How Hypoglycemia Can Cause Anxiety & Panic Attacks

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Are you eating on the go, wolfing down your food? Do you try to chomp away tension until you feel stuffed? Both of these bad habits put strain on your stomach and intestines. This interferes with proper digestion and assimilation of food and can create indigestion, bloating or cramps, as well as increasing your level of stress.

Another danger of improper eating habits is mal-absorption of essential nutrients. Food not first properly digested in your mouth and stomach may pass undigested through your intestines. There it putrefies and ferments, resulting in bloating, cramps, and gas.

How Your Bad Eating Habits Can Cause Anxiety & Panic Attacks:

Unknowingly, you miss out on much of the nutrition potentially available in your food. You can be undernourished even if you eat highly nutritious food.

Hypoglycemia and Anxiety:

Sugar! We crave it and eat too much of it, even though it makes us fat, rots our teeth, and robs us of proper nutrition. Still, our body needs sugar to survive. Glucose, or sugar in its naturally occurring form, is the very substance that provides the energy to sustain life.

We obtain much of it from carbohydrate-rich foods, such as bread, cereal, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, pasta, and so on, whose starches gradually break down into glucose.

Simple sugars, on the other hand, like refined white sugar, brown sugar, and honey, break down rapidly into glucose and too quickly overload our system with sugar. This can result in excessively high levels of blood sugar, or diabetes, or, more commonly, in periodic drops of blood sugar below normal, a condition called hypoglycemia.

This drop upsets your whole system, resulting in symptoms similar to a panic attack:

• Palpitations
• Anxiety
• Light headedness
• Trembling
• Unsteadiness or weakness
• Agitation
• Blurred vision
• Panic feelings
• Chest pain

Stress, a time when your body burns up sugar very rapidly, can also quickly deplete sugar. As a result, your brain does not get enough sugar and you feel trembly, confused, spacey and anxious.

You feel more anxious and agitated as well because your adrenal glands release adrenaline and cortisol to prompt your liver to release stored sugar to stabilize your sugar level.

Signs of Hypoglycemia:

If you suspect you may be hypoglycemic, your doctor can give you a glucose tolerance test.

The following are signs of hypoglycemia:

• Anxiety, light-headedness, weakness, or irritability several hours following a meal, or in the middle of the night, that disappears soon after eating.
• An elevated mood after eating sugar that rapidly drops to depression, irritability or spaciness 20-30 minutes later.
• Anxiety, restlessness, and sometimes a rapid heart beat early in the morning, when your blood sugar is lowest, since you’ve fasted all night.

If you experience anxiety or panic like symptoms three or four hours following a meal, but which go away when you eat, hypoglycemia may be the cause. In the majority of panic attack sufferers, however, low blood sugar does not necessarily correlate with panic reactions, though it can aggravate anxiety and panic reactions from other causes.

Fortunately, hypoglycemia can be easily overcome. To maintain a steadier blood sugar level, consume a snack between meals. Some recommend a complex carbohydrate or protein snack, like nuts, a whole grain bagel with cheese, or a glass of orange juice.

Others, like Barry Sears, recommend that to balance your insulin level, every meal should consist of .30 percent protein, 30 percent fat and 40 percent carbohydrates, snacks included.

Perfect Diet for Hypoglycemia:

Your diet should avoid foods and substances that are quickly absorbed, resulting in rapid changes of glucose levels in the blood.

These consist largely of:

• Simple sugars: candy, cookies, cakes, colas, ice cream, honey, corn syrup, molasses, high fructose
• Simple starches: pasta, refined cereals, potato chips, and white bread