Hello friends and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I am your host Liz Moody and I am a writer living in Brooklyn and I am so excited about today's episode, which is my second edition of Ask the Doctor.

I started this series because I have been a journalist for years and I'm lucky enough because of that to get to have access to all of these amazing functional doctors.

I use them as resources for stories and I can ask them all of my health questions too, but I know that that's not the case for everyone and that these brilliant people can be really hard to find and kind of expensive and inaccessible for a lot of people.

So to remedy that once every few months, I have them on the podcast and I ask them a ton of questions and I pack in as much information as possible so that you can benefit from all of their immense wisdom.

And the first episode, which was already recorded, it came out I think in like November and it's more of a general health edition. It's with Dr. Will Cole who is an incredible functional doctor. It has like stuff about inflammation and gut health and hormone.

So definitely check that out if you like this format, but this episode is a little bit near and dear to my heart. It is my anxiety edition.

And I am so excited to share that because many of you you might know if you've been listening to this podcast for a while at anxiety is sort of my health issue is how I got into the wellness world.

I had really extreme agoraphobia for a while and I couldn't leave my house without having panic attacks.

So all of the information in this episode was very helpful to me and really interesting for me to hear.

And then also I'm excited to share it because it is with one of my very favorite people in the wellness world who is Dr. Ellen Voora.

Ellen and I met years ago through my body green and since then she has become one of my favorite people to talk about literally anything with we talk about relationship staff.

We've talked about Yoni eggs and living on a commune and food and love and life and I don't know she's just so wise and she is so brilliant and she also happens to be one of the best holistic psychiatrist in the country.

She did her undergraduate at Yale and then she went to med school at Columbia and now she's regularly featured on sites like goop and my body green and she speaks around the country about natural ways of dealing with mental health.

She's also a yoga instructor and a licensed acupuncturist but I love personally that she has this very solid western medicine base like she can prescribe medicine if she wants and she understands what's happening physiologically and she knows how to read labs and all of that because I think that if you're going to differ from the norm and you're going to offer radical new solutions you need to really deeply understand what it is that you're different from and Ellen absolutely absolutely does.

So I wanted to create an episode that was the go to episode for anyone suffering from anxiety whether it's chronic or more situational or even if you just want to help somebody that you love who's dealing with anxiety I wanted this to be the go to episode for all of that it is so comprehensive it is long I wanted it to be long I wanted it to literally answer every single question I tried to ask Ellen every question that I have ever had about my anxiety or other people's anxiety and then I I wanted to do that.

People's anxiety and then I also asked all of you an insta for your questions to so we get into everything we talk about the first thing that anyone with anxiety should do we talk about how to taper off medication and how you know if you need medication for anxiety talk about the top three low hanging fruits for anxiety including the one supplement that Ellen recommends to everyone how to tell hormone imbalances are at the root of your anxiety and exactly what to do if they are how to treat anxiety or reduce stress when you're actually like living in the

pain from paycheck to paycheck and you don't have extra money or time in your life how to find and build community and relationships we talk a lot about how important community is for swaging anxiety and for mental health generally but I was like Ellen it's not like as easy as snapping your fingers and being like I want some friends so we she had great advice about that that I actually found really really useful talk about blood sugar blood sugar is so important massively impacts anxiety so she has a hack for fixing blood sugar issues and that's how I want to be able to do that.

So we have a lot of blood sugar issues and then she has what she calls a definitive solution to fix it we have to talk about the ideal diet for anybody with anxiety including what a day on a plate actually looks like from the second you wake up to when you go to sleep talk about how caffeine impacts anxiety whether coffee can fit into an anti anxiety lifestyle alcohol impacts anxiety what to do about social anxiety why you get anxiety the morning after you drink a lot how to improve sleep but not let the idea of not sleeping make your anxiety worst which is definitely not going to be a good idea.

So I'm definitely happy to me like trying to sort of optimize sleep and that whole movement that's happening right now and then you're like don't sleep as well because you're trying to optimize it so we talk about that and then I got a lot of questions about how to stop spiraling when you're actually feel like you're.

Like hitting that point of no return and you're like oh my god i'm tipping off into panic attack and she has really good advice for that we talk about the one neurotransmitter that's key to leaving anxiety how exercise impacts anxiety what types of exercise are best for anxiety and then there's a lot of like.

Relationship stuff how to help your partner when they have anxiety or how to help your partner deal with you when you have anxiety I even I've had anxiety for years and years and I still struggle with how to communicate to Zach what I need in all of that and how to help him help me so we talk about that to and I also get her take on things this is.

says a lot of I've been like I worry about stuff in the news like Ebola and coronavirus and climate change and so I got Ellen's take about how to deal with the fact that sometimes the world really is scary it's not just like your header or monol and balance is or things like that but.

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