Feeling anxious? Well, one of the best ways to address anxiety can be through improving the health of your gut microbiome, which produces serotonin, think SSRI antidepressants, and GABA, think Valium.

Improving gut health is something I'm particularly passionate about, and I'm delighted that Tim Specter could join me on a new way of being.

Before we move on to guideline number five, which is incorporating fermented foods, just a quick word on stress. So obviously, a poor gut microbiome can make you more disposed to the symptoms of stress.

But what about the symptoms of stress and its impact on the gut microbiome?

Yes, it works both ways.

And experiments they've done particularly with mice, where they've done transplants of the microbiome from one mouse to another,

and they can induce anxiety and depression in that mouse, and then it can come back.

As well, they've done experiments where they've stressed out poor old mice

and seen that their microbes have changed as well.

So, and then those, and it's all through the chemicals that these microbes are producing.

And it sort of makes sense because we know that microbes produce a lot of the brain chemicals

that can make you stressed or relaxed.

So there's two you might have heard of.

Serotonin is one that is the key component in most antidepressant drugs like Prozac,

and the other is Gabba, which is a key chemical used in drugs like Valium.

So by altering those two products which are made by your gut microbes,

you can increase or decrease mood and anxiety

pretty easily. And so that's why we think this occurs. But there's also a new body of

evidence suggesting that stress in general increases your immune system and something called inflammation, which is like a

low level irritation of your immune system. And that has effect both on your brain, but also

on your gut microbes. So certain species flourish in that environment and your good, good ones

don't. So that they don't like it when all their surrounding is slightly stressed and the

...