How What You Eat Triggers Your Trauma Response
The first time I realized the food you eat can directly trigger your trauma response was on a cloudy afternoon in late November in Athens, Greece. Back then, I worked in one of the refugee camps in Athens providing trauma-informed care to refugee children.
The daily lunch had just been provided, we were waiting for our break to end and kids to return to our space for our afternoon activities. As they did, many of them had cookies in their hands. They happily munched on their treats as they rejoined our program. And then, something changed. I noticed how the kids tended to be overwhelmed, unable to focus, more aggressive, more emotional, more fearful. We often shifted to more calming acitivites like indoor drawing sessions to help them calm down. The safe space became even more so a necessity. Back then, I knew little about nutrition and was just learning about trauma. But I asked myself: How could food be so closely linked to their stress response? How could they be so triggered by what they ate?
Today, 5 years later, on another cloudy November afternoon, I want to share with you how what you eat triggers your trauma response. I’ll also give you some valuable tips on which foods to avoid so you can provide your nervous system with space to calm down and heal.
First of all, what is a trigger?
Usually, triggers can considered things that are repeatedly and often happening in your everyday life. In the context of trauma, a trigger can be anything, any person, smell, place, or situation that in one way or another seems similar to some details of the traumatizing event. When you are triggered, the cluster of brain cells called amygdala activates your body’s stress response. Every human being depends on the amygdala’s alarm system that determines, if a sound, image, sensation, emotion, person, place etc. is dangerous, warns of danger and mediates the stress response. This stress response includes the release of stress hormones that raise blood pressure, your heart rate, your oxygen intake and prepare you to fight, flee, or freeze as your body activates your so-called sympathetic nervous system.
The connection to the triggering event may not always be obvious or logically make sense to you, because they can extend beyond the “original” trauma. Moreover, you may not consciously make a connection between the past trauma and your present behavior, because your left hemisphere, your logical and conscious brain, is shut down, when something overwhelming happens to you or when you are triggered. Simultaneously, the right (emotional) brain hemisphere is active. Essentially, you reexperience and reenact the past when you are triggered, without being fully aware of it.
A trigger’s effect is that you reexperience thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that you experienced during the overwhelming event, situation or incident; triggers bring forth the fragmented memories of the past. The brain reactivates, as if the trauma was actually occurring, lighting up the Brodmann’s area 19 – a brain region that registers images (and along with it, smells, sounds, physical sensations etc.) when they first enter the brain.
Past trauma can consequently impact your present life, because being triggered in the present leads to symptoms like flashbacks and anxiety, as well as skewed expectations and fears regarding your future and the possible reoccurrence of what traumatized you in the past.
Now you might wonder, where does the food I eat come into play here?
Research that goes back as far as 1982 shows that the sympathetic nervous system responds to changes in caloric intake. The consumption of high carbohydrate (sugar) foods stimulates the activity of the sympathetic nervous system while a restriction of high carbohydrate foods deactivates the sympathetic nervous system. In other words, eating something that is high in refined sugar like cookies made out of refined sugar and wheat flour can easily trigger your nervous sytem response making you react as if you were in danger (for this is what the sympathetic nervous system essentially does to keep you safe).
How this plays out will be different for everyone of us. Symptoms of trauma are on such a broad spectrum and unique to you individually. Some common symptoms my clients mention frequently are: anxiety, an inability to focus, mood swings and recurring emotional flashbacks or strong emotions resurfacing sometimes “out of nowhere”, anger, irritability, depressive tendencies, digestive issues like bloating, nausea etc., extreme fatigue, physical sensations and chronic pain like headaches, migraines, neck, back, chest, or stomach pain, muscle tension and muscle cramps, impulsive or addictive behaviors, a loss of interest in hobbies and activities that they previously enjoyed and a loss of routine or the inability to keep a routine up.
If you identified with any of these symptoms above, here are is a basic overview on potentially triggering foods and foods to avoid:
Refined sugar and refined flour and products that contain those
Colas, lemonades, juices that are not freshly pressed
Alcoholic beverages
If you are looking for a more comprehensive nutrition and supplement protocol for your healing journey, my online course The Journey provides you with all that you need to know to step into your power and heal yourself, including a whole chapter on nutrition, supplements and herbal recommendation for healing.