190: Break Kids Out of the Cyclone of Anxiety with Jess Sherman, M.Ed, RHN

Anxiety – the cyclone of stress!

It’s not helpful to keep looking for a root cause of anxiety. It’s not the gut, it’s not the food, and it’s not the gluten… it’s more helpful to think of it as a cyclical thing.

Kids are caught in a self-perpetuating cyclone of stress. Jess Sherman, M.Ed, RHN helps families break that cycle by understanding how messages of threat and fear, and worry circulate in the body.

Jess shares the 5 core needs and 5 core pressures she sees in kids that impact their health and especially their stress and anxiety levels. 

If your kids (or you!) struggle with stress or anxiety, you’ll definitely want to watch this episode!

Can’t see the video? Watch Break Free from Anxiety here on YouTube!

No time for the video? Here are the notes!

Break Out of the Cyclone of Anxiety

• 0:22: I’m so happy to have Jess Sherman back on the Healthy Parenting Connector. We talked about resilience way back here.
• 2:54: Jess shares how she started digging into anxiety and searching for root causes. 
• 6:30: There are lots of mental health resources available these days and some of them are great. But shifting your mindset and working through anxiety is impossible if you have yeast in your gut making you crave sugar or parasites leaching nutrients out of you that are required for creating neurotransmitters. 

What Causes Anxiety?

• 8:08: Jess says that there isn’t a root cause of anxiety because it’s a feedback loop. There are many factors that can impact anxiety and cause the loop to head in a positive or negative direction. 

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• 10:27: Some examples of internal and external forces that can play into the anxiety loop are:
  • 11:13: Environmental toxins: These aren’t good for any of us but some kids just don’t detoxify these chemicals as well as others.  Get some tips for reducing household toxins here.
  • 13:21: Gut health: Some people are genetically more prone to gut microbiome imbalances. It can be very difficult to sustain a gut healing protocol with kids, but you may need to regularly do a month-long gut healing diet to keep your child’s gut microbiome balanced and healthy.
• 15:30: It’s always good to “test don’t guess” but testing can be expensive so there are some standard first steps anyone can take to find out what helps them.

Break Your Child out of the Anxiety Cycle

• 16:05: Jess has 5 core needs of kids: real food, clean air and water, restorative sleep, movement and play, and a sense of connection and purpose. If your child is struggling take an inventory of those 5 areas and see what’s fallen off the rails.
• 17:26: If all these need categories look dialed in there is probably a pressure keeping your kid stuck and that’s when testing will become really helpful. 
• 18:10: The opposite of feeling connected is feeling fear and threat. Fear and threat signals can cause trauma even in little babies. They put your nervous system on high alert. 
• 21:56: Some experiences that can be logged in babies as trauma can be anything from a highly stressed mother during pregnancy to birth trauma, early medical issues, separation from mom, postpartum depression, and more. Many of these circumstances can’t be helped.

• 25:00: Years later we can look back and see how some of these early traumas may have affected our child’s nervous system, but obviously we can’t change it, so can we rewire their nervous systems to flip those threat signals into signals of safety?
• 26:05: Kids who have had any type of trauma in the past tend to have less wiggle room when it comes to the 5 core needs and more of the 5 core pressures. It will just take a bit more intentionality to break these kids out of the cycle. 
• 27:26: If we all could understand our children’s needs and pressures and how they self-regulate we would have a toolbox to help them when they’re feeling stressed. It’s so empowering to know how to help our kids who are struggling!
• 30:40: The 5 core pressures are nutrient imbalances, food reactions, toxicity overload, gut imbalances, and infections. When one of these things is present it puts pressure on your nervous system so that it becomes highly attuned to stress. Then external stressors become a big deal because your “stress bucket” is already full. 
• 32:38: Let’s loop in resilience to coping with anxiety. They’re very closely tied together, resilience is your capacity to handle and grow from stress. 

Resilience is taking a stressful situation, learning from it, and moving forward in a positive direction. -Jess Sherman

• 34:07: We leave you with one step all parents can take with all kids to move away from stress. 

• 35:48: There are two great times to talk to your kids. When they feel terrible and when they feel awesome. Always invite them into the conversation rather than lecturing them. Jess gives some specific examples of ways to draw connections between what the child is doing and how they’re feeling. Here’s the link Jess mentioned for her masterclass.

Resources We Mention for Anxiety 

• Our other HPC interviews about anxiety: 
  • Helping your child manage anxiety
  • Don’t let anxious kids avoid scary things
  • Simple strategies to reduce anxiety as a family
  • How to avoid the anxiety and hyper-achievement loop
  • How to be the boss of anxiety
  • How anxiety is causing attention problems
• Find Jess online
• Follow her on Instagram
• Jess’s masterclass on the biology of behavior
• Jess’s coaching services
• Jess’s parent’s guide to erasing anxiety
• Jess’s Amino Acids Course
• More posts on anxiety:
  • Getting to the root of your child’s anxiety
  • How to eat to reduce anxiety
  • Simple strategies to reduce anxiety 
  • Strategies to reduce test anxiety

Jess Sherman, M.Ed, RHN helps kids experiencing anxiety feel better so life can settle down.

Along with being a certified teacher, Jess is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, Board Certified in Practical Holistic Nutrition. With anxiety in kids now at an all-time high, she is working to help doctors, therapists, teachers, kids, and parents understand and apply a whole-child, whole-body, trauma-informed, nutrition and lifestyle focussed approach to helping them from the outside-in and the inside-out.

Her book, Raising Resilience: take the stress out of feeding your family and love your life, along with her Calm & Clear Kids Program, and her Resilience Roadmap, have reached families all over the world.