Amino acids are essential for human health, growth and development. The compounds also affect your moods by regulating neurotransmitters, or brain chemicals. Your body can only get amino acids through foods. Certain foods determine the particular amino acids that eventually enter the brain network and trigger excitement, calmness or other emotions. These different responses may relieve or intensify anxiety. The right foods may help you to reduce or avoid anxiety attacks.
Attack Symptoms
Anxiety or panic attacks occur from panic disorder, which is treatable through therapy and medication. The attacks bring on a sudden, unexplainable fear that intensifies and peaks within a few minutes, according to the Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Some of the symptoms may include feeling an impending doom, a sense of losing control or being in an unreal situation, a need to escape, heart palpitations, sweating, trembling, tingling sensations, shortness of breath or even chest pain and nausea.
Treatment
Once you are diagnosed with panic disorder, talk therapy with a therapist helps you understand the reasons for your anxiety attacks. Your doctor may prescribe antidepressant medication to help your condition. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are drugs that treat panic disorder by altering levels of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin provides calming effects and also helps with sleep. Anxiety disorders often cause sleeping problems.
Tryptophan
The amino acid tryptophan helps to increase levels of serotonin. Foods that contain tryptophan include chicken, turkey, fish, eggs, cheese, milk, nuts, peanut butter, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, soy and tofu, MedlinePlus notes. Carbohydrates, such as whole-grain bread, pasta and cereal, also improve the action of tryptophan. Carbohydrates release insulin in the bloodstream, Middle Tennessee State University explains. Insulin clears away other amino acids in the blood, but allows tryptophan to travel from the bloodstream to the brain, where it converts to serotonin to produce calming effects.
Energy
The amino acid tyrosine, however, may intensify anxiety by causing excitement. Protein foods release tyrosine during digestion. Tyrosine increases production of dopamine and epinephrine, neurotransmitters that heighten mental alertness and energy. Too much protein from such foods as meat, fish, poultry and eggs may energize you instead of relaxing you when suffering from anxiety. Your doctor can provide dietary and medical advice if you have anxiety attacks. Panic disorder requires therapy and medication, but a healthy diet with foods that promote tryptophan may also help during treatment and afterwards to avoid future anxiety attacks.
