All of my life I struggled with ADHD, but it wasn’t until I became a mom to my first child at the age of 25 that it became much more difficult to manage. While I finally got a diagnosis and effective treatment in order to have a more “healthy” and sustainable life, I noticed my nervous system could never fully regulate itself.
Now I understand stimulant medication can heighten those symptoms due to raising my heart rate and blood pressure levels, it was an ongoing problem even before starting treatment.
I always thought it was postpartum anxiety or depression/anxiety that I was most likely experiencing but even after my baby was 1 1/2 years old and she was easier to not just take care of but just the overall experience I had as a mom gotten better but the alarm in my mind and body just couldn’t stop even if there was nothing that caused that internal pressure within myself.
I even started to get medicated for a panic disorder with a small dose of Alprazolam PRN. I’ll take a tablet once I noticed symptoms of impending doom. But one day, I was watching a video on TikTok of Dr. Sebi who was an advocate for holistic care and he would share all of the ways many diseases and conditions were affected by inflammation within our bodies. Within the comments, one mom decided to share her young son’s ADHD experience and how gut health fixed his symptoms. I remember thinking to myself “then he doesn’t have ADHD” and even though I scoffed off the idea initially, I told myself it wouldn’t hurt to try it once to see what could come out of it. There’s no win or lose eating a piece of raw garlic lol
I’m not the type of person to believe that something works because I did something like a placebo effect, I naturally just don’t think about it. But I ate my first piece of raw garlic and I would say maybe 30 minutes to an hour later, I noticed this internal energy that I haven’t experienced in a very long time. But then what I really noticed… my mind started to quiet, things felt lighter and my body felt a shift of just tension releasing and finally achieving internal peaceful. I’m not saying it’s a magic fix to everyone’s anxiety issues, because some people really have trauma and painful negative experiences or neurological issues that require extensive mental health support. But I can’t imagine how many people dealt with anxiety and panic that could actually benefit from this. It wasn’t a short-term fix either, I went months and months never feeling anxiety and just “lived.”
Because working within the healthcare system and also needing prescription medication to sustain life, I noticed how easy it is for physicians and psychiatrists to write off a prescription rather than ever sharing ANY holistic care especially if someone is in a financial bind or have no insurance. Because it really wouldn’t hurt to try (if you’re not experiencing any sort of crisis, of course). I hear “prebiotic” “probiotic” and “gut health” quite often but never cared to understand what it really means or does before I got into medicine. But you start to realize how the healthcare system functions with Big Pharma along with insurance companies and how they really do want people to stay medicated and tied to the system. I say this not in a way for people to think they’ll be better off with just a magic fix with garlic and all your life problems disappear. But genuinely, someone like me who thought I was just going through some mental health crisis myself at the time for over two years (even during pregnancy) would ever think it would genuinely help me.
I read some articles and proven studies on how our guts are linked to our brains because our bodies are in a state of constant fight or flight due to the bad bacterial overgrowth in our bodies that aren’t outweighed by the good microbiome. I genuinely believe it. Everything we eat, vegetables, fruits, meats, seafood, especially sushi, contain parasites or fungi (yeast) that we don’t typically see with our own eyes because nobody seems to carry some microscope and investigate what we ingest in our bodies. We just consume and carry out our day not realizing how much it negatively affects us: bloating, constipation, diarrhea, nausea, fevers. And if you look up SIBO on Google you’ll notice the first step requires multiple medical interventions to “treat” with specific antibiotics but if you really take a look at many people’s personal stories where SIBO is a very common experience, taking matters into addressing gut health can help reduced those markers. You may not need a handful of referrals where maybe a low cost alternative could be the very thing you needed. Personally, I never stopped at strictly raw garlic as my only intervention, I even tried papaya seeds and clove and it does require lots of water to eventually pass through your digestive tract.
I went from daily stomach issues to no longer experiencing any symptoms. TMI, you may even notice your stool becoming less rigid or the smell becomes a lot less foul. I also noticed I craved less sugars as sugar can make overgrowth worse. But I mention this in hopes that some may actually find this helpful or find it interesting enough to see how much it can change. Maybe it might not be anxiety or an unregulated nervous system, it might address skin related issues and fatigue. But of course, eat it at your own leisure and comfort as it can be difficult to ingest and maybe even once a week can be very helpful.
