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A few years ago, I developed calcific tendinitis in my shoulder.
A few years ago, I developed calcific tendinitis in my shoulder. At the time, I considered myself a genuinely healthy person. I worked out constantly, did kickboxing four times a week, drank smoothies, and had done ten-day cleanses in the past. But the injury became a teacher. It showed me how much information my body had been holding that I simply hadn’t been listening to.
Looking back, I can trace it: a trip to Greece, more time than usual holding my phone, not hydrating the way I needed to, and then the longest stretch I’d gone without training in years. My body had been asking for attention long before the inflammation showed up in my shoulder. That injury became the doorway into understanding something I now consider foundational to both my physical and mental health work: the direct, physical relationship between what we eat, the inflammation in our bodies, and how we feel.
What I Noticed in My Own Body
Long before I had the science to explain it, I had the lived experience. During my cleanses and periods of fasting, I noticed I could hear my own intuition more clearly. Many spiritual traditions talk about fasting as a way of quieting the body to make more room for spirit, and I felt that directly. I noticed that when I overate, or ate without paying attention, I felt heavy, foggy, and disconnected from myself. And when I avoided processed foods, refined sugar, heavy carbs, and fried foods, I had more energy, slept better, and felt physically lighter.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that all three layers—physical, mental, and spiritual—were connected by the same underlying mechanism: inflammation.
The Science: Your Gut Really Is a Second Brain
This is something I wish got more airtime in the mental health field, because it’s not fringe—it’s well-documented physiology. Your gut and brain are in constant, bidirectional communication through what’s called the gut-brain axis, and the vagus nerve is the primary highway connecting them.
Here’s the part that surprises most people: roughly 90% of the body’s serotonin, the neurotransmitter most associated with mood and wellbeing, is produced in the gut, not the brain. Gut bacteria actually help regulate this process, producing compounds that support the enzyme responsible for serotonin synthesis. That serotonin then activates the vagus nerve, sending signals directly to brain regions that regulate mood, stress response, and emotional processing. Neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine are involved in this same two-way communication system.
What this means practically: when your gut is inflamed, serotonin production is disrupted. And there’s a strong, well-established correlation between gut inflammation and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Chronic stress—whether it’s from an overloaded schedule, working two jobs like I was during one particularly demanding season of my life, or ongoing emotional strain—is itself one of the biggest drivers of inflammation in the body. It becomes a loop: stress inflames the gut, an inflamed gut disrupts serotonin production, and that disruption makes you more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, which in turn creates more stress.
The reverse is also true, and this is the hopeful part. Reduce the inflammation, and you interrupt the loop.
Food as Frequency, Digestion as Labor
Beyond the biochemistry, there’s a simpler truth I often come back to: different foods require different amounts of energy for your body to process. Fruit digests quickly. Vegetables take a bit longer. Meat and processed foods can take days. Every bit of extra time and energy your body spends digesting something heavy is energy it isn’t spending on healing, regulating your nervous system, or keeping inflammation down. Food that’s hard to digest but low in nourishment is a double cost—it works your body harder while giving it less in return.
This is also where I believe deeply in the idea that food carries frequency. What you eat isn’t just fuel; it’s information your body is constantly receiving and responding to. A body that’s out of ease—the literal root of the word “dis-ease”—struggles to communicate clearly with the mind. An inflamed gut sends static up the vagus nerve instead of clarity.
Returning to What My Grandmother Taught Me
Long before I understood any of this scientifically, I was learning herbalism from my grandmother, natural remedies for everyday ailments, passed down the way they have been in so many families and traditions. Today, I bring that same lineage into my work with clients, using herbs like lemon balm, chamomile, passionflower, skullcap, and damiana to support calm and better sleep, and others like peppermint to support focus and mental clarity. These aren’t replacements for professional care, but they’re part of a larger toolkit—one that treats the gut, the nervous system, and the mind as one connected system, because they are.
If you take one thing from this, the next time your mood feels off, it’s worth asking not just, “What happened today?” but, “What have I been feeding my body this week?” Sometimes the answer to both questions is the same.