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Feelings of anxiety plague millions of people every day. The racing heart, the tightening chest, and thoughts spinning like a hamster wheel have become an all-too-familiar state for many. We often treat this as purely a psychological battle. Calm down, try to “rewire” your thoughts and manage your emotions. But a groundbreaking new study suggests we need to look closer at the fuel keeping our brains running.
The research, a meta-analysis recently published in Biological Psychiatry, uncovered a consistent trend in the brains of people with anxiety disorders: they are running low on choline.
“This is the first meta-analysis to show a chemical pattern in the brain in anxiety disorders,” said Jason Smucny, co-author and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “It suggests nutritional approaches — like appropriate choline supplementation — may help restore brain chemistry and improve outcomes for patients.”
Our Brains Need Lots of Things
Choline is an essential nutrient that is required for optimal health. It’s not a nutrient you hear a lot about, but choline is a heavy lifter in human biology. It’s a critical building block for cell membranes and a raw material for neurotransmitters responsible for focus and memory. Perhaps most importantly for mental health, choline is essential for maintaining myelin, the protective sheath that insulates our nerve fibers.
While our livers produce a small amount of it, it’s not nearly enough to meet our daily needs. We have to get the rest from our diet, from foods like eggs, poultry, beans, nuts, and cruciferous vegetables.
It’s not the first time choline has been linked to brain health.
Anxiety disorders are characterized by “chronically elevated arousal.” This state floods the brain with stress-related hormones like norepinephrine. The researchers propose that this constant state of high alert triggers specific biological processes that actively burn through choline.
The theory goes like this: High norepinephrine levels stimulate the repair and growth of myelin. This repair process requires significant amounts of choline. Consequently, the anxiety creates a vicious cycle. The body’s stress response uses up the body’s choline reserves to fix the myelin, leaving the brain vulnerable to further anxiety, which in turn burns up the remaining choline.
There is also a fascinating connection to Omega-3 fatty acids. Choline often hitches a ride into the brain on a specific transporter that also carries Omega-3s (specifically DHA). This might explain why fish oil supplements have shown some promise in anxiety treatments — they might be helping to reopen the supply lines for choline.
So, What Should You Do?
Before you run out and buy a gallon of supplements, we need to be clear about what the study says versus what it implies.
The researchers didn’t prove that taking a choline pill cures anxiety. They showed that people with anxiety have low brain choline. However, they explicitly state that future studies should look into whether “appropriate choline supplementation could have therapeutic benefit”.
The study also shifts the anxiety conversation to a more holistic one that also considers nutrition. This research validates the physical reality of what anxiety sufferers feel every day. You aren’t just “worrying too much.” Your brain is quite possibly running a deficit in one important but overlooked ingredient.
“We don’t know yet if increasing choline in the diet will help reduce anxiety. More research will be needed,” Maddock said. He cautions that people with anxiety should not self-medicate with excessive choline supplements.
This is all the more important given how common anxiety is.
“Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States, affecting about 30% of adults. They can be debilitating for people, and many people do not receive adequate treatment,” Maddock said.
“Someone with an anxiety disorder might want to look at their diet and see whether they are getting the recommended daily amount of choline. Previous research has shown that most people in the U.S., including children, don’t get the recommended daily amount,” Maddock said. “Some forms of omega-3 fatty acids, like those found in salmon, may be especially good sources for supplying choline to the brain.”
It might be time to check your diet, consider your nutrition, and realize that calming the mind might start with feeding the brain.
The study was published in Nature Molecular Psychiatry.
