How Lo Bosworth Eats To Beat Anxiety & Her Go-To Nightly Ritual

This week, I was lucky enough to snag a few minutes with Bosworth to pick her brain about anxiety-busting strategies, her favorite superfoods, and her go-to nightly self-care ritual. Here are the highlights from our chat.

But she also discovered something pretty surprising about her health just last week, which has prompted her to ditch other foods from her diet completely. "I recently had a genetic test come back saying I had a really high probability for celiac disease," she says. "So I did an elimination diet over the past month. After my gluten exposure day, I didn't have any stomach upset, but I had really terrible brain fog for two days. I had vertigo, I had awful bloating, I was exhausted—and my doctor said gluten could be an underlying reason for my depression and anxiety. So I feel like I've made a potentially profound discovery. I was always one of those people who thought that unless you have celiac, gluten is totally fine."

"With CBT, it's about replacing your anxious thoughts with a different thought, but through my experience, I find that you're really just suppressing whatever it is that you feel uncomfortable about," she says. "I'm more of a subscriber to ACT therapy, which is acceptance therapy. So when you're feeling uncomfortable, you really have to go back to the place of 'this is who I am' and 'this is normal.' It's been really helpful for me, more than anything else, because I'm not trying to force these uncomfortable thoughts and feelings out of my body. I'm just accepting them and living with them, and when you do that it becomes a lot easier." (Want to know more? Bosworth recommends this ACT Therapy Workbook.)

To try it out, Bosworth suggests combining a fresh tropical juice or juice pulp (like mango or passionfruit) with a little bit of water, vinegar, turmeric, ground ginger, basil seeds, and black pepper. "It creates this amazing exotic dressing," she says. "I would even use it as a marinade because of the turmeric and ginger undertones."

"I'm absolutely part of the serious bathers club; I take a bath like every night," she says. To ramp up the benefits of her soak session, Bosworth adds a hefty dose of Epsom salts to soothe and relax her muscles and help pull toxins from the body. To ensure she gets quality sleep, which she's struggled with in the past, she keeps her cellphone as far from her as possible for an hour before bed and loves sipping on a DIY sleepy-time tea made with fresh mint leaves and a bit of lemon. "I definitely focus on self-care and giving myself the time and space to wind down at the end of the day," she says. And we are all about that!