From a small case of the “blah”s to a full on depression, attending to the physical causes clears the way to a MUCH easier fix.
When I think about all the people feeling various levels of blahhh (feeling generally crappy) and the 1 in 7 people in Australia taking anti-depressants for full on depression feelings, I could just about tear my hair out. Not literally, but I did catch myself this morning with my head in my hands sighing. I’ve been trying to figure out how to communicate the sheer freaking OPPORTUNITIES for good health and a wonderful life that are literally BUILT INTO feeling crappy and BUILT INTO depression.
Here’s the thing – feeling blah, as well as full on depression is as much about bottled up joy as it is about feeling crappy and most depressions are a LOT easier fixed / released / changed than you’d think.
In Part 1 of this series I’ll call “Get rid of blah and feel good instead”, we’ll start with the easiest part first.
Today we’ll talk about fixing the physical causes of feeling crappy because that makes getting at the mental and emotional causes a LOT easier.
Back in 2018 when we ran the first Practical Happiness online clinic, 19 people replied and let me know they were suffering from depression and all but one felt a noticeable improvement from attending to the physical causes of depression that I’m sharing with you in this article. They lightened their depression enough to get at the mental and emotional roots significantly more easily.
These are the same things that are very often behind a general feeling of blah’ness.
Attend to the physical first:
Summary:
- Enjoyable exercise releases a more lasting endorphin effect than the punishing kind of exercise.
- Increase well-being by reducing hormone affecting chemicals.
- A happy healthy gut is essential to mental emotional and physical well-being.
- Not enough sunlight with its naturally occurring Vitamin D can easily cause even full on depression.
- Not enough of the right kind of fats is another cause of the blahs and even full on depression.
- Different minerals when they’re deficient can also cause full on depression and that’s easily fixed too.
1. ENJOYABLE Exercise
The right kind of exercise is one of those things that improves how we feel. It’s now been accepted in mainstream medical circles that exercise is more effective than anti-depressants in getting people out of mild to moderate depression.
FEEL-GOOD exercise is the key here though – not the punishing your body kind of exercise that wears off too fast and ends up feeling crappy. It needs to be an exercise that brings you pleasure if your aim is to increase your ongoing well being. It can be as simple as the smile on your face that comes from walking a happy dog. Or getting an oldie out of the nursing home and pushing their wheelchair around for a walk. Or joining a Tai Chi class out in the park. Bushwalking – whatever brings you pleasure. It can even be the extremes of athleticism IF the journey to that athleticism is an enjoyable one.
Even bigger than exercise in improving how you feel, is the fact that the RIGHT exercise for you, in the RIGHT physical posture, can absolutely flood your body with feel good hormones. Beautiful, effortlessly strong physical posture – finding it, the vast benefits of it and keeping it has become a passion of mine – horse folk will find that beautiful posture in the magnetic riding seat of our Fast Track to Brilliant Riding program.
2. Eliminate chemicals and toxins without getting paranoid
Some of the chemicals that we use in modern society, on farms and in cities, mimic hormones that can cause massive hormonal upsets in our systems. The “feel good” brain chemicals that are depressed when we feel crappy, are all part of the intricately balanced endocrine system and can be dramatically affected by these hormone mimicking chemicals that are found in some insecticides. For some people, these chemicals alone can be the root cause of their depression.
The simple solution is to reduce the chemicals in our environment. Eliminate harsh cleaning chemicals – there’s some great books out there on the subject. Google them, join Facebook groups, whatever. You’ll love how cheap the cleaning is, in a low chemical environment. Use the money you save (heaps!) to buy organic and eat fresh food. Basically, reduce the amount of toxins from insecticides and food additives and chemicals generally, as much as you can without being paranoid about it.
3. A good digestion is essential to good mental and emotional health
Good digestion is right up there as a major contributor to eliminating depression and getting a feeling of well-being instead. The gut is an important part of the endocrine system, as are our hormones, as are the feel good brain chemicals, the brain chemicals that help you sleep, the other brain chemicals that keep you awake and alert at the right times and give you energy – they are all part of the delicate, constantly balancing endocrine system.
Improving digestion is a good place to start influencing all those hormones and feel good brain chemicals.
It’s nice when modern medicine starts to catch up with wise women’s medicine. It’s now well accepted in mainstream medical circles, that getting the gut working happily has significant potential for achieving relief from even some severe depressions.
In my clinic work, getting the gut working properly is right up there as one of the first things to do with a chronic depression.
What can we do to fix our digestion?
Happy bacteria that dance on your tongue – that’s a page heading out of the Happiness book. I bet you never thought of those words in one sentence before!
Start with probiotics – healthy bacteria of some description. You can take those in good quality supplements (their effectiveness usually depends on their storage) but even better, you can get happy gut bacteria cheaply from fermented foods. One of the pluses of our global village is finding out and having available, the different ways that various cultures around the world have traditionally used fermented foods for good health.
Food as medicine has become another passion for me. Making real sauerkraut is so easy and the life in it it – mannn I can literally feel it dancing on my tongue! Although I have to hide it under the mashed potato for my husband who eats it under sufferance knowing it’s good for him. It’s difficult to buy live sauerkraut in Australia, because they’ve usually pasteurized it – killing the bacteria in it and making it useless – so thank goodness making it is easy. I’ve put a link to a recipe a bit further down.
Fermented foods are powerful healers for our minds as well as our bodies.
Other fermented foods such as kefir, real yoghurt with real live yoghurt culture still in it (most so called yoghurts in the supermarket don’t have the live culture in them any more and they are loaded with refined white chemical sugar so you have to check the labels carefully) – live vinegars like kombucha and apple cider vinegar with the “mother” still in it (again most of the supermarkets sell foodstuffs have been pasteurized and thus they’ve killed the good bacteria that our bodies are craving), the Japanese have a number of different fermented foods, including miso and a lovely sweet rice called Kohji that my friend Haruko sends me from Japan – all these things contribute healthy bacteria that are a foundation to being able to digest our food properly.
When you’re using fermented foods for well-being and not just for taste, remember that heating and cooking kills good bacteria as well as bad bacteria, so don’t cook fermented foods or heat beyond a nice eating temperature – i.e. add them at the end of the cooking process.
Once we have healthy bacteria in our systems, we can start getting the benefit of all that lovely fresh food, fruits and specially vegetables that provide important vitamins and produce the digestive enzymes that are the other part of the healthy digestion that is such a significant part of our emotional and physical well-being. THEN we’ll start actually craving good food.
Here’s a link to the sauerkraut recipe that I use, to make it one jar at a time. Hygiene is critical to a good outcome when making sauerkraut.
Here’s a link to Granny’s Magic Elixir which works hand in hand with happy digestive bacteria to line your gut and increase your feelings of mental emotional and physical well-being.
4. Not enough Vitamin D is a significant cause of depression.
In Australia, fear of cancer has people covering up all available skin from the life giving and Vitamin D giving effects of the sun and slapping on what are frequently carcinogenic sunscreens (don’t get me started about that!)
Vitamin D deficiency – of which depression is a major symptom – is rapidly becoming a problem in this wonderful Australia of ours that has so much Vitamin D making sunshine. Granted I don’t want to burn, so I cover up if I’m working outside for those hours in the middle of the day, or if I’m out in the sun for a long time – but personally, I WANT some sun, at least a little bit of sun on my skin, preferably every day. Lift your face briefly to the sun whenever you’re out and appreciate the heck out of it and get sun on your skin early and late in the day if you’re worried about burning.
You can find Vitamin D in some fish, but you’ll see in the section about Omega 3’s just below here, that fish oil has its own issues that need to be taken into consideration if good health and over all well being is your goal.
5. Not enough Omega 3 Fats can adversely affect our brain and our body.
There’s been a modern fad to eliminate fats from our diet which has been adversely effecting people’s health and mental and emotional stability for a while now. Omega 3’s are an essential fat that contributes to brain health. Studies have found that not enough Omega 3’s can significantly increase your risk of depression.
You can find Omega 3’s in fish oils, though be careful, because rancid fish oil adds to our toxic burden and has the opposite effect that we are looking for. Far too many fish oils are either produced chemically or with heat, which makes them rancid from the beginning or they become rancid from not being stored properly.
I’ve found plant based Omega 3’s to be more reliable – chia seeds, coconut oil, cold pressed organic Olive Oil (not cooked with), freshly ground flax seeds (like everything else that’s ground up before you get it, they start to lose their effectiveness as soon as the seed is broken and become rancid with time) – these are my personal favorites.
6. Mineral deficiencies can affect the mind, body and emotions.
There’s a bunch of minerals necessary for good health and well being, that interact with each other and where deficiencies can affect our nervous system and contribute to emotional upsets and depression. This is a BIIIGGG subject, but provided you don’t have any major mineral deficiencies where your food is grown, or major requirements to deal with a specific problem, then adding organic seaweed to your diet should take care of most mineral deficiencies. I add it to soups and casseroles and stir fries. It adds a lovely richness of flavor that is not identifiable as seaweed. I had been doing it for years without my husband and sons knowing before one of them caught me and went “Euwww mum seaweed!”
The thyroid is the hormone powerhouse whose influence cascades through the endocrine system into everything from digestion through to brain medicals:
- Low iodine is another mineral that will adversely affect your thyroid – that’ll get taken care of by adding seaweed to your diet.
- Not enough magnesium can affect our mind body and emotions. Nuts are a good source of magnesium – google for others.
- Low Selenium is one of the minerals that can also have a significant impact on the thyroid. There’s some selenium in seaweed. Eating one or two (no more!) brazil nuts a day for a while, will also take care of that.
Incredibly important note for those who are on or who have a loved one on anti-depressants
I am sure that there will be people who read this article who take heart that they won’t need antidepressants for the rest of their lives and that’s excellent. We know now from the mainstream medical newly released Maudsley Guidelines I talked about in the last blog article, that lots of people on these drugs shouldn’t be on them at all because they’re not useful to them and we know that longer than 6 – 12 months on them can cause a lot of problems. They are shitful drugs with shitful side effects that take the joy out of life and if you attend to the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of your recovery, then you will most likely be able to come off them.
BUT…
YOU MUST NOT STOP TAKING ANTI-DEPRESSANTS SUDDENLY and it MUST be done under your doctor’s supervision. Firstly because we don’t always notice what’s going on ourselves when we’ve been in a mental hole for a long time. And secondly because those new Maudsley Guidelines in the last blog give your doctor the tools to help you come off them without killing yourself. Think I’m exaggerating? Read about the doctor who researched and wrote those guidelines in the last blog.
Successful withdrawal from anti-depressants should take place over months – MANY MANY MONTHS SOMETIMES– that way, your brain and gut can be best balancing for your mental, emotional and physical well being. I’ve had one person who had been on them for 25 years who took a bit over two YEARS and she’s doing fabulously and living a wonderful life. (Later edit: There’s a blog about her now.)
If you’re a horse person, you’re in luck, because the same Feel for your horse that we teach here, that makes you brilliant with horses helps you to get rid of those bottled up feelings that feel crappy. But first…
1. Attend to and eliminate the physical causes of depression in your life. When these physical causes of feeling crappy exist for someone, then it’s really hard to fix the mental and emotional side. When I work with people on any of our paid programs, I’m happy to test for those physical causes and order them for the person’s priority.
2. The same FEEL for your horse that makes the great horse men and women great, is the same feelings that feel so crappy when we bottle them up inside us. Bottling them up happens when we don’t understand how to use them. ALL of our horse programs teach you Feel for your horse. While you’re getting to be REALLY good with your horse, at the same time you’re learning how to release those old bottled up feelings that have nothing to do with horses. Click here to look at our “path to excellence with horses” programs. There’s something for every size wallet. Email me if you need a payment plan.
3. There’s also private healing sessions available.
5. If you’ve not “met” me before, take 20 minutes today to get started on some inner peace with this totally free meditation.
6. You don’t need a horse for the on-line book Holy Shit Is That Really True? also known as I Wish You Happiness – this is an on-line experience of a journey to inner peace and happiness.
If that’s all too complicated and you just want to talk about what we can do for you, email me
Today’s photo Suze and I getting those feel good hormones running at the same time as learning the posture that makes you a brilliant rider.
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