These same physical things can also cause depression and a never ending loop of sadness.
Here’s a reminder of the things that lift or reduce vitality AND cause depression that I sent you emails about early in the program. Have a look at this list again from your new place of being more aware of yourself. Those who have attended to this list have already had significant progress in feeling better.
Summary:
Lack of Vitamin D is a significant cause of depression – just getting out in the sunshine with your horse or other animal at the beginning or end of the day with no sunscreen on, is a good thing to do, even in the sunniest climates.
Lack of Omega 3’s in your food can affect the brain where all those feel good chemicals come from. I find plant based Omega 3’s to be more reliable – chia seeds, organic coconut oil, Cold pressed organic Olive Oil (add it to food AFTER you’ve cooked, so as to keep all those good things active in it) are the easiest and cheapest.
Exercise gets the ‘feel good’ chemicals in the brain flowing – the key is to make it an exercise that you enjoy. Studies have shown exercise more effective than anti-depressants. Get out into nature – lead your horse out for some special grazing, enjoy the happy face on your dog as you take them out for a walk, push an elderly friend in a wheelchair out for some fresh air.
Eliminate unnecessary toxins that effect your hormones – reduce the chemicals in your environment by eliminating harsh cleaning chemicals and insecticides from your environment and your food, without being paranoid about it.
Mineral deficiencies can affect the mind, body and emotions – Adding seaweed to your diet solves most mineral problems (you won’t even notice the way that I do it), wearing a pretty copper bracelet from time to time and a nice long hot bath with Epsom Salts for the magnesium should take care of just about every mineral deficiency.
And last but possibly the most important – good digestion is essential to good mental health. Healthy stomach bacteria is ESSENTIAL for good mental health – so if you eat sugar, have taken antibiotics or have emotional stress in your life that causes acid in the stomach, then look at all the cheap and easy ways that you can add healthy stomach bacteria cheaply and easily further down in this article and DON’T kill the bacteria by cooking it!
For anyone that is actually in depression right now, please ask for help – from me or elsewhere. Email me
Lack of Vitamin D is a significant cause of depression.
Sunshine is how we manufacture Vitamin D and Vitamin D is essential for those of us who want to be happy. It’s also essential for absorbing calcium, developing children’s (and animal’s) bones and boosting the immune system. It’s anti-inflammatory (which means it will benefit everything from dementia to alzheimers to arthritis to metabolic syndrome to cancer) and it’s effect on the brain and general vitality has been well documented.
LACK of Vitamin D causes depression and a general lack of vitality among a host of other problems.
Now pay gentle attention to this folks… There are some people who can’t cope with sunshine, so like everything else, don’t get hooked on my beliefs or anyone else’s – whether it’s about the sunshine itself or Vitamin D supplements or the right foods for you that contain Vitamin D.
It’s MY thing to lift my face to the sun at those safe times of the day and celebrate and appreciate her life giving warmth. What’s yours?
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 well being is your goal. Natural sources is always my first choice.
Lack of Omega 3 Fats can adversely affect the brain
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 have 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 favourites.
Photo: My favorite way to eat chia seeds – set in coconut milk with raspberries and a malty sweetener like panela or maybe even just honey. I’ll also use them to thicken gravies or sauces if I’ve stuffed them up – for example if my risotto is too runny, just add some chia seeds at the end of cooking, allow them to sit for a few minutes and voila! my stuff up is now an even healthier meal. 🙂
Exercise – Enjoyable Movement and increased vitality
If exercise beats anti-depressant drugs in reducing depression (which has been proven in multiple, replicated studies now) then imagine what HAPPY MOVEMENT can do for you if you’re not depressed?
Just the word exercise makes me go blah… It conjures up images of hard work and sweaty gyms and uninteresting treadmills.
Enjoyable movement on the other hand could mean the joyful look on my dogs faces as I take them for a walk, dancing to the beat of some really good old fashioned rock and roll – learning to dance properly was SUCH fun! Walking out with my horse and using it to develop a better relationship is excellent happy movement, or riding out in the bush, or hiking into an interesting place.
It could be team sports, a walking club, a field naturalists association counting frogs, a yoga studio, pushing an old lady in a wheelchair out for some fresh air, whatever… Help someone else to feel good and you will escalate each other.
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.
Slow down, smell the roses (literally) pay attention to the nature around you, feel your feet flex and bend as you walk, notice your outward breath and the way that the lower part of your ribs flex inwards as you breath out, soften your eyes with a gentle smile, roll your shoulders, feel your back soften and your posture change and strengthen effortlessly.
Eliminate chemicals and toxins
What’s good for us is good for the environment too. Some 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 in depression, 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 and insecticides – Google on the subject – but there’s even heaps of options in the supermarket these days. You’ll love how cheap cleaning is in a low chemical environment. Use the money you save, 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.
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 alternative medicine. Psychology Today – link here – talks about how the gut is a very powerful second brain and that tinkering with this second brain in our gut has been shown to be a potent tool for achieving relief from major depression.
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.
So what happened? Why isn’t our digestion working the way it was designed?
Modern life, with the slap dash and over use of medically prescribed antibiotics and the shocking amount of antibiotics in our food and the acid in our stomachs caused by an over use of white sugar that is now a chemical and super refined starches AND our overuse of anti-bacterial cleaning products in our homes, has killed off vast populations of healthy bacteria in our digestive systems – good bacteria that are essential to us being able to absorb nutrients from our food properly and are essential for our immune system. For some people, this alone is enough to put their bodies into that feeling crappy place of depression.
What can we do to fix our digestion?
It’s a three pronged attack to fix our digestion – bone broth for repair, probiotics for healthy stomach bacteria and listening to your body for the kind of food that it likes and needs.
Bone broth
I love that the old ways that worked so well for grandma, get fashionable again because they work. Aging too fast, depression, arthritis, food allergies, irritable bowel and every single health condition that needs the immune system to be working at optimum is either caused by, or made worse by, inflammation in the gut.
Soup made from bones and slow cooked over a long time is like a magic elixir that heals this inflammation. Or you can pressure cook it if you want it faster. It’s easy, simple, delicious and you just need to add it your diet regularly. If you’re ill or depressed, you might want to add a lot more to your diet every day for a while, until the gut is healed.
Now… this soup is not the ONLY thing you need to be doing for your gut – but it’s a brilliant first step. 🙂
The recipe is pretty much in keeping with our 30 seconds, because I reckon I can throw a bone broth together in about 30 seconds too and using a slow cooker means you can forget about it until it’s cooked. 🙂
I like to keep things simple. I put whatever bones and vegetables I’m using for this batch, into a slow cooker and come back a day later for chicken, and closer to 2 days later for beef. Apparently the vegetarians can use seaweed to get a similar result, although the jury is out on that one with the research not yet completed.
Probiotics
Start improving the gut with probiotics, with healthy bacteria of some description. You can take those in good quality supplements or you can get them 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. Google it.
Food as medicine has become another passion for me. Making real sauerkraut is cheap and easy and it dances 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. We have just started to be able to buy live sauerkraut from the refrigerated section of some supermarkets in Australia. If it’s on the ordinary shelves, they’ve pasteurised it – killing the bacteria in it and making it useless.
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 kambucha and apple cider vinegar with the “mother” still in it (again most of the supermarket sold foodstuffs have been pasteurised and 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 sent me from Japan – all these things contribute healthy bacteria that are a foundation to being able to digest our food properly.
When you are 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.
Craving good food
Do you know, there’s a good reason for people to not be attracted to their vegetables, when they aren’t digesting them properly anyway. 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 won’t even have to TRY – we’ll start actually craving good food.
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!”
The Magnesium balance in our body can also contribute to to abnormal nervousness and even depression. There’s all kinds of ways of getting extra magnesium into our system, including eating nuts and seeds. Epsom Salts in a nice long relaxing hot bath before bed time is right up there as a great way to absorb some magnesium into our system through the skin and feel good in more than one way.
Copper is a common mineral deficiency here in Australia especially and copper deficiency can cause other minerals to not absorb properly. So wearing a copper bracelet from time to time is usually enough to solve that problem. I usually use one that has been blessed by the Tibetan monks, so I get a double whammy of feeling good. 🙂
YOU MUST NOT STOP TAKING ANTI-DEPRESSANTS SUDDENLY
If you’re on anti-depressants – 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 most of all, because our bodies cannot balance the lack of the drug in the brain suddenly. If you stop taking them too fast, your brain chemicals and hormones fall into a hole and the results can be mentally, emotionally and physically disastrous.
Successful withdrawal from anti-depressants should take place over months – OFTEN MANY, MANY MONTHS and each situation is unique. The brain and the gut need to balance to the withdrawal of the medication and that takes time, understanding the cause of the depression and boosting the body with healthy feel good alternatives.
Actually one of the people I’ve worked with who was on anti-depressants for more than 25 years, took nearly 2 years to come off them successfully – steadily working on all the aspects of a serious childhood trauma, finding a richer and happier life at each step.