Taggut health

Mental Health Awareness and Screening for Depression

I’m writing this post because in the last week we had depression screening day and mental health awareness day. October is mental health awareness month. However, throughout the year it feels like every day is some kind of focused awareness event, and quite honestly, I can’t keep up. Perhaps it’s just that technology is making all these events easier to document and track or maybe its my involvement in the community expanding my awareness. But the fact remains, it can feel overwhelming sometimes – jumping from one topic to the next – leaving me to wonder if it’s really effective or if we are just constantly going from one to the next, too busy keeping up to absorb the meaning of the day. These days can be good for awareness, but not so much for individuals.

Often times we see the quote “Mental health is health”, which is true, but also health is health. Everything is connected. We need to break out of the silo mentality when it comes to mind body health. Gut health is mental health. Physical health is mental health. Eat healthy or go for a run and you will be in a better state of mind than otherwise. It takes balance to be healthy. We can’t to go to the gym, have a terrible diet, and then expect optimal performance – mental or physical.

Ups and downs are a natural part of life and they serve a purpose. No emotion is inherently good or bad.

Mental resilience, or a strong mind is important to have. For me it is a choice to identify with a disease vs. having a strong mind. Do I get depressed? Sure, I’m more susceptible than most people. Life is not perfect, but that’s a part of it. Sometimes I think it is all pointless. Things don’t always go according to plan. We experience pain. Relationships drift apart. We feel lost. Possessions are temporary. People die. People should be screened if they experience any of this and don’t feel a little depressed. I’m going to do you a favor and say you don’t need to go anywhere. Take a pause and check in with yourself. This is the best screening possible. You know if you feel happy or not – if you feel fulfilled or not, if you feel sad, or stressed, or overwhelmed. And if you’re not sure, then that means it’s time to take a pause and check in. Ultimately it’s up to us to be accountable for our health.

So what do we do? First off, lets not get ourselves more down about feeling down. It is common for us to intensify undesirable emotions because we are so focused on them. We get so focused on our depression or anger that it makes us more depressed or angry! Ups and downs are a natural part of life and they serve a purpose. No emotion is inherently good or bad. Once we accept, that, we can use our emotions to our advantage. For example, feel down/depressed allows for greater introspection – to look within and re-evaluate our needs/actions.

  1. Take inventory
    • Take note of one word describing how you feel right now.
    • (Optional) Do a stress inventory. Stress is the top contributing factor for most chronic disease, immunity, mental health imbalances, and overall well-being. Sometimes we don’t recognize how much stress we are experiencing. This can help to put what we are experiencing in life into perspective.
  2. Practice mindfulness! Gratitude and positivity are two easy exercises. Remember that the mind is a muscle. The more we practice positive thinking, the easier it becomes. When we practice mindfulness it also increases our emotional intelligence and stress management skills.
    • Note down 3 things you are grateful for.
    • Practice re-framing negative thoughts into positive ones. Gratitude and humor are 2 easy ways to do this.
  3. Exercise – This is talked about all the time so I won’t go into too much detail here. Something as little as going for a walk can make a huge difference in how you feel. Do what feels good – yoga, calisthenics, cardio, weights – it all helps to get more blood flowing which means more oxygen and nutrients for the brain and body.
  4. Eat Healthy – Diet is huge but not for the reasons you might think. Yes, you want healthy toxin-free building blocks to support a healthy brain and body. But more importantly the gut produces most of our “happy molecules”, the hormones and neurotransmitters that help us to regulate our emotions and feel good. The gut really is the 2nd brain (or the 1st brain according to some people!)
  5. Find your passion – If you feel like you are not reaching your full potential or unfulfilled in any capacity, on a day to day basis then it means you are not putting energy towards things that make you happy. Find a hobby, join a club, build relationships – do what you need to do to feel fulfilled.

Gut Health

Why is gut health important? There are many reasons – and the most obvious might be the least important. Most often when people think of gut health, they think of diets or weight loss, but a healthy gut means much, much more. Your gut is your second brain!

Let’s take a deeper look… The human body contains roughly 13-30 trillion cells. The actual number is unknown and changes with age and other factors, as well as who did the calculation. We are always discovering more about the body, but the important thing to remember is that these cells are communicating in various ways in order to coordinate the many functions of the body. A trillion is a big number – hard to fathom for most people. Imagine if you had a million dollars, a million times – that would be 1 trillion.

With tens of trillions of cells in the body (containing our DNA, or made from it), it is truly miraculous how things stay organized in there for us to survive and live as a coherent human being. But here is what’s more amazing – we have more bacteria in our gut than the rest of our body combined. It was once believed that we have over 10 times as many bacteria (that gets into the 100 trillion range!) but that number is being revised as science progresses and we continue to discover more about the body. All of these are sending signals, communicating with the cells in our body, and interacting closely with the nervous system as well. Regardless of the actual number count, we can start to have an appreciation for why gut health is so important.

Feel with your gut AND your brain

You may have heard the saying “Trust your gut feeling” before, and for good reason. Your gut processes signals without the biased inputs from the pre-frontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) or the lower/mid brain – sometimes referred to as the reptilian brain which is in charge of our survival instincts and fight/flight responses.

Communication between the gut and nervous system is a two way street – anxiety and stress can cause indigestion as much as indigestion can give us feelings of anxiety and stress. Eventually it becomes hard to distinguish between what is cause and what is effect. That’s why it’s so important to be aware and consciously interrupt these self-propelling cycles that don’t serve us and keep the patterns that are healthy.

This means that gut health is a part of mental health. Keeping a healthy gut means more than just having a healthy diet. It means to eat under the right conditions so your body can absorb nutrients and create balance for the nervous system. It means that we are aware of our food choices and making choices beyond the initial impulses (this is where we get to use the brain’s intelligence over what the gut craves.) For example, if you eat while angry, your body will not activate the proper relaxation responses, enzymes, and everything that goes with properly digesting foods.

And lastly, your gut actually produces many of the brain’s neurotransmitters. It is responsible for many of the signals that our brain is capable of transmitting in the first place. So you can begin to see why it is regarded as the second brain. Many cases of anxiety, depression, and other challenges for mental health can be corrected when the gut environment is in balance either by diet or by avoiding things that can destroy our gut biome like antibiotics which kill both good and bad bacteria in the gut. The issues are not in the brain, but in the gut. If you ever experience anything like brain fog or stronger feelings like anxiety or depression, try taking a look at how you are eating.