The sun plays a vital role in health.
Unfortunately, the industry has pushed the idea that we should use sunscreen and SPF makeup. Hiding from the sun affects the brain, including your thoughts. Numerous studies show links between low vitamin D levels and depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.
What makes vitamin D unique is that it is the only vitamin that functions as a hormone. When absorbed into the skin, the body produces cholecalciferol. When cholecalciferol enters the bloodstream, it travels to all major organs, including the brain.
The brain has receptors that respond to this hormone.
Vitamin D also regulates the release of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine.
Vitamin D supplementation has led to improvement in depressive symptoms and cognitive function. Getting sun is an integral part of my well-being reduction. My mood changes, and I fall asleep so much faster. Are you getting enough sun?
The liver is a REAL superfood for the brain and, therefore, also for your thoughts. It’s cheap!
Organ meats are not popular today, but traditional cultures knew they were prized nutritional powerhouses. African tribes considered liver so sacred that they would never touch it with bare hands.
Getting the liver back into your diet can benefit mental health.
It is challenging to find foods with more nutrients.
The liver is packed with vitamin A, B vitamins, potassium, iron, phosphorus, zinc, CoQ10 and selenium.
It nourishes the energy-demanding brain with essential fatty acids EPA’s, DHA and arachidonic acid. Their anti-inflammatory effects on the brain can help depression and anxiety symptoms.
It is essential to draw on grass-fed, grass-fed animals. If you don’t care for the taste, you can also find it through supplements.
Mental well-being is the product of effort.
You can’t just expect mental well-being. Yes, it takes discipline. There is no magic pill. No therapist can “fix” you. You can heal yourself. Are you putting in the work?
Emotions are energy!
The Latin derivative for the word energy is “emotere”, literally meaning energy in motion. All emotions are neutral. Emotions only have meaning if the thinking brain makes one. Do they only affect the body if we believe them? Yes, feelings only affect those around us when we express them.
To feel. Don’t assign meaning. To sit. Release. Repetition.
You can meditate to feel how thoughts create energy in your body.
I feel my emotional energy before trying to make someone else understand.
I have humour and a lightheartedness around my emotions.
You also can’t cling to emotions when they come because you know how fast they go.
My emotions don’t necessarily mean anything.
I don’t react to emotions right away. I can sit in it.
Today it’s all about food on the go.
Little thought about what’s in it. Fewer and fewer people are spending time cooking. Apps like caviar and Uber food aren’t helping.
The problem is hidden in these foods like canola oil, preservatives and tons of added sugars that cause inflammation.
When there are inflammatory cytokines in the body, they affect the brain and, therefore, your thoughts.
Inflammation has now been conclusively linked to major depressive disorder. I have a sneaking suspicion that much of what we know we think of as mental illness will be related to inflammation in the future.
Food creates an atmosphere. What you eat, your brain eats. Don’t get caught playing the convenience game because, in that way, you won’t recover from trauma. It is a significant reason for the skyrocketing levels of mental illness we see today.
Do you eat food or snacks in between?
Everything we know about the brain is changing.
The brain used to be talked about as an insignificant and disconnected computer between our ears. Today we understand that the brain can communicate with other organs, transmitting their frequency and making new cells and connections throughout our lives.
What amazes you about the brain and, therefore, also about your thoughts? The brain is made of 60% fat. The brain is not fixed. It is neuroplastic. The brain and, therefore, your thoughts change during life.
Atrophy or brain shrinkage is present in depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s.
The brain is in constant communication with the gut.
When attention is focused, the brain sends out energy waves at 10 to 100 cycles per minute. The brain and heart communicate through the vagus nerve.
Many people focus on changing or controlling thoughts.
This is a quick way to get frustrated and overwhelmed. What we CAN control is our relationship with our thoughts.
We have nearly 70,000 thoughts every day. Ideas have no meaning; by assigning meaning, the physiology of the body changes.
After this chemical shift, we experience shocking habits in the subconscious mind. Joining this cycle is exhausting and causes high cortisol levels.
If you change your relationship with your thoughts, observe them as soon as they come.
Dropping the habit of giving meaning to thoughts leaves room to pause and is something few people can do nothing about it. Do you practice non-activity?
Fatty acids are the building blocks of the brain.
Omega-3 fatty acids block inflammatory chemicals from the brain. Low-fat diets alter serotonin function. An imbalance of fatty acids impairs brain function and leads to brain performance disorders.
A 2013 study from the Mayo Clinic found that people who consumed a diet high in saturated fats reduced their risk of dementia by 36%.
The brain loves fat.
Most of the brain is made of fat. For your brain and therefore also for your thoughts to thrive, you need fatty acids. They are literally the building blocks of the brain.
Conventional wisdom has used “obscure” science to vilify fats and promote vegetable oils from the industry.
While fat nourishes brain cells and aids neurological connections, vegetable oils promote inflammation that causes all kinds of problems in the brain and, therefore, your thoughts. In the effort to avoid fats, we lost a vital nutrient.
A brain that is hungry for fats causes brain fog and makes it difficult to concentrate.
You will also have brain crashes during the day. I believe the standard diet (and its fatphobia) plays an essential role in high levels of mental illness.
Discipline is critical in healing and growth. Apply some ground rules and keep applying them. Make small promises to yourself every day until it becomes a habit.
How do you practice discipline?
Limits!
I want to talk about one of my biggest struggles: boundaries. Without them, you will never be mentally healthy. They were the last and most challenging part of the puzzle for me. Every day I practised self-care, but I doubted boundaries. It brought me a lot of stress and eventually resentment.
Keeping boundaries is not a skill. It has been taught by our families. When we see that our parents have and maintain boundaries, they just become normal to us.
If, like me, you come from a dysfunctional, entangled family or psychological jargon for “too close”, such a family has no clear boundaries. Boundaries confuse you. Edges feel like “mean” or “selfish” to hold on to.
Every model I saw was emotionally overconsumed about how their actions made another person feel around them. Their feelings meant little. Furthermore, their space was not appreciated. Their needs were not essential. I carried that framework around into my adulthood.
Please others, doing many things I preferred not to do. I lost myself in the surrounding noise. The irony is that if you don’t have boundaries, you become incredibly selfish.
It has taken me years to reprogram my subconscious mind to understand the power of boundaries and the magic word ‘no’. I still struggle today.
My mind talks in “should”. And feelings of guilt arise. But I practice putting myself first. I practice protecting my energy. I don’t have to worry about how anyone else feels about me. It made me cringe at first.
Saying “no” made me feel like I was going to die right after that.
But slowly, I learned a truth that I was not taught: how people think about my decisions is not my responsibility.
Boundaries are your hard line.
They are your self-esteem, confidence, and confidence. Every time you hold a boundary without deviating from the emotions it provokes, you heal.
Does anyone else find boundaries the most challenging part of healing?
There is a cultural drive to ‘end the stigma’ surrounding mental illness.
In the effort to put people at ease in getting help, we normalized mental illness. The message is that some people just “have” it, and we have to accept this as a forever reality.
It is not uncommon for women in their early twenties to receive three or four diagnoses. Most of the time, they have resigned themselves to these labels for life. They have been told to treat the problem with medication and get around the usually significant limitations in their lives.
By doing this, we never ask why. Why does a mental illness become so severe? 1 in 6 people are mentally ill. Why is mental illness the main reason people have disabilities? How do current conventional treatments fail?
Could lifestyle play a role? Does nutrition have an effect? Ending a stigma is not a solution. It also stops all critical thoughts and makes a person feel completely powerless to affect their health.
Mental illness is a symptom.
It can manifest as anxiety, depression, maybe bipolar. The diagnosis is unimportant to me. All I hear when I hear a diagnosis is a body not in homeostasis.
It’s a call to resolve an underlying problem that’s gone on for too long. If you address the underlying causes (gut health, inflamed brain, poor circadian rhythms, etc.) and commit to changing your lifestyle, you will heal. It just depends on how badly you want it.
Take a pill!
I will say something that many people disagree with: we’ve ended the stigma. Now we have made mental illness a social norm. Taking a pill and moving on is not something I can accept for myself, so I wouldn’t want that for you.
Instead of trying to erase a stigma, it’s time we taught people how to self-heal.
Every day-to-day choice contributes to or takes away from the delicate balance of your mind and body. We can share the reality that body and mind are working desperately to heal. You just have to work with it.
Cold shower!
So, here it is: your brain is an organ. Your brain is an incredibly selfish organ that demands a lot of energy. Because the brain uses more power than any other organ, it is in a constant conservation mode.
When you take a cold shower, only the sensory cold forces your brain to be present. Then you shudder and begin the process of mentally holding yourself in the cold.
The brain knows that this takes energy. So, naturally, thoughts come up to help the brain stop you from doing that. You just realize you don’t have to listen to them.
Ignoring thoughts of resistance is an exercise your body will thank you for. How do you get through thoughts of resistance?
What happens in everyday life has little effect on you.
The thoughts and the meanings assigned to those thoughts make the ‘reality. Most people don’t practice developing space between each thought and reaction. So, the belief becomes “I AM my thoughts”. This is a heavy burden.
Thoughts are programmed subconscious reactions by acting as authentic or by assigning the emotion they bring up to your present moment. You are blocking the healing.
To build a new version of yourself means understanding thoughts as separate from yourself. This gives you a choice in the reaction and emotions that each thought brings.
How I function in the now is the result of my own daily choices.
My diet is 100% linked to my current mental state. I will put in the time and work, even if it means less time with friends, family, and entertainment.
In addition, I give up the idea of my comfort zone as a positive. You can’t despise mental health, either, so I prioritize my life to achieve it. I am a creator of my life, not a victim of circumstances. In addition, I understand that my thoughts have the power to create illness or well-being. I’m about to get real.
Not everyone wants to get better.
There are several reasons for this. Some have an identity related to illness. Others fear true well-being because it is the unknown and the unknown are unpredictable. It’s comforting to know what your life will be like exactly, even if it doesn’t serve you.
Subconscious patterns and neurological pathways are chains for many.
Healing is work. It’s backbreaking work.
It’s painful and scary. It means letting go of stories and the death of a partial version of the self. You know when you are ready. Then you guess second, and you want to stop. But the next day, you stay committed and keep repeating until the practice becomes a discipline. And discipline becomes trust.
One day, you look at yourself in the mirror and see that that person is not “made” but made with intention, self-love, and faith in a future self that can only be expressed in your mind. The real work, the real change, has nothing to do with anything “out there”. The real thing is to master your mind. We are all self-healers.
Many people talk about judging brains and thoughts as if that were a bad thing.
But judgments are a natural human behaviour. It is much more helpful to learn from your judgments than to silence them. When you understand that all judgments reflect yourself and your thoughts, you can use judgments as a tool.
We only see the world through our own personal lens, so we really only see ourselves in our judgments about others. If I find myself judging someone, I find these steps helpful.
Find out what emotion I really feel. This is different from a joint statement like “ugh, that person is rubbing me the wrong way.” I’ll try to immediately think of it as, “that person is intimidating me.” Identify what “it” is.
What quality gets under your skin? For me, I find loud and animated people to get under my skin. After seeing this pattern in myself, I realized that I envy how comfortable and ‘out there these people are for me because I have many introverted tendencies.
Don’t judge yourself to judge. Judging is our classification system. It has helped us evolve. Obviously, you’re too preoccupied with judging, but don’t fight the urge to do it. Use it as a tool to gain a better understanding of yourself.
You know “Why isn’t my brain working?” from That is Khartaziah.
Our brains are starving and degenerating at a rapid rate. Why? Insulin resistance and stress. Our brains are inflamed and hungry for essential fats.
Today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the extent to which our carbohydrate-rich diet affects our brain. Therefore, our behaviour and therefore also for your thoughts.
We think a lot about the heart or liver, but the truth is that many people in their thirties show signs of degenerating brains. Forgetting the keys or walking into a room and forgetting why you went in can all be signs.
I’m excited to read more of this kind of information.
Even though I’ve read countless books similar to this one, it still amazes me how little attention is paid to nutrition in health care.
VKoN self-healers!
Suppose you are new to VKoN and wish to become a self healer. It is good to know that my passion is to bring out the information I believe is desperately lacking in trauma treatment.
Without nourishing the brain, healing the body, and questioning thoughts, there is no sanity. People who have experienced long-term trauma or abuse in childhood may have suffered brain damage. But that is reversible. You can do something about that.
I look forward to sharing more about this with you. What interests you most?
Meditation!
Almost everyone who has tried meditation has had a hard time. A mind unaccustomed to being watched will evoke emotions such as confusion, frustration, and constant thoughts of “not doing it right.”
Yes, meditation will bring you incredible benefits. I could write a whole post about how meditation has changed my life.
But there is a misconception that meditation makes your brains and thoughts “zen.”
This is just not true. Meditation is a skill. Finally, the spirit will revolt. It takes effort to get to the place of zen. Watching the monkey ghost can be scary. Not enough people talk about it.
To start meditating and avoid staying a chronic novice, you need to understand that it feels weird before it feels right. Expect inconvenience! You can lie down or sit. It can be in bed or at your desk at work. Meditation is just watching. Stay tuned!
Then spend little by little: 30 seconds, more than 1 minute, etc. Slowly you create space between you and your thoughts. That’s where the magic is. That’s where change begins.
Do you meditate? Let us know.
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