Anxious? Depressed? Struggling with mood?
Sep 28, 2020
The Tune in to Your Body 5 Essentials can help support you!
Feeling anxious or depressed affects all parts of your life. Let’s look at the support you can explore to ease your discomfort…
When you work with me with a complaint of anxiety or depression, these are some of the things that you’ll consider getting to the root cause and being able to address what your body needs rather than applying a band-aid to mask your true experience. It can be uncomfortable to be uncomfortable – AND you can do hard things!
NOURISH
Food, hydration, and supplementation are included in the NOURISH essential. A root cause of mood concerns to consider include a lack of protein and blood sugar instability.
When your body digests protein, it breaks them down to amino acids. Think of a protein as a Lego tower and each Lego block as an amino acid. These amino acids are what your body uses to build many of your neurotransmitters (chemicals that make you feel one way or another). If you are lacking amino acids, your neurotransmitters can get out of balance. If you are not eating enough protein OR if you aren’t digesting your protein completely, you may be lacking in amino acids.
Blood sugar instability. When your blood sugar is high, you feel energized and ‘up’. Then, when your blood sugar crashes down so does your energy and mood. So, how can we help stabilize blood sugar? Food, movement, and stress management (like a complex spider web, everything is connected). From a food perspective, you can balance your blood sugar by eating protein, fiber, and fat along with carbohydrates. If you eat something sweet, eat a handful of nuts or seeds along with it. Movement and stress management will be discussed below.
MOVE
Both active and passive movement fall under this section. Active movement includes your posture, the ergonomics of your work area, and the movement you do every day, throughout the day. Passive movement happens when we use hydrotherapy to drive circulation from one area of the body to another through the use of water of various temperatures.
Active movement is a real must for someone with challenging moods. It helps to stabilize blood sugar and it is a tonic for mood. If someone’s mood is low, it often helps to raise it! If someone’s mood is anxious or uncomfortably high, the movement often helps to release the pent-up energy in the system.
Passive movement can be used as adjunctive therapy for your mood instability. Hydrotherapy (warming socks, castor oil to the abdomen) can be soothing and balancing to your nervous system.
CHOOSE
Sleep and your life’s design fall under this heading.
Sleep: chronic sleep deprivation can be a contributing factor in your mood concerns. If you are not prioritizing sleep, it may be the root cause. However, if you struggle to get good sleep, the mystery to solve is why – hormones, blood sugar, emotional disturbances, a partner who snores… those would be possible root causes to investigate.
Lifestyle: Are you running in 18 different directions throughout any given day and your head is “spinning” to manage it all? Remember, your mental, emotional, and spiritual being has a direct effect on your physical body. Let’s explore all possible causes of your complaints.
CONNECT
Relationships to self, others, and something greater fill a biological need that we have as mammals. Your lack of connections can lead to feelings of loneliness and/or isolation. Working to ensure a loving connection every day (with yourself, a pet, another human, a tree…) helps to physiologically support mood.
BALANCE
The state of your nervous system dictates where in your body energy and nutrients are directed. If you are constantly living in a threat or reward state (sympathetic dominance), your body wants energy and focus in your muscles and brain. All that ‘amped-up’-ness surely can create anxiety and hyper-vigilance or the shut-down experience of overwhelm/depression. The more we seek to create safety in our being (parasympathetic), the greater ease your body has in effortless function.
Now that you’re reviewed all of the topics in the 5 essentials that can support your mood to be more balanced, choose 1 or 2 that seem to interest you or resonate and add them to your life in the next week. No expectation of perfection – just curiosity to see if you can learn something about what you need…