Top 3 Things You Can Do to Feel Better Now
What can you do to start feeling better TODAY? I’m often asked about the tools I’ve found along my path that help to improve my mental health and keep it in a positive state. While CBD was absolutely the first thing that really helped to heal my body and gave me the space to heal my mind, diet has actually proven to be the most consistently solid pillar for me. I really hated switching my dependency from medication to CBD, even though I felt it was the better option, and wanted to be free from all of it- a diet geared towards my mental health totally gave me that freedom.
In our current paradigm for health, we often don’t think to correlate food’s relationship to the body in the context of mood (or even physical ailments, but that’s for another post). We have learned to associate it with weight gain or loss, emotional comfort, or socializing, but not how we feel mentally. The thing is, the body is an interconnected machine. What you put inside of it effects EVERYTHING, not just how you physically look. There are many studies pointing to the fact that our stomach is our “second brain,” that things like inflammation stemming from inflammatory foods causes anxiety and depression, along with a host of other symptoms.
Dr. Kelly Brogan works in this paradigm brilliantly and I encourage anyone searching for a more sustainable answer to their mental health to look into her work. After much self-experimentation, here are the top 3 things that have and continue to dramatically shift the state of my mental health:
1. Eliminating coffee. This was huge for me. For years, I would drink a large black coffee every morning and another medium mid-day during my crash. I first switched to matcha which is an entirely different type of caffeine and it made a wold of difference. The caffeine is long-acting, slow release, and has a generally lower (and far healthier) volume so it doesn’t trigger anxiety. Now I'm caffeine-free (except on particularly rough days) and feeling even better but matcha is a good alternative to coffee when you’re first making the switch. If you can do one thing I'd recommend this one. I’ve had over a handful of friends experiment with this as well and every single one of them diminished a substantial degree of their anxiety from this switch alone.
2. Eliminating gluten. This was also huge for me. Gluten not only triggers anxiety for me, it triggers depression. I suspect this is because it has an inflammatory reaction in the body but I haven’t formally researched it, I just know the drastically negative effects it has on my mood and thoughts. One sandwich and I’m done for the next two days. I have eliminated it entirely from my body and now only rarely experience depressive moods. Over the summer in France, I ate a few pieces of bread (because it was warm and in front of my face and I’m not a psychopath) and ALL of my anxiety, social anxiety, self-doubt, and depression, came pouring back into my body. I only started feeling better when I eliminated it again a few days later. Stay off this shit.
3. Eliminating sugar + grains. I eliminated these initially because of concentration and focus issues. When I first moved to Denver, I had to work at a new job for the first time without adderall and panicked because I couldn’t focus for more than 30 seconds. I even considered taking it again at very small doses. After meeting a girl who went from being prescribed OVER the legal limit of adderall to treating herself entirely holistically by eliminating sugar and grains, I gave it a shot. Not only did it take me from 0 to 60 productively, but I noticed a HUGE correlation to my anxiety levels as well. If I ever “cheat” on my diet, this is usually the first to go in very small amounts but I always notice my anxiety is a little more trigger happy when I do.
Maintaining control over your mood and thoughts is a crucial step towards self healing and self mastery, and diet is the most accessible, easiest thing you can change now. I encourage anyone else on the same path to try the same!
NOTE: This piece was written before I had experienced the immensely positive mental health effects of eating red meat. I was still in my 20 years of vegan/vegetarianism but switched to eating red meat every day around September 2019. This has by far been the most profound nutritional approach to my mental health. The steps outlined here were great to start with for me, but pairing them with a higher volume of red meat consumption was truly life changing.
This was originally featured in a April 5, 2019 post on Instagram at @themorganmay