How food affects your mood

Mental Health & Well-Being Support How food affects your mood

At a time when mental health has never been more important, looking at what foods we put into our body to fuel the mind is essential. We have all heard that healthy foods keep us healthy. What we’re not always told is that good nutrition significantly affects our mental health. A healthy, well-balanced diet can support our body to think clearly and feel more alert. It can also improve concentration and attention span. On the contrary, an inadequate or poor diet can lead to fatigue, brain-fog, lack of concentration, slows down reaction time, and even lead to stress and depression. We can’t always change the stressors in our life but we can support our body to deal with stress better. Your brain and nervous system depend on nutrition to build new proteins, cells and tissues. In order to function effectively, your body requires a variety of carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and minerals that improve brain functioning. Steer away from sugar-filled snacks and drinks, which lead to highs and lows in energy levels and impair your ability to concentrate. Poor diet during periods of stress and depression only makes matters worse. This cycle of sugar and processed foods addiction is a vicious one, but it can be overcome.

Fuel your mood, motivation, and mental function - Eat wholefoods.

• Consume healthy fats, such as fish, coconut oil and avocado. This will support your brain function. • Drink plenty of water, 1 - 2 litres a day.

Water helps your brain cells communicate with each other and carries nutrients to your brain. • Plenty of vegetables, dark green leafy vegetables in particular are essential for the nervous system and are brain protective. • Food’s rich in protein contain amino acids, which help produce neurotransmitters. These play a vital role in preventing and supporting anxiety and depression. i.e. chicken, fish, turkey, eggs, beans and lentils.

Gut health and mood

• Our guts and brain are physically linked via the vagus nerve. The gut is able to influence emotional behaviour in the brain. • Research shows gut bacteria produce an array of neurochemicals that the brain uses for the regulation of physiological and mental processes, including mood. 80% of the body’s supply of serotonin, which is our happy hormone, is produced by gut bacteria. • It’s important to know that processed foods such as fast foods are manufactured to be extra tasty by the use of ingredients and additives. Foods that contain chemical additives, affects our gut microbiome and increases our

risk of diseases. Eating natural whole foods and avoiding processed foods that we know cause inflammation and disease, can also be protective against depression. At the Naturopathic Health Clinic, I work with every client on a personal basis to achieve overall health and wellbeing.

Joanne D’Urso - Functional Medicine Practitioner, Naturopath and Nutritionist – Saffron Walden – Tel: 01799 218010 –www.naturopathichealth.co.uk

Yoga Pose for stress management - Legs up the wall, as it is commonly known, is mentioned in ancient Indian yoga texts as Viparita Karani. Legs up the wall is an accessible way to invest 10 minutes a day into your health and wellbeing to reap significant health benefits, including reducing the effects of stress on the nervous system. ‘Viparita’ means ‘turned around’ . ‘Karani’ refers to ‘doing’ . It is sometimes referred to as ‘reversing the attitude’ . If our normal attitude is action, getting things done, then this is a call to restore and reset and reverse that. The inversion of the legs gives a calming, restful effect for the nervous system. It is a great antidote to the effects of stress and anxiety on the body, re-establishing balance within the busy sympathetic nervous system and the restoring parasympathetic nervous system, thereby inducing balance. One valuable benefit of legs up the wall pose is that it increases circulation and therefore benefits the vital organs, including the brain. In turn, this energises and creates a feeling of refreshment. In contemporary First Aid courses, they raise the legs like in this pose if someone has fainted, as it is the most rapid way to increase circulation, re-oxygenating the brain and organs.

Jac -Yoga Teacher @ Mokshala

Stress, anxiety and depression are warning signals from our body that something in our life is not right: we need to pay attention, stand back and work out what is wrong and make change in our life. If we ignore the signal, then it’s easy for the mind to go into a spiral and for us to become ill quite quickly. However, if we pay attention to the signal and make changes, then the stress, anxiety or depression will decrease. Crucially, we need to reduce the pressure that school children are under in today’s world, especially post-pandemic: they will perform far better and suffer less anxiety. With computers and social media, modern everyday life has become fast, pressurised, loud and too stressful. We live life as a constant sprint! It is essential that we religiously build downtime into our everyday life: going for a walk, meditating or even reading a novel. The point of the “fight or flight” mechanism is to enable us to deal with an emergency and then let the mind and the body come back into balance. Living life as a constant sprint means that our dayto-day adrenal levels are far too high, and the body does not have the chance to come back into balance.

Mark Newey – Psychotherapist @ Headucate.me

www.saladdaysmag.uk

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