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Brain Science and Mental Health

I Grew Up With the Shame of Food Insecurity. Decades Later, I Still Obsess Over What I Eat

I remember watching my mother stand at the supermarket register, anxiously tugging at her shaggy dark blonde hair, repeatedly tucking it behind an ear. Her green eyes, amplified by thick glasses with rose-tinted plastic frames, scanned the running total. She’d hold an envelope open with one hand and whip out coupons like a blackjack dealer, placing them on each corresponding item to make sure the cashier scanned them together. She knew the total before we got to the checkout. She used a...

Trauma, trust and triumph: psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk on how to recover from our deepest pain

When Dr Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, it was a huge hit with yoga people. That is not a euphemism for “rich, underoccupied people”, it is just people who do yoga. Certain physical activities do something weird to your brain: ancient memories resurface, often with new feelings or perspectives attached; you start treating yourself with more compassion. It doesn’t make sense until you read Van der Kolk. After that, nothing has ever made more sense. His thesis...

Diets Make You Feel Bad. Try Training Your Brain Instead.

How eating habits are formed Dr. Brewer, an addiction psychiatrist, has tested a number of mindfulness practices to help people quit smoking, lower anxiety and reduce emotional eating. He has also created an app called Eat Right Now that uses mindfulness exercises to help people change their eating habits. One Brown University study of 104 overweight women found that mindfulness training reduced craving-related eating by 40 percent. Another review by scientists at Columbia University found...

The Neuroscience of Emotional Eating

For some people, no matter how much they try to eat healthy, when intense emotions surface, overcoming food cravings seems impossible. We reach for the comfort foods that we hope will make us feel better in the short term, but afterwards often end up feeling down in the dumps. That feeling of shame can be overwhelming — particularly in a diet-driven society where maintaining a healthy relationship with food is difficult, especially if it’s used as a coping mechanism. But why do some people...

Living in poverty is not caused by a faulty mindset, it’s a response to scarcity and marginalisation

How do you improve your life? Many of us assume that flourishing in the face of adversity requires a certain kind of mindset . Believing in your power, staying focused on future goals, being proactive, and leveraging social relationships are four outlooks that can help, many of us suspect, in overcoming life’s obstacles. Driven by the belief that people can change their lives by thinking differently, public organizations in the UK and the US have made a deliberate effort over the past decade...

How stress can damage your brain and body

We all know what stress feels like physically — though the symptoms vary by person. Some people experience shakiness or a racing heart, while others develop muscle tension, headaches or stomach aches. But what we might not realize is that our physiological responses to life’s stresses and strains can have deeper, less obvious, repercussions for just about every organ and system in the body. “I think people really underestimate just how big the effects are,” said Janice Kiecolt-Glaser,...

I’ve Always Struggled With My Weight. Losing It Didn’t Mean Winning.

There were a few bad moments, over the course of a few bad months, that led me to download the weight- loss app. These will probably sound trivial to anyone who is not me, and of course they are trivial — but we are talking about bodies here, and about my body in particular, and one of the defining features of having a body is that it is a fire hose of tiny humiliations blasting you constantly in the face, never allowing you to look away, even when you most want to. One bad moment happened...

Whole Body Mental Health

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what...

Scientists Don’t Agree on What Causes Obesity, but They Know What Doesn’t

LONDON — A select group of the world’s top researchers studying obesity‌ recently gathered in the gilded rooms of the Royal Society, the science academy of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, where ideas like gravity and evolution were once debated. Now scientists were arguing about ‌‌the causes of obesity, which affects more than 40 percent of U.S. adults and costs the health system about $ 173 billion each year . At the meeting’s closing session, ‌ John Speakman , a biologist, offered ‌‌this...

The Surprisingly Dramatic Role of Nutrition in Mental Health | Julia Rucklidge

To listen to Julia Rucklidge TedTalk, please click here. "In 1847, a physician by the name of Semmelweis advised that all physicians wash their hands before touching a pregnant woman in order to prevent childbed fever. His research showed that you could reduce the mortality rates from septicemia from 18%, down to 2% simply through washing your hands with chlorinated lime. His medical colleagues refused to accept that they themselves were responsible for spreading infection. Semmelweis was...

Our Brains Weren't Designed for This Kind of Food

Our society has long treated weight gain as a function of insufficient willpower. If you’re overweight, it’s because you chose to be. You ate too much, or you didn’t exercise enough. You lack the virtue and the discipline of the thin. This story is great. It is great for punishing anyone who struggles with weight. It is great for justifying discrimination and maltreatment. But it is just nonsense if you take even a cursory look at the data. And Stephan Guyenet has looked — and I put this...

The Link Between Highly Processed Foods and Brain Health

Roughly 60 percent of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. We’ve known for decades that eating such packaged products — like some breakfast cereals, snack bars, frozen meals and virtually all packaged sweets, among many other things — is linked to unwelcome health outcomes, like an increased risk of diabetes, obesity and even cancer. But more recent studies point to another major downside to these often delicious, always convenient foods: They appear to...

Why a food addiction many Americans say they struggle with is one experts can’t agree on

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/15/health/food-addiction-help-symptoms-wellness/index.html CNN — "About 1 in 8 Americans over 50 struggle with an unhealthy relationship with highly processed food that goes well beyond the occasional binge or midnight snack, according to a recent poll. Known as food addiction, the condition isn’t limited to older adults — previous food addiction data had primarily centered around young- to middle-age adults up to around 50, said Ashley Gearhardt, lead author of...

Nutritional Neuroscience, Whole Body Mental Health

https://onbeing.org/programs/kimberley-wilson-whole-body-mental-health/ The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and...

How to Nourish Your Brain to Improve and Protect It (thebestbrainpossible.com)

Research shows that memory problems can begin as early as the forties and continue to increase with age. However, declining cognition is not just an inevitable part of aging. Keeping your mind sharp is entirely possible, and it’s never too late to improve your brain function. Your lifestyle habits play a large role in determining whether your mind stays robust or degrades. The foods you eat are also integral in determining whether your brain continues to function at its best . Giving your...

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