Recovery and mental health.

[headFirst]

With our breakups (whether initiated or the victim) or dealing with walking away from our onitis, we tend to get depressed, and live our days in gloom and hopelessness. There is a ton of gouge on here to help better ourselves and distracts ourselves. Helping us care a little less each day about that one girl until we no longer care at all.

Sometimes though in our healing process we still can't help but feel a little down everyday or have our good days and bad days. Like many I've been dealing with my own recovery of a onitis. She's caused me to be depressed for a few months but since I started NC with her I've been getting better each day. I've had some really low self-esteem days. I will read an article off here, hit the gym, talk to some pretty girl and just get really motivated. Then one day I wake up and I just feel depressed as hell, and mentally fogged. I have trouble problem solving at work, and i just feel like not socializing with anyone.

What I'm getting at here is I decided to do some research on what effects on your brain depression has. One that stood out to me was the depleting of serotonin. For those of you who do not know what serotonin is used for; (I'm just going to hit on it's most relevance to what I'm talking about) it is a major factor in well being and happiness. It is our primary defense against feelings of depression and anxiety, it is a chemical that helps relay signals from one area of the brain to another. When this chemical depletes due to deep depression or maybe another outside factor, the signals get weaker and not so many cells get passed during each relay. So this is where the mental fogginess and blocks comes from during your depression or down days.

How do you increase serotonin? Here are a few things that help: B-complex vitamins (most benefit), whole grains or carbs that process slowly.. carbs strictly from fruit.. and getting out in the light more (keep the shades off because the light works best when penetrating the retina). Just to name a few. Also, avoid Chocolate and caffeine intake, as well as fake sugars.. This depletes serotonin levels.

What helped me the most was I went out and bought a b-complex supplement. "Super B-complex" -by nature made to be exact. I also take fish oil pills and a men's "one a day" multivitamin. I want to say the mental focus and clarity I have gained as well as a higher level of happiness/moral boost is definitely noticeable. Fish oil also helps with depression because of the EPA and DHA. The fish oil as a variety of benefits as well from skin complexion to eyes, joints, reduction in ADHD/ADD.. but mostly it has omega 3 fatty acid which is primarily what your brain feeds off of.

Anyway, I'm not a doctor by any means but I've done a lot of research. And all I know is it worked for me. Some of you may already get a lot of B-complex vitamins if you eat a lot of vegetables, and get your omega-3 if you have fish a few times a week in your diet. I don't like fish, that's why i supplement with fish oil, and I don't always have time to cut up and cook veggies nor do I always like to eat them raw.. I do however load up on fruit. But the B-complex supplement is good if you don't eat a lot veggies which I'm sure many people do not get their recommended daily servings. Also, there are multivitamins which contain enough B-complex to not need a supplement.. so when you are in the store just compare the vitamins in the B-complex supplement with the vitamins in your multivitamin. And when in doubt ask the pharmacist of what you chose will be okay.

I wanted to try strictly just a B-complex supplement to see the effects and I chose One 1 a day multivitamin because it doesn't have a lot of the vitamins in a B-complex supplement. But next time I might try one of those sports multivitamins, which loads up on the B-complex and doubles a lot of your daily value of vitamins..

B-complex also will help give you energy too.


Hope this helps and assists in your success to self-improvement. This may not work for everyone but it definitely has helped me and from my research, many others.



Edit: I also wanted to add that learning a new instrument also improves mental health, and retaining new vocabulary.
http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/playing-musical-instrument-smarter

For the heck of it, I've started this brain exercises program developed at Stanford, to help improve memory, speed, attention.. etc.
They offer a free trial: http://www.lumosity.com/

Another addition: getting the right amount of protein can also help reduce stress and also assist in memory improvement.
http://www.newweekendlive.com/html/health_food/572.html

 

[backseatjuan]

From a to b is not a "healing process" rather it is a learning process, gotta update that bios.

 

[Down Low]

You cannot swallow a serotonin pill and increase it. Serotonin won't cross the blood/brain barrier. It has to be manufactured in the brain.

There is one and only one chemical precursor to serotonin: 5HTP. It does cross the blood/brain barrier. You can buy it at Costco and most drug stores.

The main dietary source of 5HTP is L-tryptophan. It's an essential amino acid found in protein foods. Poultry is a good source. However, only about 10% of L-tryptophan will be converted to 5HTP. Dietary sources are sufficient for most people.

There is no simple test for low serotonin. Psychologists who suspect low serotonin levels can't prove it. The symptoms of chronic low serotonin are many and overlap with hundreds of other diseases. Instead of prescribing cheap and nontoxic 5HTP, doctors push big pharma (reuptake inhibitors) to achieve the same end. Dr. House would say "eat some chicken every day."

L-tryptophan makes you sleepy for half an hour or so after ingestion. It's a better sleep aid than 5HTP. Both partially break down into melotonin: another sleep aid. L-tryptophan is hard to find because big pharma used one greedy company's mistake as an excuse to get it banned in the US for a decade. Even now, nonsense gets published about how 5HTP in combination with L-tryptophan is dangerous. (How could it be dangerous if one is constantly being converted to the other -- so both must always be present together?)

There are other nervous-system chemicals that can be out of whack. It makes sense to avoid chemicals such as monosodium glutamate, caffeine, and alcohol, if you're trying to recover from depression.

 

[headFirst]

Thanks for the addition Down Low.

There are serotonin pills yes. I was aiming for the natural way though. But the extra gouge you provided is great. Thank you.



backseatjuan,

I see what you mean but during the "falling down and getting back up process," the mental fatigue, anxiety, and depression is sometimes unavoidable. This may be a nice aid to get you back on track and assist in mental freedom. Is it 100% guaranteed? No. But it's worked nicely for me, so I wanted to share. You can try it or not it's up to you all but I always appreciate others posting their positive findings, so I wanted to share mine.