Mental Wellness
Let’s have some real talk about Mental Wellness.
This is for you if you are ADD, ADHD, BPD, Neurodivergent in any way, suffer with any type of ANXIETY or DEPRESSION. This is for you if you suffer from insomnia, nightmares & night terrors, or any cognitive sleep issue.
Cognitive health is so complex, and rightly so because the brain is literally the most complex part of our own universe. We understand space better than we understand our brains.
(legalities) I can’t claim to be an expert on the brain. I am not a doctor. I have no formal education on the brain. These are my opinions and beliefs based on my own compilation of research and study over many many years. If you wish to try any practices or nutrients I recommend, you may consult your doctor, and do all the research that you feel called, and I encourage, you to do.
Personally, for myself, I am against all prescription medication for the above disorders. I have been prescribed them, and even given antidepressants in place of medical treatment for real and agonizing issues because the doctor didn’t know how to deal with me. You have to make your OWN choices. You have to do what is right for YOU. I am not telling you to quit anything! I am not you, but I do know a good deal about health practices that definitely apply to everyone. While I am at it, let me simply state I do not believe anyone can EAT their full nutrition unless they are already completely healthy and have been actively eating their nutrition with no dire illness to intervene their entire lives. This is not the majority of our population!
To simplify, I will refer to cognitive health in addressing all above listed mental concerns.
We have to think about our cognitive health as a big puzzle. There are many pieces and aspects of the brain and so there are many pieces and aspects of maintaining and restoring cognitive health.
I hope to cover many, but do know now that the stars of this show are *TRYPTOPHAN* and NOOTROPICS.
While for me, nootropics have been a very supportive tool in my cognitive health, I am not going to focus on this nearly as much as Tryptophan, because I feel this is an extra and not as critical to real mental health as tryptophan is. In saying this, if you cannot do EVERYTHING for your health like all the vitamins you need, then you have to know what is most important to focus on. This is one of the biggest struggles in the nutritional world. There are so many things that support cognitive health, how do you know which even work or are really important? Well, I hope I answer that for you today.
Nootropics are extractions of rare (expensive) mushrooms. These are not psychedelic mushrooms! These are just the extra healthy mushrooms! They are so healthy they qualify as nootropics. There are many variations. My favorite is the Dose coffee drink, but I don’t drink it everyday, so I use pill form nootropics mostly. I do buy most of my supplements on Amazon. There are some very affordable options. The one I buy for my own children (14, 11 now) is only $8 a bottle and these are smaller pills than the others, and have less odor which my kids are super picky about! If you want more detailed information on nootropics or reading material, please reach out.
TRYPTOPHAN! You have probably heard about this, especially at Thanksgiving. Turkey has tryptophan, and some other foods have naturally small amounts, but my all time favorite way to make my own tryptophan I enjoy year round and does not require 4 hours of cooking. I’m talking about Hot Coco! More specifically, hot cow’s milk. When cow milk is heated it activates the tryptophan in the milk. There are many hot milk recipes, such as golden milks, honey milks, and just plain hot milk. And yes, if able and willing, raw cow milk is certainly most ideal but not always practical. (Do note that there are people who are lactose intolerant who have NO NEGATIVE reaction to Raw Milk, but alas, that is not true for everyone with a dairy allergy.)
Why tryptophan and wtf does tryptophan do?
Tryptophan is a core component in our FULL cognitive health. It is cognitive function, it is cognitive control, it is serotonin, dopamine, it balances and regulates our hormones. It turns on our ability to create our OWN melatonin for a healthy, good, and peaceful night of sleep. I also discovered that it turned off the night terrors I had been experiencing for as long as I have been dreaming. It balances out our emotional swings. It helps us ADD/ADHD focus our overwhelm and make sense of multi-tasking. (As I write this, I am also working on the other article on Spirituality basically simultaneously.)
This helps with anxiety attacks, recovery period of anxiety attacks, and makes our shadow work far more tolerable in my experience.
Cognitive Health is more than nutrition. If it were only nutrition then no one would be impacted by trauma, but that’s just not the case. However, nutritional balance and support definitely eases the severity of our symptoms of cptsd, ptsd, and many other trauma based cognitive issues.
Shadow Work is a key to recovering from trauma and even works for depression that didn’t imprint on you in this lifetime. Shadow work is a kind of self therapy. This is not something you would typically do with the guidance of a therapist, but you may have a guide explain the process and help you start on the journey. Though most shadow work we must truly face alone. This article is not about shadow work so I will wrap this portion up for now, but do know that it is an important aspect of cognitive health.
Can you, should you, take your cognitive health into your own hands?
Well, you have to at some point or anyone you’re working with, such as a therapist, really just becomes a crutch of avoidance; or worse, you are frauding yourself by avoiding the real work for the sake of saying you go to therapy. Is that to say you should go the entire journey alone? It’s definitely ill advised, but there are those of us who aren’t mean to receive outside help. Our journey is to forge the way ahead alone. This was my way, but also why I talk so much about this without charging people. If you have to go it alone, for financial reasons or whatever else, you should still have some people in your corner. So here, I stand in your corner, to be one of those people for you.
You cannot have a healthy mind without a healthy body. If you’re consuming garbage in any capacity then your mind reflects and embodies that garbage. That means negative talk, negative people, negative media, negative distractions. You need to care for your body, because you cannot care for one and not the other. I also take Chlorophyll for full body health and safe purification, which impacts the mind. Healthy blood, healthy brain.
This is the last aspect I will mention today in concerns to full cognitive health. If you don’t ever stretch, exercise, or use your body then it is literally going to melt, along with your brain. Like if you never read a book your grey matter will become sludge, too. If you don’t use your brain and exercise your brain then it can’t be healthy! Do puzzles, build erector sets and lego sets. Read!!!!! Read anything. Read for pleasure, read for advancement. Just read. Even 5 minutes a day is a huge power move for your cognitive health.
I hope this brings someone out there some relief. May you have a blessed and enlightened day.
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