Andrew Weil's Blog: Dr. Weil's Healthy Living Blog, page 16

The Book Of Highs

Getting High And The Natural Mind:

by Edward Rosenfeld

In the late 1960s, legislators passed laws outlawing drugs people were taking to alter their consciousness. Those politicians had never taken those drugs, they only wanted to legislate consciousness. To me, that smacked of the prohibition of alcohol that was tried and failed, decades earlier.

I thought: they can’t outlaw consciousness: there are just too many ways to get high. I decided to assemble several hundred of those ways into a mini-encyclopedia. While I was writing that book, two other books were published that were a great help to me.

One was a scholarly volume, Altered States of Consciousness by Charles Tart, a compendium about the research and results in studying the myriad ways humans alter their consciousness and their awareness.

The other book was The Natural Mind by Dr. Andrew Weil. At that time, I met Andy, thru a mutual friend, and he agreed to write the Foreword to my book – The Book of Highs – 250 Ways to Alter Consciousness Without Drugs – which was published, originally, in 1973. Now a new edition of the book, entitled – The Book of Highs – 255 Ways to Alter Your Consciousness Without Drugs – has been published.

When I was preparing the 2018 edition of my book, I went back and read Andy’s foreword from the 1973 version. It read as if it was written today, and we decided to include it in the new book. Here are just a few of the most salient things that Andy had to say back then, that ring so true today, especially in light of the opioid crisis and the changing of medicinal and recreational marijuana laws in the US:

“The desire to have peak experiences, to transcend the limitations of ordinary consciousness, operates in all of us. It is so basic that it looks like an inborn drive. Almost as soon as infants learn to sit up, they begin to rock themselves into highs. Later, as young children, they learn to whirl into other states of awareness or hyperventilate out of ordinary reality. Still later they discover drugs.

“There has been much talk lately of alternatives to drugs. The present book describes a great many techniques for getting high, none of them making use of drugs. If we could teach people other methods to achieve highs, the drug problem would take on more manageable proportions. But what is wrong with drugs? They certainly work for many people, and, if used with the respect and care they demand, are no more dangerous than many agents in common, legal use in our society.

“…If we look over an extensive catalog of methods for getting high, one common trait stands out: They all are techniques of focusing awareness, of shaking us out of habitual modes of perception and getting us to concentrate on something, whether a sound, a sight, or an unusual sensation. Possibly, what we call a high is simply the experience of focused consciousness, even if the focus is on something we would normally consider painful or unpleasant. And possibly, when our ordinary consciousness is focused on anything, we can become aware of what is ordinarily unconsciously perceived: our internal organs, for example, or other persons’ minds or even things beyond ordinary time and space.

“…We are caught up in a fever of experimentation with methods of changing consciousness, much of it generated by the young. There will be much wasted effort, some casualties. But out of it all will come a generation that will know how to use its consciousness more and more fully – a generation that can build a truly high society.”

How prescient Dr. Weil’s words, then and now. I can only hope that soon people, especially politicians and lawmakers, will pay attention to the pernicious ways in which we now relegate drug use to the law enforcement, legal and judicial systems. These are personal problems and should be dealt with by the communities in which they take place and by the medical and psychiatric systems that are already in place.

If we change our attitudes to altering consciousness and devise new, innovative means of treating whatever problems occur, we will have the opportunity to improve our communities, help people in need and save billions and billions of dollars now being wasted on senseless prohibitions.

It is my hope that my book, with Andy’s perceptive and illuminating Foreword, can go some distance in changing minds and attitudes when it comes to altered consciousness and awareness, both with drugs and without. Here’s a last word from Dr. Weil’s Foreword to The Book of Highs:

“Far from leading to withdrawal from the world, meditation and other self-reliant methods of getting high tend to make us better able to function in ordinary reality. The better we get at getting high and staying there, the more we integrate the conscious and unconscious spheres of our mental life. This integration is the key to wholeness (health) of body and mind.”

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Edward Rosenfeld is the author of The Book Of Highs, Workman Publishing Company (April 17, 2018).

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Fail Well To Live Well And Be Well

Have you ever failed? Can you remember how many times you have failed? We have all failed, not just once but many times. And the truth is, we will likely fail again in the future. Far from being a reason to be sad, experiencing failure is actually a key part of achieving happiness and success in life. In fact, some of the most successful people in history have had colossal failures, but that didn’t stop them from achieving their goals in life.

Failure is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a necessary part of the path to emotional wellbeing and success in life. The trick is to learn from our failures. Let’s take the example of Thomas Edison. He is famously known for creating the light bulb and he himself has admitted that he failed nearly 400 times before figuring out the right way to construct a light bulb that works. Far from being discouraged by all these failed attempts, Edison said he saw each failure as another key step bringing him closer to his goal.

What we can learn from failure is critical to achieving success. In the case of Edison, he learned 400 ways not to build a light bulb so he could eventually find the right way to construct it. He could have given up, but instead he chose to see an opportunity to learn from every way that he had failed. He chose to learn from failure. Learning from failure is a key lesson for us in life.

Theodore Roosevelt, a famous American President, is quoted as saying that “man’s greatest honor is not in never failing, but in rising every time he falls.” This reminds me of a story from ancient Persian mythology. There once was a great king who lost his kingdom and was imprisoned in a dark and desolate dungeon. As he sat there, he started to feel sorry for himself thinking about all that he had lost and how he had failed so miserably. Amidst his tears and sorrowful state he noticed an ant crawling across the prison floor with a crumb of bread from his last meal. The ant began to climb the prison wall to reach a tiny hole where he presumably lived. As he moved up the wall, he suddenly lost his balance and fell backwards to the ground –losing the bread crumb in the process. Undaunted, the ant retrieved the bread crumb and began climbing up the wall again. The great king watched as this tiny ant fell and retrieved the bread crumb a total of seventy-two times before finally reaching the hole in the wall and successfully taking his prized meal home! The king was so moved by the ant’s perseverance despite failing so many times that he began to strategize plans for his escape. Ultimately, the king escaped and was able to regain his throne thanks to the lessons of failure he learned from a small and seemingly insignificant ant.

While this had been one of my father’s bedtime stories to me as a child, I didn’t learn the significance of the story until I too experienced failure in my life. Every failure in life is an opportunity to learn and grow, thereby getting us closer to our goals and achieving success. We must not shy away from failure. We must learn to fail well in order to live well and be well.

 

By Farshad Fani Marvasti, MD, MPH (Dr. Shad)

Dr. Shad is a Stanford-trained physician, medical educator, researcher, public speaker and aspiring author. He is proactively engaged in creating solutions to promote health and prevent the chronic diseases of our time. As a practicing physician trained in integrative medicine, Dr. Shad takes a holistic approach to health care and advocates for the use of food as medicine to actively teach his patients to buy and prepare healthy meals with food prescriptions as a standard part of treating their medical conditions.

Learn more about Dr. Shad by visiting www.doctorshad.com) and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Legacies of Celebration

With the end of April showers (snow for some of us) and the advent of May’s colorful flowers, our spirits rise. We plant our gardens, and fill our calendars with all kinds of celebrations of life: graduations, confirmations, weddings. May brings with its delicate scents and pastel colors, the optimism of the new: new clothes, new season, new relationships, new jobs, new homes, new hopes and dreams, and more.

We’ve observed the disappointed expressions – verbal and visual – informing us that younger generations aren’t interested in the legacy of our “stuff.” If we can’t give them grandma’s linens, grandpa’s fishing pole, or treasures we’ve gathered from our life journeys, what can we give them that’s meaningful, that they will appreciate and treasure? It’s the perfect time to celebrate them and mark their special moment in time with a legacy letter and/or legacy blessings.

Here are some reflection prompts to assist you as you prepare to write a blessing or letter to a loved person at this significant moment in their lives – words that will be meaningful, personal to you and them, that express your hope for their success as they embark from the old to the new.

Reflect about yourself at the age of the person you are writing to. Who were you at that moment in your own life? What were your passions, interests, challenges, values, ideals, hopes, and dreams then? What was your daily life – your work and leisure, your emotional, spiritual, mental, and social state like then? Did you have a model, a mentor, an angel, and if you did, what did you learn from that person that influenced your life going forward?
Reflect about what you know about that time or occasion in your own life that you wish you had known then. How do you wish you’d been blessed as you experienced that momentous and perhaps difficult time?
Reflect about a moment, event, time when you were especially proud of this person in the past year: how do you understand their challenge; articulate the quality in them that you are glad, even honored, to witness.
Reflect about a positive quality that you see as the unique gift that person possesses and may still be developing or refining (the ‘acorn’ of the ‘mature oak tree’ they’re becoming).
Reflect about a challenge facing the person at this time in his/her life, and if you can, illustrate or highlight the challenge with a verbal snapshot you witnessed in their life.
Now focus once again on yourself, and reflect about your own likely mixed feelings (happiness & sadness, pleasure & pain about what this time in this person’s life signifies to you and about you, and the transition you’re experiencing in your life as related to the person you’re about to bless with a letter. 

Practice:

First write a blessing to this person marking his/her special moment or life event that expresses your love and hopes for her/him going forward. (Take into account al that you know having reflected on the occasion/event, on him/her, and yourself.)

If you’re having difficulty getting started, set a timer; give yourself five minutes to write (this boundary will help you to focus) and begin with the two words: “May you…” and let your words flow from there.

After the five minutes, take as much time as you wish to edit your thoughts, and perhaps delete the first two words, and begin in your own personal way.

You may also find that some of your words don’t quite express your thoughts or feelings. Use a Thesaurus (easy online) to search for and find the word that is closest to what you are wanting to express.

When you are satisfied with your blessing, put it in the top drawer of your desk overnight, and return to it the next day. Read it aloud to yourself, imagining that you are the recipient. Set aside your judgment and self-criticism, and the voice from the past that says that you can’t write! As you listen to yourself, notice if there is anything you want to add, delete or change.

Choose beautiful paper (and envelope) and write the blessing in your own hand – nothing is more personal than gifting our own handwriting – (remember how sweet it was to find an old recipe written in your mother or grandmother’s hand?). Voila, you’ve produced a personal gift that will be long treasured.

Write a several paragraph legacy letter to honor the moment in the person’s life, using your reflections 1-6.

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters and Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies. rachael@life-legacies.com  and  www.life-legacies.com

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Food As Magic: Natural, Biologically Active Foods

Often scientists think of food as an assembly of calories and nutrients that have some specific interactions with human biology. If one follows that line of thinking, food found in Nature would be indistinguishable from food made in industrial factories. But nature doesn’t work like a factory.

Industrial food reflects roughly two hundred years of human innovation and research into nutrition, manufacturing, and optimization for human consumption. Natural foods, by contrast, reflect thousands of years of evolution and adaptation for life on the planet. When you put a blueberry in your mouth, for example, you benefit from all the effort (and thousands of years of trial and error) that the blueberry bush has placed not only into growing the berries, but also into protecting the future of the species, dormant in the seeds.

Instead of risking the seeds’ survival on their own, the berries use their own defense system, which is composed of several chemical substances we humans refer to as nutrients – those very nutrients we work so hard to industrially decant into pills and capsules. Some of these nutrients are vitamins to prevent the seeds from getting spoiled. Others are minerals to give them strength. Others still are sugars to give them energy.

Additionally, plants produce a vast array of powerful compounds called phytonutrients (i.e., plant nutrients), such as the anthocyanins and pterostilbene, that have propelled blueberries into the news. Phytonutrients serve the important purpose of fighting oxidative stress and inflammation, thereby increasing the life of the seeds. They are also responsible for the berries’ color, smell, and flavor. One reason those berries taste so good is that they are doing their best to attract the birds that eat them. That is because it is through the combination of the bird’s digestion, flight, and excretion that the plant can spread its seeds far beyond its own territory, further safeguarding its survival on the planet.

Biologically Active Foods

In the end, by making berries, the plant sets out to ensure life. By eating berries, we receive all the benefits of that effort. There is a magic to this. Without anything like intention or thought, without advertising, laboratories, or a business plan, berries have made themselves nutritious and delicious. But far from being “supernatural,” this is simply the magic of ordinary Nature.

In neuro-nutrition, there is an endless range of examples in which the nutritional whole (in its effects) is literally greater than the simple sum of its parts.

In spite of what our minds might tell us when presented with a brownie, what our brains actually crave is the multitude of nutrients present in natural, biologically active foods. When the right nutrients combine in the right way, the same magic that builds the healthy berries comes to build a healthy brain.

By Dr. Lisa Mosconi, PhD, INHC

Dr. Mosconi is the associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC)/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, where she was recruited as an associate professor of Neuroscience in Neurology. Her new book, Brain Food, explores the science of eating for cognitive power. Find her online at lisamosconi.com.

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The Legacy of Aspiration

Have you ever peeked to see what’s beneath your bucket list? Is there something deeper driving you? You may not be aware of it, but maybe there’s something your deeper self – your soul – wants you to do.

We aren’t just our past (genetics/ancestors/personal history) or our present (who we are today/our actions and lived values). We are also our future (our vision of who we will become/our aspirations of how we will make ourselves and the world better/our evolving personal purpose or mission).

Fifty years ago I left home with my then husband to serve in the US Peace Corps (Tunisia) for two years. Five years ago, I went on a ten day journey to Israel, with a group and my rabbi. Nine weeks ago, I left my habitual home, routines, language, family, friends, and set out alone to live in Jaffa, Israel, for two months. I chose Jaffa because it is an ancient city with a history and today a rare place where Jews and Arabs live together as neighbors and in harmony.

In part I went to support my oldest granddaughter, who was in Basic Training with the Israeli Defense Forces where she’d chosen to serve for two years.

But there were other reasons for my journey, although I didn’t have words nor did I really understand what was driving me. As I neared the end of my stay, my understanding of motives and learnings remained vague. Yet I knew that I’d left home curious, open to adventure and learning . . . but what?

This morning I randomly read something on my desktop my rabbi wrote in 2015. It was about the difference between who we are and who we aspire to be. He described our habitual lives: “how we tend to associate most readily with people who are just like us – same color skin, same neighborhoods, same socio-economic status – if we stay on this walkway, we continue to be carried along and become further polarized and indifferent to a world filled with a variety of people . . . . in order to change our most basic selves we have to give ourselves missions and challenges in real time, with real people that are not part of our mono-cultural circle. . . .taking opportunities to have personal interactions with members of other groups, to travel, but not in a bubble like when you visit a foreign city but wind up eating at Applebee’s.”

I’ve had “aha” moments almost every day, made mistakes, gotten lost, taken a bus North when I meant to go South, witnessed people’s sad and triumphant stories of how their families got to Israel, enjoyed incredible natural beauty, carefully preserved antiquities, and been part of hilarious and incongruous scenes.

One of my experiences was to volunteer as an assistant teacher at The SchoolHouse, a non-profit evening school, teaching English and computer skills to refugees. The students, most men in their 20s – from Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, (some possibly in danger of being deported!) – are earnest about their study of English, and very appreciative of their teacher and me. They each introduced themselves to me, and I to them; I told them I was from Minneapolis, and that we are home to the largest number of Somalis in all of the U.S.

One of the Somali students approached me after class. Wearing a broad smile, he told me his brother, Dahir, lives in Minneapolis and is studying to become an electrical engineer! We exchanged contacts, and I plan to call Dahir (to give greetings from his brother Daoud), and to ask him if he knows Somali women who would like an English tutor. Who’d have thought that a “small world” includes a 79 year old Jewish woman from Minneapolis and a 25 year old man from Somalia meeting in a Tel Aviv classroom?

And what has any of this to do with legacy – my eternal question?

As you know, I’m committed to the idea that we all are responsible to discover, preserve, and communicate our legacies in writing to future generations. I also deeply believe that we leave legacies by our acts, our interests, our lived values, and our aspirations for ourselves and the world. It’s not that I haven’t been a good example for my children and grandchildren, but my life was feeling habitual and a bit stale.

Today I feel like a refurbished house: full of good stories to tell, refreshed, relaxed and open – both empty and full – in a way I can’t yet describe. I feel fortunate to be alive, and filled with love in a very difficult world. If I pass some of that on, I’ll feel that I’ve left a worthwhile legacy to those I love. 

“Messenger” [excerpt]

My work is loving the world. . . .

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me  

keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still                                                                  

and learning to be astonished. . . .

                  – Mary Oliver

 

Practice:

Reflect about what’s on your bucket list, and what’s inside or beneath it. Questions you might consider include: Am I bored with my life? Am I stuck in a rut that is comfortable, even pleasant, but stuck never the less. Am I becoming all I want to be in my life? Are there things my heart and soul are dreaming for me that I’ve not been aware of but they’re calling to me now?
Write about your state of “astonishment,” that quality so apparent in young children, but often lost by the time we’re grown, that Mary Oliver writes she’s learning about at the age of eighty.
Write a legacy to someone you trust (and love) about who you are today, and who you aspire to be tomorrow. Share the excitement and trepidation inherent in hearing a call from deep inside to be “more”. Write about deciding on your response to the aspiration, not just for yourself, but as a significant component of your legacy.

   

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters and Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies. rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com

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Achieving Resilience And Accepting Change

Life is not always easy. In fact, it is constantly changing. Life never stays the same. Our circumstances change. Our work, our social life, our health, our family dynamics, everything changes. Good times come and good times go. Bad times come and bad times go. So how do we go about achieving resilience?

While it is helpful during times of difficulty to remember the old adage that “this too shall pass,” this also means that good times will pass, so really change is the only constant in life. Accepting change as inevitable in life helps us to achieve happiness because it strengthens our ability to be content with where we are now so that we can have the strength to grow to where we can be tomorrow. Part of that strength comes from accepting that challenges and stress are an inevitable part of life.

From the moment we are born and throughout our entire life we are faced with challenges. How we perceive and process challenges are actually more important than whether or not these negative events or situations occur. Research has shown that the occurrence of stressful or traumatic events does not predict happiness or the ability to succeed and function well in life. What is more important is how we perceive and process these events. In fact, negative events have a negative impact only when we have a negative response to them.

A positive response neutralizes the negative effect. Having an internal locus of control and reframing negative events to find a positive purpose is actually more critical than whether or not we experience these stressful events in life. An internal locus of control is a belief that we can influence the outcome of our life rather than an external locus where we feel that life happens to us and that we have no control over it. An internal locus of control has been linked to improved motivation, decreased anxiety, performing better under stress, experiencing less stress during times of difficulty and better overall psychological well-being. This ability to recover quickly from difficulties is the definition of resilience. So how can we cultivate resilience to achieve happiness in life?

Achieving Resilience – Four Ways:

Accept that change is inevitable and realize that life never stays the same, so however bad things seem they will not last forever.
Reframe how you think about stress, accept that it is inevitable but use it as a way to grow and learn rather than an excuse to be sad or give up.
Develop an internal locus of control; realize that your perception controls the impact that stress has on you not the stress itself.
It’s not the end of the world, realize it is a specific issue that can be addressed not a global problem with everything in life.

By Farshad Fani Marvasti, MD, MPH (Dr. Shad)

Dr. Shad is a Stanford-trained physician, medical educator, researcher, public speaker and aspiring author. He is proactively engaged in creating solutions to promote health and prevent the chronic diseases of our time. As a practicing physician trained in integrative medicine, Dr. Shad takes a holistic approach to health care and advocates for the use of food as medicine to actively teach his patients to buy and prepare healthy meals with food prescriptions as a standard part of treating their medical conditions.

Learn more about Dr. Shad by visiting www.doctorshad.com and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Staying Connected Means Staying Happy

It is said that ‘no man is an island.’ Humans are social beings. Happiness is not achieved alone. Although we can be happy by ourselves, it turns out that staying connected with others can make us much happier and healthier. Isolation leads to sadness, anxiety, disease, and ultimately to premature death. The opposite is true when we are connected to others and involved as an active member of a community. In fact, among cancer survivors, social isolation has been associated with elevated risk of mortality while connection to social networks and social support has been shown to improve survival and overall health.

Research has also shown that people who are part of communities such as religious or social groups tend to be happier and actually have better physical health in life. Being an active part of community life becomes even more critical as we grow older and face challenges such as loss of a loved one that can make us feel even more isolated. An 80 year longitudinal Harvard Study, has provided great insight into how staying connected helps us to stay happy and healthy. Over the course of this long study, researchers collected data on all sorts of health indicators including blood samples, imaging tests and medical record reviews. Participants were also asked about their work and home lives including their mental and emotional health as well as interviews with their family.

Researchers found that close, authentic relationships were the key to both physical health and happiness. The people who showed the greatest satisfaction with their relationships at age 50 were the ones who were healthiest at age 80. Close relationships were better predictors of a long and healthy life than IQ, genetic makeup, money, fame or social class. In fact, the level of satisfaction with one’s relationship was a better predictor of physical health than cholesterol levels! To me, this affirms how critical our relationships are in life and why staying connected is so important. Cultivating meaningful relationships with close friends, a spouse or partner, or family members can make a huge difference in our lives.

Sometimes it is easier to get lost in achieving an external goal such as making more money or achieving greater social status. While these external things can be useful in life, they do not replace the value of having strong relationships with people who we care about who care about us. Despite all the distractions in our busy lives, it is important to take the time to invest in these relationships to strengthen our connections, as this connection may be the ultimate key to our happiness and health.

By Farshad Fani Marvasti, MD, MPH (Dr. Shad)

Dr. Shad is a Stanford-trained physician, medical educator, researcher, public speaker and aspiring author. He is proactively engaged in creating solutions to promote health and prevent the chronic diseases of our time. As a practicing physician trained in integrative medicine, Dr. Shad takes a holistic approach to health care and advocates for the use of food as medicine to actively teach his patients to buy and prepare healthy meals with food prescriptions as a standard part of treating their medical conditions.

Learn more about Dr. Shad by visiting www.doctorshad.com) and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Brain Aging: The Brain-Food Connection

For decades, the medical community has recommended dietary management as part of the therapeutic plan for many conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. To date, no such recommendations exist for brain aging and dementia. In fact, many scientists and nonscientists alike are still reluctant to believe that our food choices might have something to do with the way our brains age or our risk of developing a brain disease.

In part, this is due to the fact that historically nutrition has been glossed over in medical schools, as well as in most post-grad mental health programs. It is only in recent years that nutrition was granted scientific-field status, and diet has been acknowledged as a legitimate means of protecting ourselves against brain aging and brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Little by little, scientists have come to appreciate the powerful connection between the foods we eat and our brain health. This very revelation has fostered a fast-growing body of evidence showing that we might very well be eating our way to dementia.

Brain Aging

What many of us have only begun to grasp is that the actual health and quality of the foods we eat has dramatically diminished. Animals are routinely fed growth hormones, antibiotics, and genetically modified (GMO) feed, which we in turn ingest when we make a meal of them. Chicken and pigs are fed poisons like arsenic as a preservative. Conventionally raised produce is showered in pesticides and chemical fertilizers. In addition to being toxic and depleting our soil of nutrients, these treatments drive our produce to grow larger and plumper in appearance while disguising the fact that they possess an unprecedentedly diminished vitamin and mineral content. Additionally, chemically modified fats and refined sugar are routinely added to most foods. This is done not only to preserve the foods’ shelf life but to deliberately increase our cravings for them, which in turn drives sales and profits.

What has gone unnoticed until now is the discovery of how, of all the organs in our body, the brain is the one most easily damaged by a poor diet. From its very architecture to its ability to perform, everything in the brain calls out for the proper food. Many of us are unaware that the only way for the brain to receive nourishment is through our diet. Day after day, the foods we eat are broken down into nutrients, taken up into the bloodstream, and carried to the brain to replenish its depleted storage, to activate cellular reactions, and, most importantly, to be incorporated into brain tissue. Proteins from meat and fish are broken down into amino acids which, among other things, serve as the backbone of our brain cells. Vegetables, fruit, and whole grains provide important carbohydrates such as glucose, as well as the vitamins and minerals that energize the brain. Healthy fats from fish and nuts are broken down into omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids that make our neurons flexible and responsive, all the while supporting our immune system and shielding the brain from damage and brain aging. Our brains are literally what we eat.

By Dr. Lisa Mosconi PhD, INHC

Dr. Mosconi is the associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC)/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, where she was recruited as an associate professor of Neuroscience in Neurology. Her new book, Brain Food, explores the science of eating for cognitive power. Find her online at lisamosconi.com.

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Depressive Rumination: The Root Of Depression

Many mental health professionals say depressive rumination is the hallmark of depression. This is the tendency to brood over a few characteristic negative thought patterns and lose control over the thinking process, so that depressive ideas keep intruding and crowding out others.

Why does it happen? Evolutionary psychologists propose that so many of us tend to engage in depressive rumination because evolution has selected it as a useful trait. They argue that depression makes sense as a problem-solving mode that spurs us to withdraw and deeply contemplate some thorny issue or situation.  Ideally, it is self-limited.  Either it leads to discovery of a solution, or, if there is no solution, the brooding should abate when at some deep level we sense that the situation can’t be helped and decide to move on.

Unfortunately, the process often goes awry and plunges people into lasting misery. When you are stuck in depressive rumination, you can’t stop chewing on your problems – which may be as vague and insoluble as “I am a loser.” There is no end point. No one seems to know why this happens; probably, the usual mix of genetic, lifestyle, and social factors is responsible. The practical challenge is how to get unstuck.

Managing thoughts might be one of the most difficult challenges for human beings. Our minds produce thoughts in continuous streams, as if from an engine whose controls are not accessible to us. Of course, some of these productions are very useful. They help us navigate the world and can make us feel more comfortable with ourselves and more content with our lives. I am certain, however, that a great deal of the fear, anxiety, and despair that people suffer arises from negative thoughts.

Until recently, Western psychology tried to alleviate this kind of emotional pain by making people aware of how they came to develop such thoughts – for instance by remembering incidents of abuse or failure in early life that might have started them. Many styles of therapy focus on bringing to light the why of negative thinking without giving people practical tools to change it.

Now, radically new forms of psychotherapy have become popular in the Western world. Practitioners of positive psychology and cognitive psychology teach people how to modify the process of thinking and replace negative thoughts with positive ones.

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Mushroom Hunting In Lapland

In January of 2018, I spent some time in Lapland on a trip with Origins. Lapland is the northernmost province of Finland, above the arctic circle. It was the dead of winter, and as I spend much of my time in the Sonoran desert of the Southwest, it was a big change. Together with my daughter Diana I did a little snowmobiling, visited the local wildlife (reindeer) and got to hunt for chaga mushrooms (Inonotus obliquus) that grow on birch trees. Chaga is one of the ingredients in my Mega Mushroom line of skin care products that I developed with Origins. Here are a few images from that trip:

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