More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kelly Brogan
Read between
June 23 - July 4, 2024
Rule #5: Eat Mindfully
A quiet, settled atmosphere promotes ideal digestion and turning on of the parasympathetic nervous system, designed to support this process.
The Power of Meditation, Sleep, and Exercise Three Simple Lifestyle Habits That Can Enhance Mental Health
As I’ve been emphasizing over and over again, the interconnectedness of your gut, brain, hormonal and immune systems is impossible to unwind.
One of the reasons why deep breathing, which is often a cornerstone to these practices, is so effective is that it triggers a parasympathetic nerve response rather than a sympathetic nerve response. When
Deep breathing is a way of quickly flipping the switch from high to low alert in seconds as your body calms down on many levels. According
The lymphatic system also benefits mightily from deep breathing. Lymph is a clear fluid filled with immune cells that moves around the body in a series of vessels. It’s pivotal to your immune system because it delivers nutrients and collects cellular waste while helping to destroy pathogens. The deeper you breathe, the more active your lymph system is.
I’ve been a devout meditator for years now; the eleven minutes I spend each morning to take in deep breaths helps me prepare for the day’s challenges and tame that tedious monkey mind.
Meditation can simply mean stopping for a moment to be fully present to your inhalation and exhalation; it
Practice Deep Breathing Deep breathing can be done anywhere, anytime. If you’ve never meditated before, a deep breathing practice twice daily will get you started and give
Basic deep breathing:
Inhale through your nose for as long as you can, feeling your diaphragm and abdomen rise as your stomach moves outward. Sip in a little more air when you think you’ve reached the top of your
lungs. Slowly exhale to a count of twenty, pushing every breath of air from your lungs. Continue for at least five rounds of deep breaths.
Summon Feelings of Gratitude
Try Kundalini Yoga
What appeals to my more pragmatic sensibilities is that kundalini yoga is goal oriented.8 Each kriya is for a specific purpose, and they have been handed down with great care from ancient times and crafted for outcomes in real time. The mantras are for the purpose
In 1999, the Research Group for Mind-Body Dynamics at UC San Diego published a randomized, controlled trial of kundalini versus mindfulness meditation, demonstrating that kundalini was the most effective treatment of all available modalities for obsessive compulsive anxiety symptoms, with
This chapter wouldn’t be complete without a nod to two other powerful habits to maintain in the name of mental health and wellness: restful, regular sleep and sweat-inducing exercise. Many
Indeed, billions of molecular tasks go on during sleep at the cellular level to ensure that you can live another day.
One aspect of sleep that is underappreciated but has a large impact on our sense of well-being is its control of our hormonal cycles.
Cortisol, another hormone, should peak in the morning and wane throughout the day. Levels of this stress- and immune-regulating hormone should be lowest after 11 p.m. when melatonin levels go up. The pineal gland secretes melatonin, and it is also susceptible to accumulation of
This is a potent antioxidant hormone that signals sleep; for millions of years it alerted your brain that it’s dark outside, ultimately helping to regulate your circadian rhythm. Once released, it slows your body down, lowering blood pressure and, in turn, core body
Increasing levels of melatonin facilitate deep sleep, which helps maintain healthy levels of important hormones like growth hormone, thyroid hormone, and sex hormones.
Sleep occurs in two major phases: non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and REM sleep. NREM sleep is further divided into stages 1 to 4,
Sleep itself is a continuous progression from wakefulness to NREM sleep to REM sleep. Over the course of a night, four to six cycles of NREM to REM sleep occur, each lasting 80 to 110 minutes, with slow-wave sleep predominating in the early part of the night.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, during normal physiological sleep, blood levels of cortisol, norepinephrine, and epinephrine drop
while growth factors such as growth hormone, prolactin, and ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If you’ve ever noticed that you get sick more often when you’re sleep deprived, now you know why: sleep disruption can leave you more vulnerable to infection. Each of us brings our inflammatory and immune patterns to our sleep integrity, which then further influences immunity and inflammation.
NATURE’S ANTIDEPRESSANT: EXERCISE
For instance, we now know that exercise directly affects the health of the mitochondria,
which are your body’s most important energy-producing structures. We have
Significant gains have been measured in as little as two weeks of interval training, which entails repeated bursts of high-energy output: you go hard for a short period, then ease up for a few minutes before resuming a higher level of intensity for another round.27 This may in fact be better for you—and your mitochondria—than the long, slow and steady approach to exercise.
The health of your mitochondria is paramount to your general health, for their age and ability to perform have a direct correlation with your metabolic health, which in turn factors into your mental health.
Studies show that aerobic exercise for just fifteen to twenty minutes at a moderate intensity three to four times a week can increase the number of mitochondria in your
muscle cells by a staggering 40 to 50 percent.28
In the Kitchen Avoid canned foods, which you should be doing anyhow
I recommend that you keep a skin brush in the bathroom for dry skin brushing (body brushing), a method of stimulating and cleansing the lymphatic system and detoxifying the skin. Remember, lymph flow is directly related to your immune and detoxification systems. However simple it may seem, it is a very powerful, effective technique. Use a brush with soft natural vegetable bristles or a loofah sponge, which
Keep the brush or sponge dry and pass it over your dry skin in a clean sweeping motion—no back-and-forth or scrubbing motions and move it in the direction of the lower abdomen—up the legs, up the arms, and down the neck and trunk, everywhere but your face. Do this twice a day, or up to four times a day during times of intense toxicity.
CHAPTER 9 Testing and Supplementing Supporting the Healing Process The twelve simple, noninvasive lab tests your doctor isn’t ordering.
Vitamin B12, as you know by now, is one of the basic building blocks of life. And it’s one of the all-star antidepressants. We all need vitamin B12 to
As a prelude to starting the thirty-day program, I’m going to outline two key features of my general protocol: testing and supplementing. In other words, ordering certain laboratory tests to determine your baseline and rule out underlying medical
TESTING TESTING, 1-2-3
Thyroid Function Tests
As a recap, thyroid hormone production is controlled by a feedback loop among your thyroid gland, pituitary gland, and hypothalamus. Hypothalamic thyrotropin-releasing
Most conventional doctors use only one or two tests (TSH and T4) to screen for problems. They don’t check free T3 (FT3), reverse T3 (RT3), or thyroid antibodies. As I mentioned earlier, the autoimmune disease Hashimoto’s thyroiditis
This will gauge your thyroid health (optimal values included): TSH: optimal value: less than 2 μU/ML FREE T4: optimal value: more than 1.1 NG/DL
FREE T3: optimal value: more than 3.0 PG/ML REVERSE T3: optimal value: less than a 10:1 ratio RT3:FT3 THYROID PEROXIDASE ANTIBODIES (TPOAB): optimal value: less than 4 IU/ML or negative THYROGLOBULIN ANTIBODIES (TGAB): optimal value: less than 4 IU/ML or negative
MTHFR (Methylation)
The MTHFR gene produces the MTHFR enzyme (methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase), which is essential for several bodily processes that directly tie into mental well-being. When it’s working right, the MTHFR gene begins a multistep chemical breakdown process called methylation, which ultimately helps you to make important proteins, use antioxidants, combat inflammation, eliminate toxins and heavy metals,
Vitamin B12
