The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ helping you to sleep well. In fact, poor sleepers with SAD respond best of all to light therapy.

      In the “Resource Tool Kit,” you’ll find details on how and where to find anti-SAD lighting equipment.

      Are You Getting Enough Exercise and Oxygen?

      Ever notice that you feel better after you’ve been hiking, cycling, or working out? Exercise can definitely raise your serotonin levels. Even brief and moderate workouts will do it for most of us. You may already have developed exercise routines that you can count on to keep you going moodwise. You can probably feel the difference when you don’t get to the gym or out for a brisk walk or a swim, as your serotonin levels quickly sag again. Or are you one of those who don’t exercise much at all and miss out on this healthy, natural antidepressant activity? If so, see chapter 4 on how to increase your energy so you can get out there and enjoy it.

      Here’s how exercise can increase your serotonin stores: When your muscles get to working, even during moderate exercise, they put in a routine call for amino acids for muscle repair. Your bloodstream always carries an assortment of amino acids for just such contingencies and delivers them quickly to the muscles in need. That’s true for all aminos except one—tryptophan—the only one that can be used by your brain to make serotonin. While the other aminos are being diverted, tryptophan gets a free ride right through the blood-brain barrier! Once through, it quickly converts into enough 5-HTP and then serotonin so that in half an hour or so you can go humming out of the gym, smiling out of the pool, or floating off the dance floor.

      Exercise also helps raise serotonin by increasing your intake of oxygen, which is critical to the formation of serotonin from amino acids. All that huffing and puffing really pays off! (That’s probably one of the reasons why taking deep breaths when you’re angry or upset is so helpful, too.)

      Exercise diminishes depression just as well as light therapy, so why not do both? Get outside and walk or jog in the sunlight whenever you can. On a clear day, even the winter outdoor light is often brighter than a therapeutic lamp and, combined with exercise, can really improve your mood. By the way, both exercise and light raise oxygen levels in the brain.¹⁰

      Unfortunately, exercise-stimulated serotonin works only in the short term. (The same is true for light therapy.) You may have come to depend on exercise to keep your mood up, but you can lose this thin edge if you can’t exercise enough to keep your serotonin levels high—if you’re too tired, or too busy, or break your leg, or get sick. Fortunately, as you’ll soon see, there are other, even better ways to build and guard your serotonin stores. But if you can, get exercise outdoors during the day at least three times a week.

      GETTING CLEAR ABOUT YOUR OWN DARK MOODS

      Before we go into detail about how to use which nutrients to quickly optimize your serotonin levels, let’s look at how a lack of serotonin may be specifically affecting your mood, your behavior, and your life. A good baseline understanding of where you are mood-wise when you begin will give you an effective way to measure your progress. This is a good time to review the symptoms that you checked off in part 1 of the Mood-Type Questionnaire. Which symptoms did you really identify with? Which ones are you unclear about? Which ones are you unaffected by? Go through the following section and read more about the symptoms and how they do or might apply to you. You’ll come away with a clear picture of your own low-serotonin symptom state. You’ll also get a good idea of how your symptoms can change, based on the examples I’ll give you of how our clients felt and acted before, and after, they started their serotonin building programs.

      Relieving Depression—How and When Do You Get Depressed?

      All of the drugs, like Prozac, that stimulate serotonin activity are called “antidepressants,” so you may have wondered why I haven’t mentioned the word depression much so far. I haven’t because I’ve found the word depression to be much too vague to be very useful. If you think of yourself as depressed, what do you mean, exactly? Do you have the low energy slumps, or are you overly anxious and negative? Or do both descriptions fit you? Do you sleep too much or not enough? Only these kinds of specifics can tell you exactly what kind of depressive state you’re dealing with, and they’re the only clues that will lead you to real solutions.

      I’m alerted to dark cloud depression by a distinctively gloomy yet agitated mental outlook. It’s not just bored and flat (that’s the province of what I call the blahs and discuss in the next chapter). Rather, it’s worried and obsessive. The negative feelings and thoughts can just keep on coming, unfazed by real-life circumstances no matter how pleasant they might actually be. When real-life circumstances are not pleasant, this kind of depression can be a heavy emotional load to carry. Typically, though, you’re experiencing more inner negativity than your real life warrants, one that says, “No, my life will never be happy or fulfilled,” or, “What if my daughter gets really sick and can’t finish college?” or, “I know my evaluation is going to be bad.” Both the present and the future can look quite hopeless when serotonin is low and the “what ifs” take over.

      Dark-cloud types may see life as looking so hopeless that they may think seriously of suicide or even take suicidal action. This is obviously the blackest kind of depression possible. We have had a few clients who have been suicidal when they came to us and many others who had been suicidal during one or more previous periods in their lives. Most were relieved of their deep depressions by serotonin-building nutrients along with psychotherapy and an improved diet, but not all. If you have suicidal thoughts, it’s very important that you seek professional help immediately. There may well be more than a brain chemistry imbalance involved, or you may have an imbalance that the nutritional methods suggested here will not correct. Do not attempt to treat this problem by yourself!

      The majority of the low-serotonin clients we see usually start to look on the bright side very quickly. It happened in ten minutes for one of our depressed clients who tried one of the pro-serotonin amino acids in our office and suddenly started noticing the flower arrangements on the desk and her nutritionist’s pretty red hair. More significant, clients typically report within forty-eight hours that they’ve stopped dreading their days and started looking forward to them instead.

      Struggling with Low Self-Esteem?

      Like most psychotherapists, I have spent many long hours struggling to help people with shyness and low self-esteem. I have usually started with assertiveness training and backed it up with a deep exploration of the past and present circumstances that might be contributing to a lack of confidence. My female clients have hated their bodies. My male clients were more likely to doubt their ability to be competent on the job. All of them were much too hard on themselves, with frequent inner self-scoldings and unnecessary guilt or shame. Sound familiar? The trouble was that psychotherapy didn’t always help. Self-critical thoughts and feelings often continued to dog my clients, no matter how hard we worked. I couldn’t understand it.

      But when those same clients changed their diets and began using pro-serotonin supplements, something amazing happened—as their serotonin levels rose, so did their self-confidence. One of the most dramatic transformations in self-esteem I’ve ever seen involved Fleur, a jazz musician who had been a bulimic for fifteen years. Research confirms that bulimics are low in serotonin and that they stay marginally low even in recovery, which is why their thoughts and moods tend to continue to be so negative and why they so often relapse.

      Fleur was in psychotherapy and went to Overeaters Anonymous meetings regularly, but she’d been unable to stop bingeing, purging, and overexercising. Her self-esteem was completely tied to СКАЧАТЬ