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

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СКАЧАТЬ times a day and taking desperate steps, like abusing laxatives, if she found the numbers going up. We immediately designed a supplement protocol to rebuild her nutrient-stripped system.

      When she came back the next week, she reported feeling much better and being free of her urges to binge and purge. Then I asked her, “What about the tape measure?” She looked blank for a minute, then a shocked expression came over her face and she answered, “I completely forgot about that. I haven’t done it all week!”

      This example makes a point that is especially poignant to me—Fleur had been convinced that she was just an ugly, inadequate mess at the core. But the real Fleur was able to blossom into her true self with the correction in serotonin chemistry that a few nutrient supplements could provide. Once Fleur’s brain chemistry was corrected, she became much more active and productive in therapy, too. Until then, she’d just been going over and over the same senseless feelings of self-hate and the same empty body image issues that her low serotonin had forced on her. She was actually a very strong, positive woman, who easily learned to assert herself appropriately when her biochemical confidence was restored by certain amino acids, the basic supplements, and her good-mood foods.

      Are You Overwhelmed by False Guilt? Do you feel guilty too often? Even when you’ve done nothing wrong, do you feel that you have? If your own behavior does get out of line, do you get upset out of all proportion? Because many low-serotonin sufferers condemn themselves without a trial, it’s no wonder that violent suicides are just as likely as violent crimes to be associated with low serotonin levels. Raising your serotonin levels will leave you with a healthy conscience, not a toxic one.

      Are You Obsessive or Controlling?

      Are you a perfectionist? Many of our clients have always felt driven, unable to relax about grades, looks, or work. Do you wonder about, or have other people commented on, your tendency to focus on a single worry: your weight, your work, or a problem that you perceive in someone else? This tendency to be obsessive is a quality that typically disappears with adequate serotonin. Often these symptoms are so familiar that you think of them as normal. Like the repetitive worries that keep you awake at night or being too “anal” about your school or work projects or your housekeeping. But that’s not really you: it’s low serotonin. Even with more compulsive behaviors and rituals, like hand washing and hair pulling, it’s usually the same story.

      “Controlling” is another name that you might be called if your serotonin is low. You may be hypervigilant and critical about how other people do things. You may take over and do things for them, creating a co-dependent cycle in which they come to depend on you but resent you for not letting them work it out for themselves.

      Whatever your personal serotonin-depleted style may be, increasing your serotonin levels will allow you to start to move more gracefully and graciously from one stance to another, to try new things, to be more creative and less rigid. And don’t forget that the symptoms of low serotonin tend to run in families. Does anyone else in your family come to mind regarding these traits? For example, we’ve had dozens of clients whose mothers obsessed about their own weight, constantly dieting and making critical remarks about themselves. Often they obsessed about their children’s weight as well, overmonitoring their food intakes and taking them to diet doctors at very young ages.

      Obsessiveness may appear or get worse after pregnancy, if already marginal levels of serotonin fall too low. The baby may be affected, too. We worked with a young mother who had been part of a study testing the effects of the medication Paxil on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She twisted her hair obsessively and had to go back to check that her door was locked three times before she could leave the house. Paxil had made her tired, caused her to gain unneeded weight, and had only taken the edge off her OCD. She was looking for a better way, now that the study was over, for herself and her 5-year-old son. Her little boy was obsessive in several ways, but his outstanding obsession had to do with the movie 101 Dalmatians. It was the only thing he talked about and the only thing he’d been able to think about for quite a while. A few weeks later, while on the supplements, she reported considerable relief from her own obsessions and told us the following story about her son: He had come up to her about a week after starting his supplement and said, “Gee, Mom, it’s kind of fun thinking about something besides 101 Dalmatians!”

      You, too, can become more flexible, relaxed, and obsession-free once your serotonin levels have been nutritionally shored up.

      Are Angry Feelings Getting in Your Way?

      If you have low serotonin levels, you are likely to be experiencing feelings of impatience, edginess, and unreasonable irritability. For example, violent criminals have much lower serotonin than do nonviolent criminals. And while you may not be given to violent rages, were you prone to tantrums as a child? Is anger affecting your relationships now?

      Most (but not all) people with subnormal brain serotonin do feel irritable too often. Whether they’re able to control the expression of their angry feelings is another matter that may relate to how low their serotonin levels have fallen. For example, some of our female clients become much more irritable, even violent, during PMS than at any other time of the month.

      One of the worst aspects of sapped serotonin is how it can harm your relationships. I’ve had many clients whose marriages improved dramatically as they became less irritable and critical. Other relationships can heal as well. My client Clara was appalled by her outbursts at her young son, because she had been badly abused by her own father. She had never forgiven her father, though he had mellowed as he’d gotten older. She had always seen him as sadistic but felt that she was in an entirely different category, because she knew that she loved her son. I asked her to consider that her father’s behavior, like hers, might have been involuntary—the impersonal expression of a malfunctioning brain. This relieved her of some of the hurt and anger that she still harbored toward her father. Although he will probably never apologize to her and fully mend their relationship, her new perspective on his past behavior has helped.

      If you have been harmed by a parent’s or sibling’s irrational anger, dealing with the same kinds of feelings in yourself can be a very bitter frustration. Understanding the brain chemistry of anger can be a powerful force for healing old family wounds and putting an end to the wounding pattern.

      I’ve been intimidated by my own angry clients at times. A real standout was a 16-year-old giant brought in by his mother, who adored him but cowered in the corner of my office in our first session while I tried to figure him out. Since he sulked and snarled much of the first hour, it wasn’t easy. But I finally got enough information out of the two of them to confirm that his disposition included depression, insomnia, and low self-esteem, along with chronic irritability. He’d been in an outpatient counseling program for a year, because he’d been caught with marijuana at school. As a result, he’d tried to stop using marijuana, but he hadn’t been able to resist the mood boost that it gave him. His mom thought we might be able to help get him back on track. After gleaning this information, I consulted with one of our nutritionists and gave him 2 capsules of 5-HTP. About ten minutes later, he began to smile and actually volunteer information about himself. He wasn’t aware of the extent of the change (he usually felt that his anger was everyone else’s fault), but his mother was thrilled by it. She recognized that her true son was emerging from the hell that serotonin deficiency had created for them both. Note: There are certain kinds of extremely angry behavior that seem to have more to do with imbalances in the minerals copper, zinc, manganese, or other nutrients in the body than with serotonin levels. I recommend the book Depression-Free Naturally, by Joan Mathews-Larson, if your anger does not dissolve upon using the supplements recommended in this book.

      Is Fear or Anxiety Ruining Your Life?

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