Mental Fitness

Shawn Talbott

Description

Widespread Need for Mental Health Healing:

The World Health Organization has identified mental wellness issues as the leading cause of global health burden. Depression, anxiety, burnout, stress, and brain fog afflict hundreds of millions of people worldwide and account for hundreds of billions of dollars spent on feel-better products. Unfortunately, most of these solutions make us feel "different" but not really "better" and can come with many side effects.

Solutions Based in New Scientific Findings:

For the last century, we've had the mistaken notion that these problems were "all in our head"—when in reality, they were mainly in our gut. The discovery of the gut-brain-heart axis and the explosion of research around the microbiome in our gastrointestinal tract is causing a fundamental shift in how we think about—and how we improve mental wellness.

Lifestyle to Train Your Brain:

Mental Fitness is an all-encompassing guide to naturally improving how we feel and perform. With topics ranging from nutrition to mindfulness, physical activity, and sleep, the book instructs readers on rebalancing the microbiome and optimizing the gut-brain axis function for improved mood, reduced depression, lessened anxiety, and enhanced stress resilience.

Expert Author Renowned in his Field:

Psychonutritionist Dr. Shawn Talbott is a Nutritional Biochemist who studies Nutritional Psychology. He is the author of more than a dozen books on nutrition and fitness. Talbott's work has made a guest appearance in media outlets worldwide, including The Dr. Oz Show and the White House as part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign to fight childhood obesity.

Chapter 1 - What is Mental Fitness?
Chapter 2 - Gut Brain and Microbiome
Chapter 3 - Heart Brain
Chapter 4 - Axis: How Do Our Brains “Talk” To Each Other?
Chapter 5 - The Mental Fitness Diet
Chapter 6 - Movement for Mental Fitness
Chapter 7 - Stress and Sleep
Chapter 8 - Mindset
Chapter 9 - Dietary Supplements: The Trojan Horse – How Mental Fitness Drives Physical Health

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Diététique
• Santé du quotidien
• Santé au quotidien
• Santé au quotidien
• Healthy Living
• health
• Fitness
• diététique

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 14 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781684426782
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

MENTAL FITNESS
Maximizing Mood, Motivation, Mental Wellness by Optimizing the Brain-Body Biome
SHAWN M. TALBOTT
PHD, CNS, LDN, FACSM, FACN
The information contained in this book is based upon the research and personal and professional experiences of the author. It is not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician or other health-care provider. Any attempt to diagnose and treat an illness should be done under the direction of a health-care professional.
The publisher does not advocate the use of any particular health-care protocol but believes the information in this book should be available to the public. The publisher and author are not responsible for any adverse effects or consequences resulting from the use of the suggestions, preparations, or procedures discussed in this book. Should the reader have any questions concerning the appropriateness of any procedures or preparation mentioned, the author and the publisher strongly suggest consulting a professional health-care advisor.
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, TN
www.turnerpublishing.com
ISBNs: 9781684426768 (paperback)
9781684426775 (hardback)
9781684426782 (ebook)
Library of Congress 2021021856.
Copyright 2021 by Dr. Shawn Talbott
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the copyright owner.
Cover design by Nicolette Donohoe and Grace Cavalier
Interior design by Gary A. Rosenberg
Printed in the United States of America
C ONTENTS
PREFACE Mental Fitness
INTRODUCTION What is Mental Fitness?
PART 1 The Gut-Heart-Brain Axis
CHAPTER 1 The Brain
CHAPTER 2 Gut Brain (and Microbiome)
CHAPTER 3 Heart Brain
CHAPTER 4 Axis
PART 2 What to Do
CHAPTER 5 The Mental Fitness Diet
CHAPTER 6 Movement for Mental Fitness
CHAPTER 7 Stress and Sleep
CHAPTER 8 Mindset
CHAPTER 9 Dietary Supplements
CHAPTER 10 The Trojan Horse-How Mental Fitness Drives Physical Health
References
Index
About the Author
PREFACE

M ENTAL F ITNESS
A t no time in human history have we ever been so advanced technologically and yet so miserable psychologically.
It s no exaggeration to describe stress, depression, anxiety, and burnout as epidemics-literally the black plague of our modern times.
We ll get into the reasons we feel so terrible soon enough in the chapters to come. But how you feel is not just in your head; it s also in your gut, your heart, your immune system, and in many other places inside and outside your actual brain.
I ve been researching, speaking, and writing about the mental fitness topics covered in this book for more than twenty years, and I ve written a dozen previous books on related topics.
I started writing this particular volume in early 2019 as a way to bring together some of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs around the gut-heart-brain axis linking psychology, neurology, biochemistry, physiology, and microbiology into the emerging field of nutritional psychology (which is what the area of my expertise is now commonly called). At the start of 2019, I really didn t think that our collective mental wellness problems could get much worse.
Boy, was I wrong!
National surveys showed that happiness and life-satisfaction levels were at all-time lows, while depression, suicide, drug addiction, and use of prescription antidepressants and pain-killing opioids were at all-time highs.
And then COVID-19 hit.
In the first weeks of 2020, we began to see the emergence of COVID-19 and its subsequent spread around the globe devastating health systems, economies, and individuals-both physically and mentally.
At the time of this writing, more than 100 million COVID-19 cases with now over 3 million deaths have been recorded worldwide-with more than 32 million cases and 500,000 deaths in the United States alone.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in more than half the world s population being placed under different levels of quarantines and lockdowns to stem the spread of the virus. These restrictions are expected to significantly influence the physical and psychological well-being of everyone affected. Research studies are already showing a clear and consistent increase in mental health issues around the globe, particularly among adolescents and young adults.
Some of the reasons underlying the increase in mental health problems are biological, some are psychological, and some are financial, but they all coalesce toward numerous predictions of a looming mental health crisis that was already bad and is only expected to get worse in a post-COVID world.
I hope you agree with me that there is no physical health without mental health. They are two sides of the same coin, and they are vital for each other and for our ability to reach our peak potential in this one life we have to live.
We will cover many of these topics in Mental Fitness , and we ll consider how research-supported natural approaches can improve how we feel mentally and perform physically in every aspect of our daily lives.
Thanks for joining me.
Shawn Talbott
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
February 24, 2021
INTRODUCTION

W HAT IS M ENTAL F ITNESS?
I t might surprise you to realize that the biggest health problems today are not physical ailments such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer s disease but rather are mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, sleep deprivation, and everyday stress. In many ways-including biochemically, physiologically, and behaviorally- mental wellness is the overarching umbrella that determines our overall physical health, and mental fitness can be thought of as the optimized state of mental wellness.
For example, when we re stressed, we re more likely to crave junk food and store belly fat, but when we re resilient, we don t succumb to stress-eating and we make better dietary choices. When we re tired, we re less likely to exercise or meditate, but when we have good sleep quality and metabolism, we have abundant energy levels that can fuel our lifestyle. When we re depressed, we re less likely to take care of ourselves or interact positively with others, but when we have a good mood, we re more likely to love ourselves and apply that love to others.
Each of these aspects of mental wellness, and ultimately mental fitness, drives a specific change in behavior that leads to a negative or positive impact on physical health.
Imagine if your default state was inclined toward mental fitness.
Imagine having naturally high levels of energy so you feel like being physically active on a daily basis.
Imagine being resilient in the face of whatever stressors you encounter on a daily basis so that rather than stepping away from stressful events, you can step into them and take care of business.
Imagine having a naturally positive outlook on life that infects others with positivity rather than a negative and pessimistic view of the world and your place in it.
This book will help you understand how optimizing your mental fitness can not only help you feel better (both quickly and long-term) but also how those changes can improve your physical health-including how you look and perform on every level.
According to the World Health Organization, mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which every individual
realizes his or her own potential,
can cope with the normal stresses of life,
can work productively and fruitfully,
and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.
Mental wellness exists on a continuum across
depression, anxiety, and burnout on the low end ( struggling ),
to daily stress, nightly restlessness, and feeling blah ( typical ),
to abundant energy, sharpness, creativity, vigor, and thriving on the high end of mental fitness ( optimized ).

MENTAL FITNESS CONTINUUM
The Problem
The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified stress and depression as global epidemics and the leading causes of disability worldwide. In North America alone, hundreds of millions of people spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on feel different remedies such as antidepressant and antianxiety drugs, opioid painkillers, drugs for ADHD, drugs for sleep, and an unending array of energy drinks and junk food that we self-medicate with in response to being tired, stressed, and depressed.
Unfortunately, while many of these approaches will change how we feel, none of them will help us feel better. These synthetic approaches generally take us from feeling bad in one way to feeling bad in a different way. They utterly fail to help us feel the way we want to feel-good.
The Disconnect
In the last fifty years, health-care spending on a per-person basis in the United States has increased by more than 2,000 percent, but I would wager that we re less healthy in many ways today than we were five decades ago. According to the WHO, the United States has the most expensive health-care system in the world (by far), yet the overall health and well-being of its citizens ranks near the bottom of industrialized countries (seventy-second overall).
The modern disease-care model gobbles up more than 20 percent of the entire American economy-and the largest portion of those expenditures are for the categories of prescription drugs targeting physical pain and psychological pain. The physical pain drugs include a wide range of anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs, including opioids. The psychological pain drugs encompass an even wider range of antidepressants, tranquilizers, and sleep aids. Not quite as large, but growing more rapidly, are costs associated with drugs for gut problems such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and Crohn s disease; drugs for brain problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorders, and Alzheimer s di