Areas › Your body
Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
Narrowed down
8 practicesTheme · Food, caffeine and fuel
How long you have · Twenty minutes
When · Any ordinary day
If your attention runs low on stimulation, salty and sweet food is the fastest legal source of a lift and it is available all day. Worth knowing about yourself, because it explains a pattern that willpower alone never seems to touch.
Rates of overweight and type 2 diabetes are higher in people with ADHD, and the reasons are not moral ones. A reward system that is under stimulated…
Caffeine buys about half an hour of sharper focus and takes the payment out of your sleep. It is a decent tool for a particular hour, and using it in place of treatment usually leaves you worse off across the day.
Four cups a day and upwards starts producing insomnia, irritability, tremor, an unsettled stomach and a racing heart, and a few people go sleepy on…
Very low vitamin D produces fatigue, low mood and a flatness that looks exactly like depression, and it is not part of routine bloods in most places. If you have never had it measured, it is a fair thing to ask for.
One clinician telling this story about himself had a level that was almost undetectable, and no antidepressant would have raised it, because what was…
The vitamin D in a general multivitamin is a maintenance amount, nowhere near what is used to correct a real deficiency. If your level is genuinely low, that is a prescribing conversation with blood tests behind it, not a shelf in the chemist.
Correcting a deficiency usually means a high dose for a defined period and then a steady daily amount, with the level rechecked to see where you have…
Before settling on depression as the whole story, ask for thyroid function and vitamin D to be checked. Both are common, both are cheap to test, and an underactive thyroid produces a picture that looks like depression from the outside.
An untreated thyroid problem also blunts how well antidepressants work, so missing it can mean months on a treatment that was never going to do the…
If a health habit keeps sliding, attach something immediate to it. The apps where you put real money on hitting a step target work for a reason: the payoff arrives now instead of in twenty years.
The natural reward for walking more is invisible and decades away, which is no use to a brain running on what happens next. A small stake, a streak,…
Before settling on a purely psychological account of months of anxiety or broken sleep, it is worth having the ordinary bloods done. Low iron, low vitamin D or low magnesium can produce symptoms that look exactly like a mental health problem.
This is not about swapping therapy for supplements. It is about not spending a year working on something a blood test could have partly explained. If…
A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.
Symptoms that arrive together are worth asking about together. If reading, mood and stomach all went wrong over the same period, that pattern is…