The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross
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 the size of her thighs. She was measuring her thighs with a tape measure several 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