The Mental Wellness Diet: a free introduction

The drift

We've drifted. In modern-day life, we've drifted away from the elements of life that lift our spirits and make us whole. We've drifted away from good food, restful sleep, hours of sunlight, constant movement, and the sense of belonging to a tight-knit community.

Instead, we've gravitated towards all of our modern conveniences and comforts. Modern-day life is relatively easy. But it's also lonely, disconnected, pressure-filled, and flooded with fears of inadequacy.

Sure, things were not necessarily easier in ancient times. Persistent risk of famine, freezing winters, and a chance of warfare was the typical forecast for our ancestors. These dangers loomed large over daily life.

Yet our ancestors' experience of life was full of those elements of wellness. Their days were filled with more movement, face-to-face socializing, cooperation, and a bit more loafing around during the day. That's how it goes when your one and only purpose is survival.

Simply getting through the day and meeting their basic needs was an accomplishment for our ancestors. Compare that to modern-day life, when "just getting through the day" sounds more like a failure than a victory.

Plus minus

Common sense would say that in order to feel well, we have to put work into re-integrating the ancestral ways of living into our chaotic modern-day lives. That's obviously true for our physical health.

Is the same true for our mental health? Considering the drift, is it any coincidence that today 1 in 5 adults live with a mental illness?

What did we gain or lose relative to our mental and emotional lives over the past millennia?

We gained a chaotic world marked by overstimulating technology, excessive greed, pervasive social competition, and subtle but palpable disconnection between ourselves and the people closest to us in life.

We lost strong and dependable social connections, immersion in nature, a really great diet of wholesome food straight from the Earth, as well as ample opportunity to take the time to sit and reflect.

Problematic solutions

By now, science and technology have come up with answers to almost every inconvenience in our modern-day lives. Yet once the solutions started flowing, we slid into a collective delusion that emotions are dangerous.

There are so many solutions out there for all kinds of frustrations and inconveniences. Why should we feel bad at all? Clearly, someone out there must have invented a solution for that exact problem. Why stop and tune in to our emotions when a speedy solution is just a scroll away? Nowadays the solution is the act of scrolling itself.

The truth is: not all feelings are problems. Avoiding or pushing down and away our feelings is more often the problem.

Now, intense negative emotions can create immense suffering, dysfunction, and loss in our lives. Mental illness symptoms are genuine and debilitating. But not all feelings or negative emotional states are permanent, impairing, or even toxic. Feelings are important.

Negative emotions have been hardwired into us from ancient times. Negative emotions helped to protect us in a dangerous world. Fear kept us safe from dangers.

The pain of social isolation pushed us to cooperate and forgive. The feeling of being overwhelmed pushed us to connect, talk it out, and accept help when necessary.

These negative emotions are still trying to protect us in modern-day life.

Modern-day life tries to offer us a bunch of solutions that immediately, yet temporarily, mute those negative emotions. Modern-day life is designed to get us to exchange our attention and our money for these quick solutions.

The modern-day life prescriptions for depressive symptoms and anxiety include binges on social media, junk food, and trashy reality TV, as well as drugs, sex, alcohol, and other extreme endeavors. They all feel good and kind of work, just not for very long.

Tune in to turn it down

As you've likely gathered, in The Mental Wellness Diet book (TMWD), feelings are considered to be really good sources of information. TMWD puts forth the argument that as we move forward in life, all of our feelings, especially our negative emotions, can help us make better decisions.

Negative emotions are pieces of information that can actually help push us in the right direction.

Depression can feel like something big is lacking. It's lonely and it's usually kept a secret.

Anxiety can feel like multiple fire alarms are going off all over our brain, all at the same time. Clearly, that alone is frightening and disturbing, but later on all that anxiety can bleed into anger. It's disorienting.

Scattered attention can lead us to feel like what's so easily doable for others is nearly impossible for us. It's demoralizing.

Despite the devastating nature of these illnesses, our negative emotions are still great sources of information. Fear and anxiety let us know what we truly care about in life. Depression and sadness highlight for us what we've lost, what we need to grieve, what important pieces of our lives are missing. Even scattered attention can point out for us which parts of our lives we really don't want to look at.

If in response to negative emotional states we try to use one of modern-day life's quick fixes, the result could be minimal relief over the long term. This is because every modern-day life solution begs us to ignore our feelings.

When the solution becomes the focus, who we are and what we need or even want in life fades into the background. This is how we've drifted.

The mash up

A central theme in TMWD is awareness. It's the idea that we can pick out the major drivers of our mental and emotional health, those that pull us towards illness as well as those that push us towards wellness, by looking back to traditional practices of our ancestors.

The theme of awareness shapes the guidance provided in The Mental Wellness Diet book. TMWD was put together with research from various fields, including mental health research, nutritional science, and even some anthropology. The overarching principles are simple.

We evolved on a certain kind of planet (green landscapes, clean air and water, only unprocessed whole foods, tight-knit tribal communities, etc.), but we now find ourselves in a very different place with new and nearly invisible stressors.

At the same time, the nutrients that helped our brains grow into supercomputers are now generally missing in our typical Western diet. Also at the same time, in modern-day life, we have become conditioned to disconnect from our feelings.

We cannot go back to living as hunters and gatherers. But if we can somehow find ways to reintegrate those positive and healing elements into our lives, we might be able to reclaim control over our mental wellness.

The logic here is that the body and brain need certain nutrients to function optimally. The opposite is also true: our brains function better when some foods are absent (think sugar, trans fats, pesticide residues, and artificial additives).

When our brain is flush with the nutrients it needs for neurotransmitter function, energy production, waste removal, neuronal communication, and balanced immune function, our brains function optimally.

As a result, we feel and perform better. When we're feeling better, we are less likely to seek out highly palatable, nutrient-depleted, toxic fast foods, and all of the other quick fixes modern-day life tries to offer us.