I couldn’t sleep. At all. It seemed to happen overnight. I went from sleeping perfectly fine, to not being able to fall asleep at all. It started with a racing heart, panic attacks and anxiety that flooded my body and I just couldn’t settle down. It was relentless.

I went to my doctor and was handed a few standard prescriptions and a request to return in two weeks. I left deflated and full of shame. Just two weeks prior this wasn’t my reality. What happened?

Brain Health

Our brains are run by neurotransmitters and our body has to make them from eight essential amino acids. Those amino acids come from proteins found in our diet such as fish, poultry, beef, lamb, pork and eggs.

Two big challenges with this in today’s world:

1) We can only make neurotransmitters when we are able to appropriately digest and assimilate those proteins into the eight essential amino acids.

2) The microbiome in our gut determines how those neurotransmitters are balanced and function.

In short, our gut health determines our brain health.

Dr. Tom O’brien says, “for every message from the brain going down to the gut, there are 9 messages from the gut going up to the brain.”

My brain and gut had hit their tipping point. The isolation of my husband’s deployment, my reliance on wheat and my long-standing digestive issues suddenly all came to a head.

(Interestingly, depression is the most common brain symptom after brain fog for any wheat-related disorder.)

In recent years prior I had gone to a GI doctor asking about a nagging issue I was having with my gut health. I was handed a ‘solution’ and that was that. I had NO idea what was really happening in my gut, nor that the ‘solution’ only masked the problem further.

Until the problem got bigger.

Those sleepless nights didn’t go away in a week or two. It took months and months for me to finally find my footing again and actually sleep. It was hell. And the shame was deep.

I am grateful people are talking about depression and anxiety. It needs to come to light. It certainly isn’t something I breathed to anyone at the time because the shame was so strong. But just telling someone to ask for help isn’t the answer. They typically already have. Particularly when help only includes pharmaceutical interventions and possibly therapy. Those elements are only one piece of the puzzle. We need MORE.

The problem is getting bigger. More suicides. More school shootings.

Each one of us is unique and each one of us is made up of multiple systems and billions of cells. We can’t treat a person when we only treat a single (or couple of) symptom(s). 

When talking about brain health, we have to talk about diet, gut health, nervous system health, past traumas, emotional health, stress and ….. so much more. If we truly want to support mental HEALTH, we have to stop calling holistic health alternative and give it a standard seat at the table. This is not an either or conversation, this is a YES AND conversation.

I looked for help but I had no idea where to turn. I had no intention of returning to the doctor after he betrayed my trust when I was really vulnerable. I wanted someone who would really see me and help me find my health again.

Ultimately I did find sleep and I slowly became more grounded again. It took changes in my diet, addressing my gut health, finding new avenues to release stress and even being introduced to new healing modalities that I thought were completely out there but were in fact pivotal (hello, Reiki!).

Addressing my brain health wasn’t a one-size fits all solution. I don’t have a to-do list of steps that will instantly solve it. But what I do know is that it is possible. The only to-do item I have is to be open to new avenues to restore your brain health. Don’t discount diet and gut health, these pieces are vital to brain health. And so are many other elements in healing. To honestly address this growing problem, we have to start looking at it from a whole body, holistic lens.

For me it took many different layers to fully bring me back to center. But with each layer, I saw improvement and it gave me the courage and determination to keep going.

And that’s what we all want with our health, right?