Here’s How The Food You’re Eating Is Affecting Your Mental Health Significantly
Did you know that the food you eat has just as much effect on your mental health as it does on your physical health?
A relatively new field, called nutritional psychiatry, accentuates how a certain diet can affect the function and structure of your brain, and ultimately, your mood. A healthy, nutritious diet helps you think clearly, and improves concentration and attention span. Conversely, an unhealthy diet can lead to fatigue, impulsivity, impaired decision-making, and may even cause stress and depression.
The Science Behind This
Studies have shown that our gastrointestinal system– usually called "the second brain" or "the gut"– is closely linked to our brain, thereby causing the food that we eat to affect our mental health so strongly. The gastrointestinal tract carries a number of bacteria that influences the production of some chemical substances that constantly carry messages from the gut to the brain– dopamine and serotonin, just to name a few.
If you eat nutritionally healthy food, it promotes the growth of “good” bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract, which consequently positively affects the production of these chemicals. When there is enough production, your brain receives these positive messages, and your mental state will mirror it. On the contrary, when the production is awry, so is your mood. So naturally, a nutritious diet promotes a healthy gut and a better mental health, and conversely, an unhealthy diet results in poor mental health.
Mindful Eating
Eating food without awareness – watching TV, endless social media scrolling, or working on your desk while eating– has become exceedingly common today. It’s greatly concerning how people are ignorant towards how detrimental this behaviour actually is. It’s also one of the biggest causes of overeating, obesity and various eating disorders in the world.
Mindful eating– eating with little to no distraction– helps you to eat food with full awareness, and promotes healthy eating behaviours. Eating with awareness allows you to pause your eating, and further helps prevent overeating and binge eating by allowing you to slow down. This is one of the positive effects mindfulness-based eating has on reducing anxiety and depression.
Eating food with awareness not only helps you to discover how a certain type of food makes you feel, it also allows you to focus more on foods that help you feel more energized and calm, thus helping you keep your mental health in check.
Vibration around the food that you're cooking and eating
It is important to have positive vibrations around the food that you’re cooking and later consuming. The food that is being cooked absorbs the vibrations of the thoughts of the person cooking the food.
Imagine that you had a stressful day, or a fight at home, and later you cooked dinner with all these negative thoughts, re-playing in your mind the incident that caused you hurt or pain. You might not like to hear it, but yes, that dinner that you cooked– it absorbed the negative energy and vibration of your thoughts.
Now, imagine consuming that food. You were already stressed because of the chaotic day you just had, and after having that meal, you’re probably going to feel worse. And not only will it further affect your own mental state, it’s also going to affect that of everyone else consuming that food– your family members.
There is a famous experiment where two plants are given the same amount of water and sunlight, but one is spoken to with love and affection, while the other plant is given words full of hatred and hostility.
At the end of the experiment, it is found that the plant which got affirmative and encouraging words flourished, bloomed and grew beautifully, while the other plant that got all that negativity and hatred either couldn’t wilted completely.
This is the effect an unpeaceful and negative environment has on our food, which is why, it is usually advised to avoid having arguments in the kitchen or around food.
Food should always be cooked with a calm, positive and peaceful mindset. If you’re stressed, try speaking positive affirmations to yourself– either verbally or mentally– while you’re cooking. You can even try playing a calm sound or a worship song in the background while cooking.
Gossipping and Watching Violent Movies While Eating
This point encapsulates the two aforementioned points. While you’re eating, try to avoid gossiping or any kind of hateful talk. Again, it is good for your mental health if you have a positive environment while you’re having your meal. It would be better if there is no talk involved at all while you’re eating, because mindful eating should be your focus if you’re trying to keep your mental health in check.
Similarly, you should avoid watching violent movies or shows while eating food. The effect of watching violence while eating is detrimental and may cause long-term harm to your mental health. Not only does it radiate negative vibration and energy, consuming violent content while eating also causes you to become more aggressive and violent than it would generally cause you to become.
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The newer and younger generations– the "Gen Z"– are facing more mental health issues today than any other generation, because of their ignorant lifestyle habits, greater exposure to social media from a young age, and the pressures of the world– I’m talking school and career-related pressures and deadlines.
Nonetheless, it isn't hard to maintain a fairly good mental health, especially if we start to live with a little more awareness, and change our everyday lifestyle to fit in some healthy habits. It won't be easy initially, but we can certainly make a permanent change if we make efforts every single day.
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