Lifestyle Prescription: Psychiatry’s New Drug of Choice?
The things we do daily are more important to your health than you may realize.
Western medicine hinges on the use of chemical pharmaceuticals to treat health conditions. Yet, what if there was another way to help a large subset of patients in the field of psychiatry? A new look at a meta-analysis of lifestyle choices in the field suggests that prescribing habit changes may be the single most effective way to curb the severity and frequency of some of psychiatry’s most often occurring DSM V disorders.
So, which lifestyle changes are linked with improved psychiatric outcomes?
According to a prominent 2020 paper written by a tag-team of Canadian and British researchers published by Flirth et Al., there are four key things that can be done to curb depression risk.
- Increasing physical activity levels can reduce the severity, risk of, and length of time symptoms by up to 41% in patients with major depression. Physical also appears to be inversely associated with anxiety symptoms.
- Following a consistent sleep schedule that has roughly seven to nine hours of sleep can reduce the risk of depression and anxiety.
- Avoiding smoking can prevent your risk of experiencing all causes of psychiatric impairment.
- Eating a low-inflammatory diet, which was defined in this study as either the Mediterranean diet or one rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, was also inversely associated with depression and anxiety.
On that note, a fantastically produced genome wide association (GWAS) conducted in 2018 by researchers Nagel et Al., found genes strongly associated with neuroticism and depression. Because the expression of many of the genes uncovered in the study can be flipped by lifestyle habits, it is indeed possible that prescribed lifestyles choices, such as the ones outlined in the review above, have the pharmaceutical ability to “flip back” the genetic switches in the brains of patients presenting with neuroticism associated psychiatric disorders.
