The bottom line is that foods have an immense impact on your emotions, moods and physical health, all of which directly impact your ability to deal with not only challenges, and day to day stressors, but also issues in your relationships.

Findings show that nutrition deficiencies cause biochemical conditions in the brain and body that raise stress to toxic levels, fostering depression and anxiety and other emotional (and physical) disturbances. More specifically, the culprit is chronic inflammation of the brain and body.

Chronic Inflammation, a public health issue?

Inflammation itself is the body’s natural immune response to harmful stimuli, an automatic initial defense of the body, without which wounds would never heal.

• When acute, inflammation is a healthy process that is designed to restore balance by containing harmful irritants that would otherwise spread and harm the body; at the same time, it moves restorative agents, such as white blood cells, to the region to allow healing of injury, infection, stress, etc., to take place.
• In contrast, chronic inflammation is a prolonged condition that attacks healthy cells and tissues instead of protecting them; it can lead to a host of diseases, among others, diabetes, asthma, heart disease, arthritis, autoimmune and neurological problems.
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If there is evidence that questions both the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs and whether they cause more harm than good, what are options to consider (with your doctor, as necessary)?

In Part 1, we looked at some of the significant findings and publications that sound alarm on the prevailing take-a-pill approach to mental health (and health in general), and certain forces responsible for fueling an epidemic of mental (and physical) illness in the last decades, curiously unique to the United States.

In the next post, Part 3, we consider five essential strategies that studies show reduce anxiety and depression naturally. Here, we first consider five factors that can elevate stress in the mind and body to toxic levels, and that must be addressed in treatment to successfully eliminate or lower the toxic levels of stress that can feed anxiety or depression.

The position of this therapist is that depression and anxiety are serious problems with affect regulation that are learned neural associations or chemical-reaction patterns, rather than genetic diseases.

Believe it or not, you are in a perfect place in your life, exactly where you need to be.

If that doesn’t feel true, you may not be exercising your capacity for conscious acceptance as a springboard for making optimal choices, or may not understand how it can serve you as a bridge or anchor, to realizing the larger vision of where you aspire to be your life (whether you know what that is or not).

In Part 1, we looked at conscious acceptance, and how it can empower you to respond to disappointments and challenges in consciously positive ways. Considering the life-shaping power of responses, that’s big.

In this post, we look at three factors that shape how you respond – your beliefs, choices and actions – and how acceptance can play a vital role in cultivating these key abilities, so that they more fully support you to take the shortest, most expedient path to living a life of balance, healing and transformation, or what psychologist Abraham Maslow would call self-actualization.

How does conscious acceptance maximize your beliefs, choices and actions?

• Like an anchor, acceptance grounds your sense of self in mind- and body-calming core beliefs.