[Ayoob]

One way to support your mental health is to give your brain everything it needs to fix itself, and then stimulate your brain with light, electricity, exercise, and dragging your body out to the woods and walking around.

Grass fed meat, wild caught fish, organic vegetables, mineral water, fish oil in abundance, vitamins of all kinds in meaningful doses, lithium orotate.

Take time off work and do nothing.

Use neurofeedback. That helps your brain talk to itself and figure out how to use neuroplasticity to fix itself.

Orthomolecular psychiatry can be a useful tool. It's very open-source and available for free.

Use a sauna to detox your body from all the chemicals we're swimming in. I have a far infrared, but supposedly the three-spectrum ones are the best.

[onlooker]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... 843b4fd8f2
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')o the theory comes back to despair. Case and Deaton believe that white Americans may be suffering from a lack of hope. The pain in their bodies might reflect a “spiritual” pain caused by “cumulative distress, and the failure of life to turn out as expected.” If they're right, then the problem will be much harder to solve. Politicians can pass laws to keep opioids out of people's hands or require insurers to cover mental health costs, but they can't turn back the clock to 1955.]

[vox_mundi]

Neuroscientists Get At the Roots of Pessimism

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]... Graybiel's laboratory has previously identified a neural circuit that underlies a specific kind of decision-making known as approach-avoidance conflict. These types of decisions, which require weighing options with both positive and negative elements, tend to provoke a great deal of anxiety. Her lab has also shown that chronic stress dramatically affects this kind of decision-making: More stress usually leads animals to choose high-risk, high-payoff options.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to see if they could reproduce an effect that is often seen in people with depression, anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. These patients tend to engage in ritualistic behaviors designed to combat negative thoughts, and to place more weight on the potential negative outcome of a given situation. This kind of negative thinking, the researchers suspected, could influence approach-avoidance decision-making.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers stimulated the caudate nucleus, a brain region linked to emotional decision-making, with a small electrical current as animals were offered a reward (juice) paired with an unpleasant stimulus (a puff of air to the face). In each trial, the ratio of reward to aversive stimuli was different, and the animals could choose whether to accept or not.

This kind of decision-making requires cost-benefit analysis. If the reward is high enough to balance out the puff of air, the animals will choose to accept it, but when that ratio is too low, they reject it. When the researchers stimulated the caudate nucleus, the cost-benefit calculation became skewed, and the animals began to avoid combinations that they previously would have accepted. This continued even after the stimulation ended, and could also be seen the following day, after which point it gradually disappeared.

This result suggests that the animals began to devalue the reward that they previously wanted, and focused more on the cost of the aversive stimulus. "This state we've mimicked has an overestimation of cost relative to benefit," Graybiel says.



The caudate nucleus has within it regions that are connected with the limbic system, which regulates mood, and it sends input to motor areas of the brain as well as dopamine-producing regions. Graybiel and Amemori believe that the abnormal activity seen in the caudate nucleus in this study could be somehow disrupting dopamine activity.

The researchers also found that brainwave activity in the caudate nucleus was altered when decision-making patterns changed. This change, discovered by Amemori, is in the beta frequency and might serve as a biomarker to monitor whether animals or patients respond to drug treatment, Graybiel says.

"There must be many circuits involved," she says. "But apparently we are so delicately balanced that just throwing the system off a little bit can rapidly change behavior."

[onlooker]

Very interesting Vox. Thanks for posting. I would say though that the bio-chemical responses in these and other situations seem to be ALWAYS dependent on the environmental stimuli. In other words consistent with I believe the latest Science, though our brain has great flexibility and adaptability, we exhibit all (with a healthy brain) similar behavioral/mental patterns in accordance with both the acute and chronic environmental stimuli we are exposed to. In short, it in my opinion is always the environment/upbringing that is the dominant catalyst in behavior rather than our preset evolutionary makeup. So, this preset evolutionary makeup is like the Menu for our range of behavioral responses but the Environment is the final arbiter by inducing a choice from the menu

[Newfie]

Onlooker,
That may be predominantly so, but not always. I’ve watched traits transfer in 4 generations of my exWifes family. Without providing TMI it’s a very real things, at least sometimes.

[onlooker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'O')nlooker,
That may be predominantly so, but not always. I’ve watched traits transfer in 4 generations of my exWifes family. Without providing TMI it’s a very real things, at least sometimes.

[Newfie]

You don’t need to be on one side or the other. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other.

[KaiserJeep]

As for me, I'm on the aged bourbon side of things every time.

[Newfie]

Kraken rum personally.

[jedrider]

I think Trump could benefit greatly from being declared 'insane' and removed from power by Pence. No need to pardon him in this case. What do you think?

[careinke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jedrider', 'I') think Trump could benefit greatly from being declared 'insane' and removed from power by Pence. No need to pardon him in this case. What do you think?

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jedrider', 'I') think Trump could benefit greatly from being declared 'insane' and removed from power by Pence. No need to pardon him in this case. What do you think?