The UltraMind Solution (7 page)

Certainly, if the body is back in balance, working with the emotional and spiritual dimensions of our suffering is critical and necessary. But it is a very hard road to follow without addressing how our genes, diet, and environment interact to change our brain chemistry and detract from the optimal function and balance of our body and mind.

If you have a significant biological imbalance, psychotherapy is a distraction and a waste of time.

And
many
of us suffer from biological imbalances...

Sensing this, modern psychiatry has moved into an elaborate attempt to control brain chemistry with drugs, as if all mental illness were a brain chemistry imbalance and all we have to do is match the right drug (or drugs) to the mental illness.

Is this the answer to our epidemic of broken brains—more and better medication? Do we really need more antidepressants, stimulants, antipsychotics, and memory medications?

Are we defectively designed so that we cannot be happy, or concentrate or remember things, without pills? Is depression a Prozac deficiency? Is ADHD a Ritalin deficiency? Is Alzheimer’s an Aricept deficiency?

I think not.

Yet the use of these drugs is skyrocketing. Psychiatric or psychotropic medications are the number-two selling class of prescription drugs,
¹⁵
after cholesterol medication. And the rate of increase in the use of psychiatric
medications in the last decade is meteoric (such as a 1,000 percent increase in the use of stimulant medication in children).

If treatments like these were completely effective and free of side effects, I would welcome them to provide relief from suffering for millions. But they do not work well (or at all) for many.

Let’s take the example of antidepressants.

Most patients who take antidepressants either don’t respond or have only a partial response. In fact, success is considered a 50 percent improvement in half the symptoms. And this minimal result is achieved in less than half the patients taking these medications.

That’s a pretty dismal record. It’s made worse by the fact that 86 percent of those who do find some relief from their symptoms have one or more side effects, including sexual dysfunction, fatigue, insomnia, loss of mental abilities, nausea, and weight gain!

No wonder half of the people who try antidepressants quit after four months.
¹⁶

A recent study in
The New England Journal of Medicine
discovered that drug companies selectively published studies on antidepressants. They published nearly all the studies that showed benefit and almost none of the studies that showed they don’t work.
¹⁷

This kind of underreporting warps our view, leading us to think that antidepressants (and other psychiatric medications) do work when they don’t. This hiding of the real and complete data on antidepressants has fueled the tremendous growth we have seen in psychiatric medications.

The problem is actually worse than it sounds because the positive studies hardly show benefit in the first place. In double-blind studies of antidepressants (where people are given either the medication or a sugar pill) 40 percent of people taking a sugar pill got better, while only 60 percent taking the actual drug had improvement in their symptoms. Looking at it another way—80 percent of people get better with just a sugar pill.

I’ll admit, the approach is half right. Chemical imbalances lead to problems. But the real question that manipulating brain chemicals with drugs begs is never asked...

Why
are those chemicals out of balance in the first place and how do we get them back to their natural state of balance?

These drugs don’t cure the problem. They cover over the symptoms.

To cure the epidemic of broken brains we have to ask a new set of questions:

How do we find the cause of this epidemic?

Are we defectively designed, or is it our toxic environment, our nutrient-depleted diet, and our unremitting stress affecting our sensitive brains? Is it the result of imbalances in our body?

Are more drugs
really
the answer, or is there a way to address the underlying causes of this epidemic so that we can regain our mental (and physical) health and live whole, functional, fulfilling lives?

There is an answer to brain problems, but it’s not more drugs or psychotherapy. Although these tools can be a helpful bridge during your recovery from a broken brain, they won’t provide long-term solutions.

The secret that promises to help us fix our broken brains lies in an unlikely place, a place modern medicine has mostly ignored.

The answer lies in our body.

Finding the Body-Mind Connection

——————

Do you see what you believe or do you believe what you see?

—SIDNEY BAKER, M.D.

I wasn’t sad, hopeless, forgetful, and unable to focus because I had depression, attention deficit disorder, or dementia. It was because I was toxic, inflamed, nutritionally depleted, my gut was a mess, my hormones were out of balance, my cells were unable to make energy, and I was stressed out from being a single parent.

It wasn’t until I learned how to rebuild all these broken systems and heal my body that I got my brain back.

The solution I found is the same one I am going to teach you.

It is the UltraMind Solution.

To learn how to fix your brain you are going to have to accept a radically new way of thinking about health—one that most doctors today still struggle to understand. The crux of it is embodied in a simple truth:

Everything is connected.

Your entire body and all of the core systems in it interact as a single sophisticated symphony. You are one whole person, and all the pieces of your biology and your unique genetic code interact with your environment (including the foods you eat) to determine how sick or well you are in this moment.

This means your body-and-mind are connected as well.

The body-and-mind are a single, dynamic bidirectional system. What you do to one has enormous impact on the other. What you do to your body you do to your brain. Heal your body and you heal your brain.

Change your body and you will fix your broken brain.

Your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, traumas, and life experiences directly influence your biology. We know that stress and other psychological factors
can have a major impact on your health. Now we understand that 95 percent of all illnesses are either caused by or worsened by stress. What you think can influence how sick or well you are. The mind influences the body.

This is known as Mind-Body Medicine. It is an important contribution to the field of science and is researched by major institutions such as Harvard and Stanford.

Sadly, most physicians do not apply this knowledge in their practices. They accept it. But rather than using the power of the mind to heal, they disdainfully say that people with psychological influences on their health have “psychosomatic illness,” or “somatize,” meaning that their “physical” symptoms are all in their head.

Even worse,
somato-psychic
medicine (or how the body affects the mind) is hardly on the radar.

The body directly and powerfully influences the brain. Nutritional status, hormonal imbalances, food allergies, toxins, and digestive, immune, and metabolic imbalances, primarily influence mood, behavior, attention, and attitude.

You already know about this body-mind connection, even if you have never consciously considered it. Just take a moment to think about how your own body has affected your mind over your lifetime, and then extrapolate that to more serious conditions.

Have you ever felt anxious, irritable, jittery, fearful, or even had a panic attack only to have a can of cola or muffin and feel better right away? Why were you anxious? Because your blood sugar was plummeting, and when that happens your body is programmed to respond as though it is a life-threatening emergency.

Do you feel foggy and mentally sluggish after eating a large meal?

Have you ever felt stressed and anxious and then taken a long walk or ridden your bike a few miles only to feel calm and relaxed afterward? Why did this happen? Because you burned off the stress chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol, which made you feel anxious.