Yet Another LBS w/ WAW

[Vanilla]

Haku

This is a journey not a destination. It's a journey sometimes with detours and other times rest overs.

But it is your journey.

You have a predisposition to working from sadness, each of us has a predominant emotional hormone set up. It is in our genes. My own is fear, so I get super anxious.

The good news is that with mental tools (CBT and NLP for you and I) great nutrition and appropriate exercise we can manage the epigenetic switch to turn it off. I switch off my predisposition to the extreme form of cPTSD, but I may always have the tendency to be anxious, these days though it takes a lot to trigger it because I monitor it and have an intervention.

So too with depression, which is also a mood disorder. The Guernsey website (which is a charity) get.gg has lots of freebie CBT tools to help you monitor and identify the triggers in depression too.

I am also a great believer in the Kindness Method for those of us with mood issues. Mood issues aren't mental illness they are a physiological regulatory matters. This is about having shift in your life by changing what you do to create a virtuous spiral.

It's biohacking your mood issue by testing that which works. For me that was losing weight (Very slowly), exercising and giving up sugar. Which biohacks work? To start with any exercise helped. DUH! Now I go dancing, spin and use weights, now even more specific and I need stretch and deep tissue massage! With food I gave up sugar particularly fruit and almost all white carbs (But new potatoes are ok! Go figure) and I am now no longer type 2 diabetic. So what works for me might not work for you.

I believe in monitoring this stuff, and taking extreme care. Knowing your numbers, if you can afford it a second hand fitness monitor is great including one that tracks sleep. My Fitbit recently broke and it no longer works, I got a second hand Fitbit HR from eBay for 25 sterling about 30 US dollars. It's worth every penny as it tracks and links to a website via Bluetooth. If I ever have the cash I will buy an ouraring which provides feedback. I also track my blood sugar and ketones and log that. But the fit bit is great as it is automated. For a long time I kept a detailed food diary and noted it's effect on mood. But as it's well under control I just get anal on it a couple of times a year. I discovered that bizarrely peanuts and anything peanutty brought on anxiety. You may find for sadness that sugar is an issue. Sleep patterns are also helpful to monitor with mood disorder. I found the ocean and spas more helpful than trekking for instance. Running and high intensity increased Cortisol for me, not good with anxiety so now I do HI IT and dancing.

The point is this is your journey and I would dearly like you to have the courage to know that mood disorders need managing, sometimes very closely and at other times just lightly. But they are what they say on the tin MOOD not charachter or personality. Physiological not Psychology.

The other big thing is to journal, come here and post as that will allow you to observe how far you have come.

It's a long way so far!

I can see that even if you can't.

V