Helping Your Brain Do What It Was Designed to Do

Kelsey Asplin, ND in brain health September 22, 2026

As we wrap up this month’s conversation about brain health, I keep coming back to something I find myself saying to patients almost every day, although I don’t know that I’ve ever actually said it in quite these words.

Your brain isn’t asking you to be perfect.

It’s asking you to care for it.

Those two things are very different.

If you’ve followed along over the past few weeks, we’ve spent a lot of time exploring the remarkable biology happening inside your nervous system. We started with the gut-brain connection and discovered that your brain is constantly gathering information from the rest of the body. We learned that neurons communicate through an intricate network of chemical messengers, that neurotransmitters have to be built from nutrients your body digests and absorbs, and that symptoms like brain fog, anxiety, poor focus, and low mood are often invitations to become curious rather than labels that define who we are. We’ve covered a lot of science together, and I hope one thing has become increasingly clear: your brain is not an isolated organ making decisions all by itself. It’s responding to the environment it’s living in every single day.

To me, that’s one of the most encouraging ideas in all of medicine.

When people first come into my office, they’re often worried that something has permanently changed. They’ll tell me they don’t feel like themselves anymore, that they can’t remember things the way they used to, that they’re anxious over situations that never bothered them before, or that by the time the afternoon rolls around they feel like someone quietly unplugged half their brain. Those conversations are deeply personal because they’re rarely just about symptoms. They’re about identity. They’re about wondering whether the version of yourself you remember is gone for good.

I understand that fear.

It’s also one of the reasons I remain so hopeful.

After years of practicing medicine, I’ve become less impressed by quick fixes and more impressed by the body’s extraordinary ability to adapt. I’ve watched people regain energy after years of exhaustion. I’ve seen digestion improve after decades of frustration. I’ve watched patients who once struggled to make it through an afternoon meeting eventually return to hiking fourteeners, traveling internationally, building businesses, chasing toddlers, or simply enjoying a conversation without feeling mentally exhausted halfway through it. None of those changes happened overnight, and none of them followed a perfectly straight line, but they happened because the human body never really stops trying to move toward health when we begin giving it the resources to do so.

That’s an important distinction.

I don’t think the goal is to force the body into health.

I think the goal is to create an environment where health has the opportunity to emerge.

The older I get, both as a physician and as a person, the more I think about health less as something we achieve and more as something we cultivate. It’s a relationship rather than a destination, and like most worthwhile relationships, it asks for consistency much more often than it asks for perfection. There are seasons where everything seems to be clicking. You’re sleeping well, making dinner at home, exercising consistently, spending time outside, remembering to take your supplements, and generally feeling like you’ve got this whole adulting thing figured out. Then life reminds us who’s actually in charge. Someone gets sick. Work becomes overwhelming. A baby decides that 2:17 in the morning is the perfect time to practice new sounds. You move. You grieve. You travel. You spend three weeks living on takeout because your kitchen is under construction. Whatever the reason, the rhythm changes.

Thankfully, our brains understand seasons.

That’s something I wish we talked about more often.

The nervous system was never designed to function only under ideal circumstances because, quite honestly, ideal circumstances don’t exist for very long. Life is wonderfully unpredictable. Some seasons ask very little of us, while others seem determined to stretch every ounce of resilience we have. During those more demanding chapters, the brain adapts. It reallocates resources, changes priorities, and responds to the information it’s receiving from the rest of the body. We talked about that last week when we discussed symptoms as observations rather than explanations. If sleep has been scarce, stress has been relentless, blood sugar has been unpredictable, or inflammation has been quietly simmering beneath the surface, the brain doesn’t ignore those circumstances. It works with them as best it can.

What I find so encouraging is that adaptation works both directions.

We often think about the body adapting in response to illness, chronic stress, or poor habits, but we sometimes forget that it also adapts when conditions improve. The brain is paying attention to patterns over time. It’s gathering information from the meals we eat, the quality of our sleep, the conversations we have, the way we move our bodies, the nutrients available to build neurotransmitters, the amount of time we spend outdoors, the stress we carry, and the moments we actually allow ourselves to recover. None of those experiences determines our neurological future by itself, just as one healthy meal doesn’t transform us into the picture of perfect health. But together they become the environment the brain is continuously adapting to, and that’s where I think so much hope lives.

One of the concepts that has fascinated neuroscientists for decades is something called neuroplasticity, which is simply the brain’s remarkable ability to change throughout life. For years people believed the adult brain was largely fixed, that we were born with a certain number of brain cells and spent the rest of our lives slowly losing them, almost like watching sand slip through an hourglass. We now know the story is much more interesting than that. The brain is constantly strengthening connections that are used frequently, trimming away those that are used less often, forming new pathways, and adapting in response to experience. That adaptability is one of the reasons children learn languages so quickly, why musicians improve through thousands of hours of practice, why stroke rehabilitation is possible, and why changing habits, while sometimes frustratingly slow, is never truly pointless. Your brain is learning whether you intend to teach it or not.

I don’t share that because I think everyone needs to become a neuroscientist.

I share it because I think it changes the way we think about everyday choices.

Not in a way that creates guilt or pressure. Quite the opposite, actually.

If the brain is responding to patterns rather than perfection, then every ordinary day becomes another opportunity to gently influence the environment it’s adapting to. That means yesterday doesn’t have to dictate tomorrow, and one difficult season doesn’t have to become the story of the rest of your life. Personally, I find that perspective much kinder than the all-or-nothing thinking that often dominates conversations about health. It leaves room for birthday cake, vacations, sleepless nights with young children, stressful weeks at work, and all of the beautifully messy parts of being human, while still reminding us that our daily habits matter because they quietly shape the biology we’ve been talking about all month.

And that’s where I’d like to spend the rest of our time together, because understanding how the brain works is fascinating, but understanding how to care for it is where science begins to intersect with everyday life.

Building an Environment the Brain Wants to Live In

One of the questions I hear surprisingly often is, “If you could only recommend one thing for brain health, what would it be?”

I always smile a little because I know people are hoping for a straightforward answer. Maybe it’s a supplement they’ve never heard of or a superfood that suddenly makes everything click into place. We all love the idea that somewhere out there is one missing piece capable of changing everything.

I’ve just never found biology to work that way.

The brain is far too sophisticated to place all of its hopes on one nutrient, one habit, or one intervention, just as a thriving garden doesn’t depend entirely on sunlight or water or healthy soil. Remove any one of those long enough and eventually you’ll notice the effects, but when they’re all present together they create an environment where growth happens almost effortlessly. That’s the way I think about brain health. Rather than chasing individual interventions, I’m much more interested in creating the conditions that allow the brain to do what it was designed to do.

If you’ve spent much time around me, you’ve probably heard me talk about the determinants of health. They come up in almost every appointment, regardless of whether someone schedules because of digestive concerns, autoimmune disease, hormones, cardiovascular health, or brain fog. That’s because the body doesn’t organize itself according to medical specialties. Your neurons don’t know they’re supposed to stay out of conversations about digestion, and your immune system certainly didn’t get the memo that it’s only allowed to participate during cold and flu season. They’re all part of the same beautifully interconnected organism, quietly influencing one another all day long.

That’s one of the reasons I almost always begin by asking about sleep.

Not because sleep is trendy. Not because wearable technology tells us to optimize it. Simply because I’ve never seen a brain consistently function well without it.

Sleep is one of those remarkable biological states that looks deceptively passive from the outside. We close our eyes, become less aware of the world around us, and hopefully avoid being awakened by the neighbor’s dog or the smoke detector that always seems to need a new battery at 2:00 in the morning. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, the brain is astonishingly busy. Memories are being consolidated. Neural connections are being strengthened or pruned. Metabolic waste products are being cleared. Hormonal rhythms are shifting. Immune function is changing. The nervous system is performing maintenance that simply doesn’t happen in the same way while we’re awake.

I sometimes tell patients that sleep is less like pressing pause and more like sending your brain into the maintenance shop overnight. If the mechanics only have two hours to work before the doors open again in the morning, they do what they can, but some jobs inevitably get postponed until later. One rough night rarely creates lasting problems. Several months of inadequate sleep, however, often begin showing up in ways people don’t immediately connect back to bedtime. Concentration becomes more difficult. Emotional resilience wears a little thinner. Cravings increase. Recovery slows. Suddenly the body seems less adaptable than it used to be, when in reality it’s simply been trying to keep up with a maintenance schedule that never quite catches up.

Nutrition follows a similar pattern.

Over the years I’ve become less interested in arguing over the perfect diet and much more interested in helping people consistently nourish themselves. Our brains require an extraordinary amount of energy relative to their size, and while they certainly appreciate colorful vegetables, healthy fats, quality protein, and a wide variety of micronutrients, they also appreciate regularity. Stable blood sugar may not be the most exciting topic in nutrition, but from the brain’s perspective it’s incredibly reassuring. One of the fastest ways to make an energy-hungry organ unhappy is to ask it to function through repeated cycles of feast, famine, caffeine, sugar, and whatever happens to be left in the office vending machine at four o’clock in the afternoon.

I realize life doesn’t always cooperate with that ideal. There are days when lunch happens in the car between appointments or dinner consists of whatever your toddler didn’t finish because, let’s be honest, throwing away perfectly good avocado somehow feels personally offensive after seeing grocery prices lately. The point isn’t to create another impossible standard. It’s simply to remember that the brain is continuously building, repairing, communicating, and adapting, and those processes require raw materials. Protein provides amino acids. Healthy fats become part of neuronal membranes. Vitamins and minerals quietly assist thousands of enzymatic reactions that almost never receive the appreciation they deserve. We rarely notice them when they’re doing their jobs well, which is usually the sign of excellent physiology.

Then there’s movement, and I think this is where we’ve unintentionally complicated things over the last decade. Somewhere along the way, exercise became something that required matching outfits, expensive wearables, heart-rate zones, and enough data to launch a satellite. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy strength training as much as anyone, and there are tremendous benefits to structured exercise, but sometimes I worry that we’ve made movement feel so complicated that people stop doing it altogether.

Your brain honestly doesn’t seem nearly as concerned about whether you closed your activity rings as it is about whether you moved at all.

Movement improves circulation, supports insulin sensitivity, stimulates the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, enhances mood, and reminds the nervous system that the body it lives in was designed to interact with the world rather than remain seated in front of glowing rectangles for twelve hours each day. Some of my clearest thinking has happened while walking my dogs, hiking a trail, paddle boarding on a quiet lake, or lifting weights without listening to anything at all. I suspect many of you have experienced something similar. Solutions seem to appear, ideas become clearer, and problems that felt overwhelming indoors somehow become a little more manageable outside.

Which brings me to something we don’t prescribe nearly often enough.

Nature.

I realize that sounds almost cliché, especially in Colorado where stepping outside usually means someone immediately asks if you’ve climbed a fourteener lately. (For the record, I support your decision regardless of whether the answer is yes or absolutely not.) But spending time outdoors changes us in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Natural light helps regulate circadian rhythms. Green spaces have measurable effects on stress physiology. Fresh air encourages movement almost without us realizing it, and the simple act of stepping away from constant notifications creates space for the nervous system to exhale.

Perhaps that’s what I appreciate most about nature.

It rarely asks us to optimize anything.

It simply invites us to be present.

As much as I love the science behind neuroscience, I also think the brain appreciates beauty in ways that don’t always fit neatly inside a laboratory study. Music. Art. Laughter. Meaningful relationships. Purposeful work. Time with people who make you feel known. Quiet moments of gratitude that catch you completely by surprise. None of those experiences replace good nutrition or restorative sleep, but I don’t believe they’re separate from health either. They become part of the environment the brain is responding to, quietly shaping the chemistry and circuitry we’ve spent the past month discussing.

Maybe that’s why I find it difficult to separate brain health from simply living well.

The two have become almost impossible for me to untangle.

Where Supplements Fit Into the Picture

At this point, some of you are probably wondering when we’re finally going to talk about supplements.

Fair enough.

After all, I am a naturopathic doctor, and if I managed to write an entire month about brain health without mentioning fish oil, I suspect some of my patients would begin checking to make sure someone hadn’t stolen my laptop.

The reason I’ve waited until now is intentional.

Supplements are one of my favorite tools in medicine, but they’re exactly that…tools. A hammer is incredibly useful when you’re building a house, but none of us would expect to build the entire structure with nothing but a hammer. The same is true here. Once we’ve started creating an environment where the brain has access to adequate sleep, nourishing food, movement, healthy blood sugar regulation, and the raw materials it needs to function, supplements often become wonderful amplifiers. They can help fill nutritional gaps, provide additional support during times of increased demand, or target specific physiological pathways that need a little extra attention. What they rarely do is compensate for foundations that have been missing for years.

That’s not a criticism.

It’s simply biology.

If someone tells me they’re sleeping four hours a night, surviving on energy drinks and vending machine snacks, and working eighty-hour weeks, I can certainly recommend several excellent supplements, but I’d be doing them a disservice if I pretended capsules alone were going to solve the problem. The brain is asking for an environment that supports health. Supplements become much more effective once that environment begins taking shape.

With that said, there are a handful of nutrients and botanical compounds that consistently earn their place in my toolbox because they support many of the physiological processes we’ve spent the last month discussing.

One of the first categories I think about is structural support.

The brain is nearly sixty percent fat by dry weight, and every neuron is surrounded by membranes that need to remain flexible enough to communicate efficiently while still maintaining their structural integrity. Omega-3 fatty acids, particularly DHA, are major components of those membranes and play important roles in neuronal signaling, neuroplasticity, and the resolution of inflammation. EPA, while present in smaller amounts within the brain itself, appears especially valuable for supporting inflammatory balance and has been studied extensively in mood disorders. I rarely think about omega-3s as “brain supplements.” I think about them as providing some of the raw materials from which healthy nervous systems are built.

Another nutrient that has become increasingly interesting over the past several years is creatine.

Most people associate creatine with athletes and bodybuilders, which is understandable because it’s one of the most well-researched supplements available for improving muscular performance. What many people don’t realize is that the brain also has tremendous energy demands, and creatine participates in one of the body’s primary energy-buffering systems. Researchers have begun exploring its potential role in cognitive performance, mental fatigue, neuroprotection, recovery from sleep deprivation, depression, and even traumatic brain injury. The evidence is still evolving, and it’s certainly not a miracle supplement, but I find it fascinating that something long associated with the weight room may also support one of the most metabolically demanding organs in the body. I have a feeling we’ll continue hearing much more about creatine over the next decade.

Then we have nutrients that quietly participate in the chemistry itself.

The B vitamins rarely receive much attention because they’re not particularly glamorous, yet they’re involved in hundreds of enzymatic reactions throughout the body, including neurotransmitter synthesis, methylation, mitochondrial function, and energy metabolism. Vitamin B₁₂, folate, and vitamin B₆ are particularly important in neurological health, while nutrients like magnesium, zinc, iron, copper, and vitamin C also serve as essential cofactors for the biochemical pathways that produce and regulate neurotransmitters. We often focus on the neurotransmitters themselves while forgetting that every one of those molecules depends on an entire cast of supporting characters working quietly behind the scenes.

Magnesium deserves its own paragraph because I honestly think it may be one of the most underappreciated nutrients in modern healthcare.

It’s involved in well over three hundred enzymatic reactions, influences muscle function, energy production, sleep quality, glucose metabolism, and nervous system regulation, and many people simply don’t consume enough of it. Different forms behave differently in the body, which is one reason you’ll hear me recommending glycinate for some patients, threonate for others, citrate in entirely different situations, and occasionally combining more than one form depending on what we’re trying to accomplish. Like every supplement, context matters.

One of the more enjoyable parts of practicing naturopathic medicine is that I also get to work with plants that have been supporting human health for centuries.

Medicinal mushrooms are a perfect example.

Lion’s mane has attracted considerable attention for its potential effects on nerve growth factor, neuroplasticity, and cognitive function. Reishi is often appreciated for its calming, immune-supportive, and adaptogenic properties, while cordyceps may support energy production and physical endurance in certain individuals. Are mushrooms a replacement for sleep? Absolutely not. Could they become one thoughtful piece of a comprehensive brain health strategy for the right person? Certainly.

There are also several compounds that support the brain more directly by participating in membrane integrity and neuronal communication.

Citicoline, sometimes called CDP-choline, provides a highly bioavailable source of choline while also contributing to phospholipid synthesis within neuronal membranes. It’s been studied for attention, memory, stroke recovery, and cognitive aging, and I find it particularly interesting because it supports both structural and functional aspects of brain health.

Phosphatidylcholine serves as another important building block for cell membranes while also contributing choline for acetylcholine synthesis, making it relevant for memory and cognitive function. Phosphatidylserine, another phospholipid concentrated within neuronal membranes, has been studied for memory, attention, healthy cortisol regulation, and age-related cognitive changes. One of the things I appreciate about these compounds is that they’re not forcing the brain to do something unnatural. They’re helping support structures the brain already relies on every moment of every day.

Finally, there are supplements I often think about in the context of protection rather than performance.

Curcumin, the bright yellow polyphenol found in turmeric, has been extensively studied for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Alpha-lipoic acid supports mitochondrial function while also serving as a powerful antioxidant. Acetyl-L-carnitine participates in mitochondrial energy production and has shown promise in several areas of neurological health. Vitamin D influences immune regulation and neuronal function far beyond its traditional association with bone health, while antioxidants from colorful fruits and vegetables quietly help defend the brain against the oxidative stress generated by an organ that’s constantly consuming enormous amounts of oxygen.

When you look at that list, it’s easy to start wondering which supplement is “best.”

My answer is almost always the same.

It depends.

It depends on the person sitting in front of me.

Their symptoms.

Their health history.

Their medications.

Their laboratory findings.

Their diet.

Their goals.

Their genetics.

Their stage of life.

The beauty of personalized medicine is that it allows us to move beyond asking, “What’s the best brain supplement?” and instead ask, “What does this particular brain need right now?”

To me, that’s a much more interesting question.

And it’s usually a much more helpful one, too.

A Lifetime Conversation

As I sat down to write this final section, I found myself wondering what I actually hope people remember a month or even a year from now after reading this series. Part of me hopes you’ll remember that the gut and the brain are constantly communicating, or that neurotransmitters have to be built from nutrients your body digests and absorbs, or that symptoms like brain fog and anxiety often have far more than one possible explanation. I certainly hope some of the science sticks because I think understanding our own biology is incredibly empowering. At the same time, I suspect those details aren’t what matter most.

What I really hope stays with you is a different way of looking at your body.

One of the unexpected things that has happened over the years is that studying physiology has gradually changed the way I move through ordinary life. I don’t think about breakfast the same way I did when I was twenty. I don’t think about sleep the same way. I certainly don’t think about going for a walk the same way. None of those things feel like isolated health habits anymore. They feel like opportunities to participate in the remarkable biology that’s quietly unfolding every moment of every day. Sometimes I’ll be out walking the dogs or cooking dinner and catch myself thinking about all the things happening beneath the surface that none of us can actually see. Neurons are firing. Proteins are being synthesized. Memories are being consolidated. Immune cells are communicating. Hormones are rising and falling. Somewhere inside all of that complexity, the brain is constantly paying attention, taking in information about the environment it’s living in and adapting as best it can.

I realize that probably sounds exactly like something a naturopathic doctor would think while chopping vegetables, and I fully admit that occupational hazards come in many forms.

The longer I practice, the more I’ve noticed another shift taking place, and I think it’s influenced me just as much as anything I learned in school. Earlier in my career, I spent a lot of energy trying to identify what was wrong. That’s an important part of medicine and always will be, but over time I became just as interested in understanding what the body had been trying to accomplish. Those are surprisingly different questions. One asks us to identify a problem. The other asks us to understand a story.

When someone tells me they don’t feel like themselves anymore, I’m certainly interested in their symptoms, but I’m equally interested in everything that came before those symptoms. What has life looked like over the past year? Have they been caring for a sick family member? Did they welcome a new baby? Have they been sleeping poorly for months? Has work become overwhelming? Have digestive symptoms quietly made it more difficult to absorb the nutrients their brain depends on? Are they recovering from an illness, navigating hormonal changes, grieving a loss, or simply trying to carry more than any one person was designed to carry alone? Those questions don’t replace good laboratory testing or thoughtful clinical reasoning, but they provide context, and context has become one of the most valuable diagnostic tools I know.

Maybe that’s why I rarely find myself frustrated with the body anymore.

Frustrated by disease? Absolutely.

Frustrated by suffering? Every day.

But frustrated with the body itself? Almost never.

More often than not, I see a body that’s been trying remarkably hard to adapt to circumstances that weren’t particularly easy to adapt to. Sometimes those adaptations become the very symptoms that bring someone into my office, but even then I can’t help feeling a certain respect for how tirelessly the body has continued trying to protect the person living inside it.

That perspective has made me a more hopeful physician because adaptation isn’t something the body only does in one direction. If our biology can change in response to chronic stress, poor sleep, nutrient deficiencies, inflammation, or illness, then it also has the capacity to continue changing when those conditions begin to improve. Healing doesn’t erase every challenge we’ve ever experienced, nor does it always happen as quickly as we’d like, but I’ve seen enough people surprise themselves over the years that I’ve learned never to underestimate what the human body is capable of when it’s given the opportunity.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become less interested in perfection and much more interested in patterns.

I don’t worry about the occasional birthday cake or vacation or week where life feels completely upside down because, honestly, those seasons are part of being human. What matters much more is the overall rhythm of our lives. Are we generally creating an environment where the brain has access to nourishing food, restorative sleep, meaningful relationships, movement, purpose, moments of joy, opportunities to recover, and the nutrients it needs to perform one of the most extraordinary jobs in the natural world? Those are the patterns that quietly shape health over time, and thankfully they’re also the patterns we have the greatest opportunity to influence.

If you’ve noticed a common thread running through everything we’ve talked about this month, I hope it’s this: your brain isn’t asking you to become perfect. It isn’t keeping score after one stressful week, one missed workout, one sleepless night, or one less-than-stellar meal. It’s responding to the overall environment you create, patiently adapting day after day to the information it receives. I find that incredibly encouraging because it means that every ordinary day offers another opportunity to participate in your own health. Not through guilt or fear, but through stewardship.

When I think about brain health now, that’s the word that comes to mind more than any other.

Stewardship.

It’s caring for something extraordinarily valuable with the understanding that it was never really ours to take for granted.

And perhaps that’s the nicest part of all.

The conversations we’ve explored throughout this month were never happening only between your gut and your brain.

In a way, they’ve also been invitations to begin a different conversation with yourself, one that’s a little more curious, a little more compassionate, and a little more appreciative of the remarkable body that’s been quietly working on your behalf every single day.

To me, that’s what helping your brain do what it was designed to do has always meant.

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