Resilience Is Not the Same Thing as Being Unaffected I have mixed feelings about the word resilience. I love what it is supposed to represent: our remarkable human capacity to adapt when circumstances change, recover after difficulty, learn from experience, and continue moving forward when life looks nothing like the version we had planned. Somewhere […]
Sleep Is Not Just Time When You’re Not Doing Anything There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep fixes. You stay up too late, the baby wakes up six times, you travel across several time zones, or you have one of those nights when your brain decides that 2:13 a.m. would be an excellent […]
Your Nervous System Was Never Supposed to Be Calm All the Time If you’ve spent any time in the wellness world lately, there is a reasonable chance someone has told you that you need to “regulate your nervous system.” Perhaps you’ve been encouraged to stimulate your vagus nerve, increase your heart rate variability, shake out […]
There are certain things about yourself that you don’t necessarily recognize as unusual until you’re old enough to realize that not everyone else’s brain works the same way. For me, one of those things has always been perfectionism. I was the student who wanted the assignment done correctly, but “correctly” wasn’t really enough. I wanted […]
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 […]
Over the past two weeks we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about communication. First, we explored the remarkable conversation taking place between the gut and the brain, and then we looked at the language that allows billions of neurons to exchange information every second of every day. We followed electrical impulses as they […]
Last week we introduced the idea that your gut and brain are in constant conversation, and we spent quite a bit of time talking about the gut-brain axis, the vagus nerve, the microbiome, and the many different pathways that allow organs sitting on opposite ends of the body to exchange information all day long. If […]
If you followed along with us through August, you probably noticed that I kept bringing up the brain, even though we were supposedly talking about the gut. At the time, I may have seemed a little distracted, like someone who keeps wandering off topic halfway through a story. I promise there was a reason for […]
Over the past month, we’ve taken a journey through one of the most remarkable systems in the human body. We began by exploring the digestive tract as the place where the outside world meets the inside of the body. Every meal, every sip of water, every medication, and every microorganism first encounters the lining of […]
“I think I have SIBO.” Or… “I read online that I probably have low stomach acid.” Sometimes it’s parasites. Sometimes candida. Sometimes “leaky gut.” Often, someone has spent hours reading articles or scrolling through social media trying to match their symptoms to a diagnosis. I completely understand why. Digestive symptoms can be frustrating. They often […]