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 […]
Kelsey Asplin, ND Townsend Letter Issue: December 2019 We’ve been fascinated by the wide range of clinical uses that have been reported for the hormone melatonin. Initially we just thought of melatonin as an agent to improve sleep or help one get over jetlag faster. In the 1990s melatonin’s anticancer effects were added to the […]
Could gut microbiota be driving sleep disturbance and cognitive decline? This paper is part of NMJ’s 2018 Cognition and Mental Health Special Issue. The article can be seen in context, along with the rest of the issues here. Reference Anderson JR, Carroll I, Azcarate-Peril MA, et al. A preliminary examination of gut microbiota, sleep, and […]