Healing with Spiritual Healer Sujon Datta (Part 1)

[Music] Hi, welcome to another episode of the Healing Podcast. This is the place where you learn and get inspired to heal in, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction in every area of your life. I am Karen Millinger-Host and I believe that what we resist, persists, and that we cannot change what we don't face.

And it was finally when I accepted this reality and invested time, energies and money, into myself, in professional support, that my life was completely transformed. And now I'm on a mission to demystify this process for you to inspire you to do this work yourself. Today, I am beyond excited to have with me, Dr.

Uma Nayido, who is a Harvard-Drained Psychiatryist, a professional chef, a nutrition specialist, who is considered a nutritional psychiatrist, pioneer, and best-selling author of two books, the first that I read when he came out, this is your brain on foods, and her recently released book, Calm Your Mind with Food, which is a nutritional first approach to psychology. In addition, Dr. Naido founded and directs the first hospital-based clinical service in nutritional psychiatry in the US.

She's the director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, and director of nutrition psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital Academy, while serving on the faculty at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Naido has been asked by the American Psychiatric Association to author the first academic text on nutritional psychiatry.

Dr. Naido has been featured at the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Harvard Health Press, Goop, Healthline, Martha Stewart, and she has even been invited to be the English royalty. We spoke about her journey to incorporating nutrition as a fundamental foundation of mental health and her psychiatry practice.

How many physicians are unaware of the role that nutrition plays and how that is changing with over 20% of medical schools having a robust nutritional component in medical education, why what we eat is so important to our mental health, how when you start to improve what you eat, it works as a catalyst for healthier habits and better physical health, and why sugar and carbs are having a negative effect on our society, and on tips on how we can enjoy small amounts of the carbs that we love, and more tips on what to eat and what not to eat to treat and alleviate both inside and depression. To learn more about Dr. Umanaido, please check on her website at umanaidomd.

com. Please follow her at Dr. Umanaido on all social media platforms.

And if you want to eat foods that are good for your brain and health, but don't like to cook, please try on her mood food meals with daily dose, which delivers freshly prepared meals using her brain food recipes and space. And please subscribe to Dr. Umana's newsletter on sub-tack.

And if you're a physician or a student training, Dr. Umana is an instructor with her own master class that you can find there on brain health and sign up for Dr. Umana's course in nutritional psychiatry.

Please share this episode with everyone, you know, especially those who are facing anxiety and depression and can benefit of this amazing free information as well as tools that they can use to heal into achieve higher levels of satisfaction with your health and in your relationships and in every area of your life. Welcome to the healing podcast, Dr. Naido is such an honor to have you here.

Thank you so much, Ken. I've been really looking forward to speaking to you. Thank you.

Thank you. I listened to your book. I'm a bit of a, I'm addicted to audio ball.

Um, so I listened to your book back in 2020 at the start of the pandemic when it came out and just loved it and highly recommended it to every client I have, every friend and especially in those times when we were all struggling so much. And it, I've been really lucky that I eat really well for physical and weight maintenance and so it really reminded me or kind of gave me, um, you know, an understanding of maybe I dealt with so much stress in my life like getting divorced and moving countries and cities because I ate so well because I eat a lot of land origin. Eating a lot of black beans and and avocados and high magnesium kind of helped me and now when I help people who are going through really hard times with coaching is always like, you know, food is not only good for our health but for mental health.

So your book was just amazing and validating. Um, would you share with our audience a little bit about your journey into not only psychiatry but working on this field of nutrition and prevention, which I know, um, I worked with medical staff, my whole life, my married to a surgeon. I told to surgeons and doctors and pediatricians my whole life through a previous business.

So I know how hard it is to deviate from the norm. Right. Um, well, thank you for that question.

Um, you know, I'm at the beginning of the pandemic I wrote, uh, this is your brain on food and a few months ago, published my second book, calm your mind with food, which is actually. Interesting you referenced the pandemic and I will answer your question in a second because that book helped people through the pandemic. But what I was seeing during the pandemic was this heightened level of anxiety.

And it's often hard to see because many people are high functioning and they power through that anxiety, but it is what I was seeing in everyone calling co workers family, friends, everyone and myself. So I thought it was valuable to use food in a very focused way for those symptoms as well. So I hope people will check that out.

Um, but you know, my journey was really, uh, coming from a family that is South Asian and my mom is a double-ported physician. So I was one when she was in medical school and during the day, I chose not to go to preschool. Um, but I wanted to spend time with my, my maternal grandmother, I would show who my first book, this is your brain on food is dedicated.

And from her, I just naturally, I love spending time with her, but I just actually learned, helped the eating because she would prepare fresh food every day. We'd pick vegetables from the garden. She'd be entertaining me.

My grandfather would help teach me yoga and meditation. And we, you know, she'd prepare meal and we'd sit down together and eat a meal at lunchtime and the evening my mom would add with pick me up. But I learned those things and and they were part of my life.

So the first time I liked to joke that the first time I met a pop talk was when I moved to Boston to study. It was not only a highly unusual food, it's a highly addictive food. And it was very unusual for me to eat a sweet breakfast or try a sweet breakfast, be not actually be eating food.

But it's such a, it's so emblematic, right? Of what happens with the cultivation process, but also as we tend to have countries in the world that want to be like the US and adopt also the eating habits which, which when you look here, you know, are that that big said. I followed a path of what I really love to do.

I was always encouraged by my plans to do that and discovered that in psychiatry residency as learning about these heavy duty medications, which are life saving to the lives of some of my patients, but it's not necessarily the first option for everyone. But no one was really checking or asking about what people were doing for lifestyle, sleep, exercise, what they were eating every day. And I recognized that it was a gap and started to sort of pursue that at the same time, a lot of the science of the gut microbiome is emerging.

And I had the opportunity to start the first clinic in nutritional lifestyle and metabolic psychiatry, which I've run. And that lead to my first book and then my first book, let's the second book. But it therefore helped create the platform for the work that I do today.

But in large part, the path was always just following what I thought was would be good for people. What would be good for my patients, things I learned as a child. I'm not a perfect each other.

That's all I'm saying. But I'd recognize that understanding that you eat healthy whole foods, understanding that nutrition is important to mental well being. And then how to prepare for it became important.

So my journey to come to school was really about honoring that passion. And I didn't realize that it would fit so neatly into everything else I was doing because interpreting a recipe for a patient or client or someone I'm working with is therefore another step to just help them along that path. But that's, you know, that's how I came to do what I do.

So interesting and how this is more on a personal note, how difficult has it been to talk about this with the very formal sort of medical community and psychiatry are they sort of very open to it and or they're like, I don't know, you know, not not serious or not medicine and right. You know, I think that I've been fortunate that I've generally had very positive open responses to my work, but that doesn't mean that everyone practices it or believes it. I think there's so many people who think this is very soft science, despite the mounting body of evidence behind it, which I reference in my books, which was very important to me that I had every reference listed so people can see that this is back by science.

I recognize it's evolving science and we are doing ongoing research to know more, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I think the support of my hospital and where I work is very important. But at the same time, there are still people who don't think it's how we should be treating patients now.

The issue is not the only way it's just part of the solution exactly to the many things that we offer, but also you have to recognize can doctors do not study nutrition so they don't have the language of the knowledge. We just published the first world that's coming out in a few weeks wrote and published the first textbook from medical students, the Department of Division of Nutrition faculty at Harvard, wrote several chapters in it on nutritional psychiatry. We did this because it's going to be available to students everywhere.

We wrote this because there is a gap. And some medical schools are doing better than others, but only 20% of US medical schools have some nutrition education that is really robust. So I think that sometimes it also comes from not knowing and sometimes it basically feels like people are just wanting to pull out a prescription pad whether it's on the computer or you know, long years paper anymore, but you know, however it is that that's what they want to do because that's what they most comfortable doing.

Also, I would say that generally clients come in and they want they want an urgent solution, you know, because they're not feeling good. So there's that pressure on both sides. It's not just the doctors, either, you know, pulling out the virtual prescription pad.

No, I hear you and I asked the question because I know that there's that gap within just medicine of learning and understanding nutrition and like you shared in your books. We also had a cancer scares with my husband who's older and when we got sort of the diagnosed, we went very heavy into nutrition and what can we eat right the enzymes in all the vegetables that kill cancer, that's a mental sugar is to growing cancer and yes, I remember learning so much that I was like and he was he's a surgeon learning so much that he's like, why don't we know this right why is it not part a big part of the solution. So it's so interesting.

So in both books you talk about be a mental health pandemic or crisis in the US. Yeah. Why do you think that is what are all the factors affecting mental one thing I don't think that we even in the US have enough resources and the pandemic made that worse.

I think that mental health has always been in a crisis to can it's just the spotlight has not been shaman it until the pandemic sort of uncovered what was going on and so many more people suffering anxiety increased by 25% you know this from research. So it became more obvious and became front and center, but they're not enough clinicians in the world to actually help individuals with mental health problems. So I feel that at a grassroots level.

There need to be other solutions and food is something that is right in front of you because we have to eat and eat more than once a day usually. So I think that having these options and tools in the toolbox become critical for people and I will tell you so many of my patients find that it heals other things for them. They might lose some weight they heal their skin conditions they just start to feel physically better because with that healthy habit of starting to really pay attention to how they're eating.

But it's tend to follow they want to exercise or work or spend time outdoors and go to the gym you know drink drink mostly water or just clean liquids sort of not soldiers or diet soldiers or energy drinks. They start to feel better and that really opens up a plethora of things that they want to do to lead a healthy life you know and without a healthy mind and without our best brain health really the rest of us does not function. So let's start from the beginning so how does what we affect our mental health so if someone in my audience is listening to this and like what are you talking about like what do you mean when I eat and are not aware of sort of the God mind connection.

So there are several mechanisms that are being researched the one that most obviously and easily explains the connection between modern food is the gut brain connection the gut and brain. originated from the exact same cells in the developing human embryo, then they divide up a part and form two separate organs. But then they remain connected and automatically and physiologically by the tenth cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, which allows for bi-directional two-way messaging of chemical neural transphytus.

So these organs are constant communication. Now you also then have to realize that 1995% of cell tone and end its receptors are the gut. So it is also in the body, but there is a very big collection in the gut and that is exactly where food is being digested.

So if we were to unpack it for a second, I say to people, "Well, what happens when you take a headache, and you know, they say, "Well, I take a glass of water, swallow the pool, and I hope my headache goes away in ten minutes." And I say to them, "But the, you know, the pain is in your head while you're swallowing the pool." They look at me, you know, like I have two heads and I say, "Well, I just follow me here, you know, explain this to me."

But it very clearly explains you swallowing a pool. It's going to a digestive system. It's interacting with the microbes.

It's interacting with, you know, your gut microbiome. But it's healing a pain that's usually in some out of your neural tissue. That, in that way, I start to explain to them that in a similar way with slower and more complicated reactions, the food that we eat does get digested, it does interact with the trillions of microbes in the gut microbiome.

But the breakdown products also, ultimately, over time have an impact on the brain. Now, when the good microbes are active and we are feeding them with fiber and substances like plant polyphenols and lip trins and vitamins and minerals and proteins that they need, they break down. They break down products of things like short-chain fatty acids, which are very healthy for the gut and healthy for the brain.

But when we're eating a typical standard of makeup diet, which is called a sad diet for that reason, it's very high in processed, ultra-processed foods, junk foods, fast foods and sugar. And hyphryptose, conserved in those types of products, those foods feed the bad microbes. And the bad, when the bad microbes thrive and take over, they cause dysbiosis or inflammation in the gut.

And this leads to multiple problems. This leads to many, many problems. So, you know, inflammation in the gut leads because these organs are connected, leads to inflammation in the brain.

And that's one way to think about it. And other mechanisms include oxidative stress and other things. But it's important to understand that how we eat impacts this process.

And if you continue to eat that unhealthy way, it's going to worsen the process. And for my work, I then see an increase in symptoms of things like depression and anxiety, where they might have been less anxious or less depressed before. Or not even had symptoms before.

So, based on the chemical breakdown, when you're eating the proper foods and omegas and fibers, there's a release of those chemicals that make us happy like oxytocin and dopamine. Does that play a role as well? Or is it just inflammation?

There's no release of that. So, it's all a system. It's all an interactive system as a food is getting digested.

Certainly, there are foods that can enhance and help things like so, it's all dopamine. I think the process that we understand is that when the food that we eat is really attracting the negative microbes, that's really when you get that upset of the gut microbiome. And you start to reach dysbiosis and inflammation, because those bad microbes are being fed and they are thriving.

So, they are taking over that environment. Yes, the neurotransmit is always involved, but if there is preponderance, there's a preponderance of inflammation and sort of this dysbiosis going on, even that system is overwhelmed. So, there isn't the ability to function at their peak.

Okay. So, what if you would say someone suffering from anxiety, and you had to come up with a very short list of things that they should stop eating to feel better? What are those things?

In my book, "Come You Mind With Food," I've written an anti-exhaphing list. I've broken down the foods into macronutrients and macronutrients, so that people understand the difference and they can build in those foods and carbohydrates. So, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, all of this stuff.

But the other thing I did is I created a protocol that people can even just follow a week at a time or a day at a time. Don't overwhelm yourself, start with it in a simple way. Although there are many, many foods in the book, I like to break it down with the pneumonic calmed, C-A-L-M-S.

C-A is for colon, which you get from eggs or even legumes. C-A is also for vitamin C, and it's also for extra dark, dark natural chocolate. A is for ashwagandha or antioxidants.

Ashwagandha actually has a good amount of evidence for healing anxiety and helping anxiety. But it doesn't taste good, so supplemented, it pulls up, it is probably the best way to go. Antioxidants you get from colorful vegetables, different berries, lots of foods, even spices, have written antioxidants, so lots of good options there.

L-O is for liquids, and the reason I mentioned this is dehydration can cause you to feel anxious. So, having calming teas, having a glass of water when you wake up in the morning and sipping water throughout the day is very important to help keep your body hydrated and keep you less anxious. M is for two things.

More omega-3s and magnesium. Magnesium is one of those micronutrients which many makings are deficient in. So, I think it's just helpful to be eating those amacardos, eating foods that are rich in magnesium, and then S-S-F-F-V-S-N-O-B.

So, spices, very rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties, easy to add into your food, easy to flavor your food, but also have positive benefits. So, you know, from the book, I just pulled those foods because I'm only people to have something at their fingertips, but there is also what I like to guide people with is that anti-anxiety shopping list, which helps them to decide. It is very helpful and you go through the grocery store and where to go and what to get and what to avoid and I love your discussion of diets and the difference between the Mediterranean diet and also being able to incorporate our cultures and what we yes just for and I sort of identified with you because I eat very Mediterranean, but I love beans and legumes, you know, an avocado, like you were saying, which is important to make things that we want to eat, right?

Right, because many people think healthy food can't be tasty and one of the reasons I wrote the recipes to include Mediterranean flavors was to bring in spices from different cultures, not only to be more inclusive, but because to your point, we want the food to be flavorful. Yes, including Asian cultures with miso, and spay, and I actually did try the miso, glaze, sparigas, and sweet potatoes. So let's just stay with food before I ask about the evidence because most of my audience are physicians and professionals and we know that they want to hear about the evidence.

Something that why I remember hearing in your book, The Latest One, and call your brain with food, you recommended very little pastas and bread and white flour and can you explain to my audience why eating low GI foods and explain to them what that is, but why does it hurt and say it? So, you know, it's not these foods are bad. It's just that I want people to eat them in moderation and be aware of what they're eating and what they're eating.

It was once a week, right? Once a week. I suggest a man-made bread or pasta.

Exactly. These types of foods are things that people are favorites and things that people enjoy and it's hard to give up, but I have a few solutions for you. One is try to understand that with the pastas, they'll be tend to eat in the US and the types of bread that be consumed.

They are highly processed and they tend to just break down simply into sugar. And the glycemic node of these types of foods definitely is worse for our system, worse for metabolism, spikes, glucose leads us towards insulin resistance 88% of Americans. I hope to have some research has shown this, some form of abnormal metabolic factor, not full blood metabolic syndrome, but maybe some abnormality in their blood panel or other symptoms.

So, we are all a product of what we're eating. The reason I wanted to guide people in this way is there are a few things. When you need those foods all the time and in the portions that Americans eat, that it's a massive load of not just carbohydrate, but think about the carbohydrates, cauliflower's a carbohydrate, very different nutrient profile, high in fiber, multiple nutrients, and micro nutrients, so fewer things, lots of good stuff.

There's also carbohydrate and its breakdown is very different from a pasta or piece of bread. So, with pasta and bread, with certainly cooking pasta and cooling it allows for a process called starch retrogradation, which then makes the glycemic index of that food lower. Same thing with rice, but I want people, you know, there's a lot of evidence and some are not about cooling rice and all that, but the same principle works, same thing with potatoes and same thing with bread.

So, with bread, I always suggest people go for a more wholesome, artisanal loaf of bread like sourdough. Sourdough has fermentation in it as part of the process, so there's a lower sugar content naturally by the process of fermentation. That's where it's one of my go-to brands.

But this doesn't mean we have to give up these foods. We need to think out of the box about how do we have that same flavor, feel, texture, crunch, enjoyment, but make healthier swaps, zucchini noodles, spaghetti squash, you know, having that baked potato, baking it the day before, letting it cool overnight and eating it the next day, heating it up and adding your toppings and veggies to it, very different product, very different glycemic index. There are also tons of recipes now for alternate forms of bread made without an ultra-processed flour, made with seeds, made with lentils.

I've seen all sorts of things and tried them. So, I think that it's not that I want people to feel they're giving these up, but you created from different things. A few days ago, I launched, my audience has been asking me about food and meal plans and I launched my own meal plan that I developed with a company called Daily, the Daily Doe Smears and it can be delivered fresh food anywhere within the US.

But to develop these recipes, I used lower glycemic flowers. I used fresh foods made into something, you know, even pancakes in this menu, but they are made from actual whole food. They're not made from an ultra-processed grain.

So, you know, we switched out the flowers, I used very little sugar in the food, but we still making it flavorful and delicious. We use a lot of spices, not so that it's spicy, but that it's flavorful and it has those antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefits. So, there is a way to still have our foods, but, you know, we have a mini bagel in the menu and it's made with a different type of flowers, so not the ultra-processed flowers that we use, you know, that we tend to get if we just have a bagel from a straw.

It's also a very different size and it's, you know, paired with a rich protein and some vegetables, so that has a good balance. So, it's just how we put our foods together and how we think about it is also important. What a fantastic business idea.

And I remember especially with the pandemic, ordering like blue apron and it was amazing how they incorporate at least three vegetables in every meal. And so, they had rice with with char and, you know, bok choy and it's, yeah, that's amazing. So, daily dose, okay, we're gonna recommend it in the podcast to everyone.

I think it's a fantastic way, especially for families who are working, don't have time to cook and they want things either easy to prepare or already prepared. So, it's okay to cool down the pasta and then you can warm it up again in the microwave or the stove or do you have to eat it cold for a better... No, no, no, you don't have to eat it cold.

It's just that the cooling process the day before the night before will help that process. And then, you know, the thing that I want people to think about is when they make it the next day, they can heat up the baked potato, the microwave or how all gently heated in the oven and their toppings, same thing with the pasta or that type of thing. I have a recipe for a healthy-ish mac and cheese in my book, "Camiobind with food."

And what I do is you can make the whole dish the night before. It's actually great. We created it for Thanksgiving a few years ago and cool the whole dish and then bake it the next day.

I'm amazing. So, you know, that's that's I want people to think about it conceptually like that. You don't have to eat it cold.

That would be yeah. You're breaking all kinds of Italian rules. I was married to an Italian family and then you kill the idea of it has to be authentic and it has to be right off the thing but I love and something I helped my clients with I love pre-cooking meals and making a big batch of lentils and vegetable soups or black beans and cooling it off.

What's your thoughts on freezing food? Does it retain a lot of the nutrition or does it lose some of it? So it does.

I actually just want to mention if I could for a second, pasta and Italy. So the other thing to realize is that the pasta that you eat in places like Italy or fresh homemade pasta is a slightly different product. Most Americans eat a processed version that's out of a box.

Not everyone in the US is making their pasta. In Italy, the flour is different. It's obtained differently even if it's named the same thing here.

Here it's just more highly processed. I've often had clients who travel to Italy, enjoy pasta and don't gain weight. Any of the portions are different.

It's made from scratch and it's a healthier product than what we eat here. So just bear that in mind because we have to look at it a little bit through the lens of US food. But coming back to Transia question freezing, so it turns out that let's look at just frozen foods in the US.

Frozen vegetables and fruit, like berries, are flash frozen. So they're frozen at their peak. So they're a great product.

If you don't have the time to clean the cauliflower, the broccoli, frozen is fine. It still maintains its nutrients because it's like I said, it's frozen at its peak. If you're freezing food at home, I think you just follow safety guidelines around how you freeze it and how long you keep it.

If you've cooked the food, if it's a whole food, it should retain its nutrition. Obviously very different from a frozen pizza that you buy or frozen dinner. That's a very different product.

So freezing is fine. Just maintain rules around food safety and you know, eat it within a certain period of time. But if you're often do that with soups, for example, they make a big batch that allows me to have something healthy on a regular basis and also cook a large amount of the time.

Amazing. Let's talk a bit about the evidence on the relationship between what we eat and our mental health and anxiety and depression. Would you mind sharing some of the studies, both rat studies and human studies?

And when you've seen in your practice as well, to inspire people to change how they eat for feeling better. Because, as you mentioned, their anxiety is such a common thing in our society and in our everyday lives as parents, as workers, as everything. Right.

So you know, to talk about that, the amigurment brain is sort of the flashpoint for anxiety. We've talked, we've talked earlier a little bit about neuro transmitters, but GABA is also an inhibitory neuro transmitter. When GABA levels of bow, you know, the amygdala can be more reactive, creating more stress response, more anxiety.

And it turns out that we now understand that there are certain bacterial colonies in the gut that are related to GABA. So there's a colony called Bifurobacterium Adylocentus. And when there's anything that creates a shortage of this bacterial colony to produce GABA, because it's produced by some of these gut bacteria as well as other ways.

And this gut imbalance leads to a shortage. This also means that that individual may experience high-planned anxiety. So what I go through in the book is some of that evidence behind the different bacterial colonies, what we know about different neuro transmitters, different bacterial colonies that exist like Bifurobacterium, lactobacillus, many of these.

We sort of, we are uncovering some of that evidence now. So it's no longer just, oh, you know, we can each, to feel better, we are slowly understanding on a deeper level what that means. Let me give you an animal study that I thought was fascinating.

There was a study that looked at that, that took the microbiome from individuals with active symptoms of schizophrenia, which is a pretty serious mental illness. And they transplanted them. It's in my first book.

They transplanted them into germ-free mice. And what this means is the mice do not have a microbiome. So they put the, did this transplant into the mice and the mice developed symptoms of schizophrenia, active schizophrenia.

So what I thought was powerful about this was, you know, that it translated and that it could be seen. And it also speaks to the power of the microbiome. And what material is genetically coding, what it contains, what's in the trillions of microbes that reside there.

So I think if anything, I just want people to understand that it's not, it's not that we are prescriptive, but we are gaining more and more traction in the research and understanding more and more about the gut microbiome, the research in the gut microbiome, the mechanisms like inflammation, oxidative stress, the gut brain connection, and so many more, you know, the stress response, the HPA axis and that kind of stuff. So it's, if someone is interested and has an open mind, you know, reading through this material, looking at the studies, becomes a way to fill in the gaps of what we may not know, what a person may not know, and decide, you know, do I want to try this out? Do I want to maybe correct my diet or clean up my diet or a little way and see how I feel.

But it is where we simply do not have enough therapists, let alone doctors to treat individuals, you know, if someone is suffering and by all means if it's an emergency, the emergency room in the US, we have 911 and the emergency line for mental health is 988, by all means use those. But if you just struggling at home and you're managing otherwise, maybe looking at how you're eating can be very powerful to help you. Very powerful and I do highly recommend both books because it goes deeper on all the different research and recipes and examples and it's amazing.

So one of the objectives of the healing podcast was to expose the audience to very different healing modalities because combining them all and it takes healing to the next level and you know what works for one person might not work for the other. In your practice, Dr. Naido, when you obviously incorporate nutrition, what other modalities do you find that have been more effective for you in treating anxiety and depression which are the most common issues that most of us face.

Like I know you talked about cognitive the cognitive behavioral therapy which is the understanding of the thought, causing anxiety. But what other modalities do you have found effective in your practice? So the cornerstone is nutrition but it's really an integrated and holistic approach to mental wellbeing.

So lifestyle factors include things like how are you sleeping? What can we do to correct your sleep? What are you doing for movement or exercise?

You know what do you feel up to doing? Can you start walking on the treadmill, walking the dog, walking to get a cup of coffee or the newspaper just to get your body moving and can we build from there? Yoga and meditation.

Some sort of mindfulness practice. Mindfulness that works for you. For some people it's just closing their eyes and imagining a beautiful scene, maybe somewhere they've traveled or something they've seen on television to calm them, to feel, to feel better.

It's a vision of the mountains or a vision of the ocean, something like that. It doesn't have to be a formal meditation but it could be what works for them. And then I also really care about outdoor time, 10 minutes of exposure to sunlight with not only eyes facing sunlight but our skin having the benefit of sunlight, it leads to about 80% of our vitamin D for the day and enough low vitamin D leads to high anxiety and depression.

So just making sure we get our vitamin D through outdoor time, some sunlight and then prolong your sunscreen or your sunblock. And you know I also really think that a breath work exercise is one of the best things for people to practice. Learn box breathing or learn some form of breathing exercise, alternate cross-world breathing.

There's very, there's several simple ways and where I find this is powerful as I get my clients to practice it but they're not having an anxiety attack or panic attack when they're feeling relatively okay because then when it does hit, when it happens they can lean into that breath work exercise. So just a few of these different things, you know really who exercise in movement, it's what appeals for some people, it's also including things like acupuncture, massage, many, many things that it's all about healing, it's all about helping our body along to feel better. Absolutely, I know that when I was going through the worst times in my life doing yoga twice a week because I had a really hard time meditating, it was so therapeutic.

Just moving your body and feeling the stretches and going through the whole flow. What are your thoughts before we end the episode? What are your thoughts about EMDR?

This is something I practiced, I don't practice, went to EMDR therapists to sort of feel those varying grains subconscious sort of negative beliefs that sometimes fuel the anxiety that we feel about. Yes, yes, I think it's very powerful for people that it can help with all these modes of therapy, whether it's CBT, different types of psychotherapy, different forms of treatment, you know from even ECT, TMS, vaginal nerve stimulation, there's a huge plethora of things. I think that's what works for the individual.

I'm really all about even when it comes to food all about diet, visualities, I think if it's something that has worked for you that you found a good person you're doing to work with, I think that's fantastic. So it's certainly something some of my patients have done and has been very helpful. So it's all part of that healing journey and it's about putting together the formula for yourself that's going to work the best.

Yes, yes, it's very individual. Well, Dr. Naido, thank you so much for your extremely valuable time.

I really, really enjoyed both books and I follow you on all platforms and I love your videos and everything you have to say. I ask all my guests, what does healing mean to you? I think that for me healing is when I am spiritually, mentally and physically aligned and I work on that all the time that are my sets of spiritualities and check that I am psychologically feeling sound and if I'm not, what's the reason that I'm not and that I'm physically, that I'm physically in touch with what's going on, that I'm trying to be active and all of those things include nutrition.

So it's one way to bring my world together. Thank you very much and thank you so much for your valuable time. Thank you, Candace.

I'll be right back with you. Great questions. Thank you.

Bye bye.