How do you integrate the Mediterranean diet into your food plan? And what does that even mean, the Mediterranean diet? I had that question, and this video is all about the solution. And to find the solution, I went all the way back to the origin of the Mediterranean diet, Siracusa in Sicily, to tell you about the fundamental principles of the Mediterranean diet, and I had a problem that I solved.

I’m going to tell you all about it in this video. Hey everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board-certified psychiatrist. I’m one of the original Nutritional Psychiatrists thinking about how food impacts your mental health and brain health. We can all agree the modified Mediterranean diet or the modi Medi diet, which was the diet used in the SMILES trial. That’s the historic trial that showed using a Mediterranean diet can help people who have clinical depression reach full remission. It’s a great trial. We’ve got other videos up on that, but I want to get into what do we do with that data? How do we integrate a Mediterranean diet into what we eat and what does that even mean? Let’s talk about it.

Now, why do you need to know about the Mediterranean diet? Because your brain health, your mental health, that’s the most important asset you have and the data keeps coming in. The more of the ultra-processed foods we’re eating, the higher the risk of depression, up to 50-60% increase in your risk of depression. Exactly the opposite happens when you eat a Mediterranean diet.

But when you look around the Mediterranean region, what does that mean? What does that mean when you go to the grocery store? So I wanted to understand what are the foods of the Mediterranean diet, and then I’ve had a problem with this diet and I want to tell you about it.

When we think about the Mediterranean Sea or this Mediterranean basin, we’re often just thinking about the the northern part, the European countries, Italy, Spain, Portugal, amazing food. But we expand the options, the flavor profiles, and the reality of this amazing diet when we include the Levantine diet. This is moving into the Middle East with Lebanon, Turkey, and Greece, and then of course North Africa. It’s often not even included, but so much shoreline on the Mediterranean Sea, Algeria, Syria, Morocco, Egypt, all of these incredible, incredible culinary histories, and all of these diets are really at the foundation of human civilization. And so that’s where you want to really dial in.

What are the principles? What have humans always been eating? Because when we look at the data, it’s really clear. No matter how you say it, Mediterranean, Levantine, North African, we want to go back to these traditional foods. And Nutritional Psychiatry is all about inspiring you and exciting you to find new flavors, new ways, new kind of personal meaning to the foods you eat so you better support your mental health.

So let’s talk about some of the principles that I’ve tried to distill out from this whole region to help you today at the grocery store, tonight when you’re ordering dinner, tomorrow at lunch, apply these principles so you can get the benefits.

Now, real quickly, if you haven’t heard the benefits again, people who have clinical depression, about a third go into full remission when they adopt a Mediterranean diet. If you look at these studies, there’s just a few foods that people are adding in. And that’s what we want to do in Nutritional Psychiatry. We want to take the the research that’s coming out about how food impacts mental health, how foods can protect our brains from depression, anxiety, even things like PTSD and ADHD. And then what are the foods that that actually means we want to see on our plate, in your kids’ lunch boxes, when you’re planning dinner for the friends or for family? So let’s talk about these principles.

First, you’re getting a lot of different plants, you’re getting plant diversity, you’re getting leafy greens, you’re getting all the rainbows, you’re getting lots of nuts, beans, and seeds, and lots of legumes. And that’s what we’re always asking you to do in Nutritional Psychiatry. Think about that rhyme: seafood greens, nuts and beans, a little dark chocolate, rainbow celebrations, don’t forget the fermentations. That’s all about these traditional diets and helps you think about the food categories. With this principle, plant diversity, I’m asking you to think about 30 different plants a week to really kind of gamify or keep track of the plants that you’re eating.

Another principle you’re seeing around this region is lots of seafoods. Did you know that Morocco is one of the top exporters of sardines? As I was traveling in Italy searching for this healthy, wonderful Mediterranean diet and finding a lot of pasta, gelato, and espresso, as I got down to Sicily and in Siracusa. Sardines were everywhere. There was wild fennel and sardines in the pasta. It was amazing and delicious. Sardines filled with omega-3 fats, calcium, vitamin B12, complete protein. This is brain food. You get all these minerals, iodine, and this is what we’re looking for: these nutrient-dense foods that really form the foundation of our diet.

So, along with getting two to four seafood meals a week, we also want you to think about fermented foods. You see this throughout this dietary region, all types of different fermented dairies like yogurt and kefir. Two of the top recommendations I’m often making to patients, all these interesting fermented vegetables are really great to get on your plate.

And then a last and really the unifying principle, if we think about what we’re trying to achieve, Mediterranean, Levantine, or North African parts of the Mediterranean diet, we are trying to get you off of the ultra-processed foods. Right now, if you’re the average person in America watching this video, about 60 to 75% of your calories are coming from ultra-processed foods. These are foods that are made and they’re often marketed as really healthy, your protein bars and powders, your low-fat flavored yogurts, your chips and crackers and baked goods. They’re ultra-processed foods. When we eat more of these, our risk of anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorders go way up. When we eat more of these throughout our life, our risk of dementia goes up.

The whole point and the goal of Nutritional Psychiatry is to get you on these real whole foods that form the core of a foundational human healthy diet. I hope this video has helped you think about the Mediterranean dietary region and how to apply some of these principles of Nutritional Psychiatry to what you’re thinking about eating today, tomorrow, the types of foods you want to share with your families and friends. When we think about the Mediterranean dietary region, think about these different flavor profiles, all of the rich nutritional and culinary history. It’s just a fun way to eat. I hope this helps you get more healthy, wonderful, colorful whole foods into your diet.

Make sure to sign up, check out some of the free downloads about eating for mental health, eating more Mediterranean style diet. Make sure and leave some comments below on some of your favorite foods from this region. And I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks so much.

The post I Traveled to Sicily to Discover the REAL Mediterranean Diet appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

The science of self-esteem is not what you expect. We’re going to get into it in this video and teach you about building self-esteem. Everybody, welcome back. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board-certified psychiatrist, and this is a series we’ve been building on resiliency. How do you build more resiliency? We’ve already talked about a growth mindset, what that means. We’ve talked about self-efficacy, your ability to do one thing. And today we’re going to zoom out a little bit and we’re going to think about self-esteem, what that means, what the science tells us about getting more of it, having more confidence, having more of what in my clinic I talk about your stance, you know, that you feel confident, you feel calm, you feel clear, and you feel a real sense of knowledge about yourself, who you are, your strengths, your weaknesses, and your challenges. That’s self-esteem, everybody, let’s get into it.

It’s the background hum of am I worthy? Do I matter? Am I good enough? Sociologist Maurice Rosenberg developed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale in 1965. It’s still the gold standard that’s used in research. And Rosenberg asks us to think about our self-esteem simply thinking about the self in favorable or unfavorable terms. This isn’t really trying to say that, hey, you’re the best. It’s simply trying to understand favorable and unfavorable aspects of the self. What’s useful about this framing is it’s not about being the best. It’s about having a a stable, reliable assessment of yourself. It’s about having basic self-respect. It’s not about grandiosity. It’s about groundedness.

What’s surprising about the science? Well, think about it. When you want to build self-esteem, we tell kids they’re great, they’re smart, you’re special, you can do anything. No, this is not how we build self-esteem, according to the research. Researcher Roy Baumeister and colleagues did a massive review of the evidence around building self-esteem and found that unless you earn it, self-esteem, this praise, it doesn’t matter. We can’t just tell kids, hey, you’re great, you’re amazing. They’ve got to earn that praise for it to count. And just boosting self-esteem without actually having substance to it doesn’t improve academic performance, relationships, or mental health outcomes. In fact, it can backfire, producing more entitlement and fragility.

So what works? Researcher Jennifer Crocker developed a term called non-contingent self-esteem. This is self-esteem that doesn’t rise or fall based on our successes or failures, whether you got the promotion or whether someone texted you back. This type of self esteem is genuinely protective against depression, anxiety, and other mental health concerns.

Let’s talk about three science-backed ways that you can actually build self-esteem. Number one is living and acting in line with your values. A psychological researcher, William Damon, Matt Damon’s dad maybe, who knows. He looked at how you people build self-esteem and found that it wasn’t around like approval or achieving a certain goal. It was about acting with integrity, acting within your values. This is where that goal of mental fitness, of self-awareness, is so important because part of self-awareness is really thinking through what are your values. The more you know about your values, the more clear it is to you. How do you act with integrity? How do you then live a life that regardless of whether you’re winning or losing, you know that you’re living a life that is true to what you believe?

What this means in practice is every time you you keep a commitment, every time you choose kindness instead of, I don’t know, something else, every time you act within your values, you’re putting a little self-esteem in the self-esteem bank, is how I think about it on my couch in my clinical practice. That each time we’re putting points on the board, each time we’re trying to act within our values, we’re building self-esteem very intentionally.

Number two, practice self-compassion over self-criticism. That inner critic does not build self-esteem, everyone, and it really destroys self-esteem in my clinical experience. Research from the University of Texas, Austin, has shown that self-compassion is such a powerful tool for you in your arsenal of building self-esteem. The practice of this and what the research shows is treating yourself with kindness, especially after a setback or a failure, is incredibly protective for your mental health.

People high in self-compassion are less defensive, they’re less prone to rumination, and they’re more likely to seek improvement after a setback. That’s how we all want to be. This is why it’s so important. Recognize that inner critic and understand that it is not going to get you the self-esteem that you want, it’s going to destroy it. You’ve got to identify it, address it, be aware of it, and replace that with self-compassion. Use the voice of one of your best friends. What would they say? You call them up. They’re going to say something really compassionate and caring. You need to invoke that, pull it inside, and use that as a tool to build your self-esteem.

The third way to build great lasting self-esteem is to contributing something beyond yourself. Studies on volunteering, mentoring, get involved in the community all are shown to be really protective for your mental health. And I just found a study that blows my mind. Let me tell you about this. If you’re getting involved with things that give you a sense of purpose, you are protecting your brain like nothing else. Researchers recently did what’s called diffusion-weighted MRIs. There’s a very complex imaging study that’s really talking about the very intricate structure of your brain cells and how they connect. As we age, something called radio kurtosis goes down. This is a measure of kind of complexity of how healthy our brain cells are. Except, if you have a sense of purpose, the integrity, the actual architecture of your brain, and your brain cells improve. That’s why this third way contributing outside of yourself, thinking about who you can serve, thinking about how you can be of assistance to your community, to individuals who maybe don’t have as much as you do, this is a wonderful way for you to have a better sense of self-esteem, to have more integrity, to have a better sense of purpose.

When your sense of value is rooted in what you give, not just in what you achieve, it’s so much harder to knock over this self-esteem. You matter because you contribute, and that’s a stable foundation. So let’s bring this full circle as we think about your building more resiliency. Growth mindset says I can change. Self-efficacy says I can do this. And self-esteem says it’s worthy that I try. These in reinforce each other. This is how we can build a more stable sense of worth, how we can contribute to one another, and how day in, day out, regardless of the rise and fall of the events in our lives, we can have a stable sense of ourselves, we can have a sense of resilience, and we can know that we’re living a life according to our values and our purpose.

It’s such a treat to get to help you think through these things and to build more resiliency and more self-esteem. If you missed the first two videos on growth mindset and self-efficacy, make sure to check them out. Please leave some comments below, share these, save these, make sure that you’re giving them to the people in your life who need more resiliency, more self-efficacy, more self-esteem. And now everybody, please go out there, get after it. It’s such a delight to get to help you think about building more mental fitness. I’ll see you in the next video.

The post The Truth About Self-Esteem (It’s Not What You Think) appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

Do you need more resilience? Most of us do. This series is all about how you can build more resilience. We just talked about growth mindset. Now we’re going to get into one of the secret engines of having more mental health, and that’s self-efficacy. Please subscribe, please share this video. Give us some comments below because we want to help you engage with your mental health and build mental fitness. Everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board certified psychiatrist and therapist with over 25 years of experience in mental health, helping people build more resilience.

Let’s get into self-efficacy. So self-efficacy is the belief in your ability to do a specific task. With growth mindset, we’re thinking about your ability to be flexible, to learn, to take information from your failures and improve your processes. Self-efficacy asks us, do I believe that I can do this specific task right now? Can I take the dog for a walk? Can I call my therapist when I need an appointment? Can I cook dinner tonight? These basic things, so many of which we can do, and this is absolutely key to building resilience and better self-esteem.

Why does self-efficacy matter for mental health? Well, the research shows so clearly that high self-efficacy is related to lower rates of anxiety and depression. You have more tenacity and ability to change some of these health promoting behaviors. We talk so much about in mental fitness, your ability to engage in exercise and improve diet. When people have low self-efficacy, they give up on challenges more easily. They don’t follow through as much. They have higher rates of anxiety and depression. And the great news about self-efficacy is it’s not fixed. It’s one of these skills and abilities that we can grow and we can enhance. Let’s talk about how you can do that right now.

Let’s talk about the four science-backed ways that you can increase your sense of self-efficacy. Number one, master small wins first. Bandura called these mastery experiences and they’re the most powerful driver of self-efficacy. In my clinical practice, I talk about putting points on the board, which is finding things that we know we can do and doing them. These wins matter because it tells your brain on a biological level, you’re capable. So we want you to stack these wins because they compound over time and enhance your feeling of self-efficacy.

Number two, watch someone like you do it. This is called vicarious learning. And it’s a really important and easy way. We want to pick someone like you, not a superhero, not some Instagram fitness model. Because when your brain sees someone like you achieve something, it kind of recalculates. It re-estimates what’s possible and it lowers the bar for you to achieve that. So seek out communities, role models, or even stories of individuals who are similar to you or struggling with something similar, and that provides evidence to your brain that you can do it too. Their wins become evidence that yours is possible.

Number three, pay attention to your body’s signals. And I’m going to add onto this, interpret them correctly. Bandura’s research showed that so often when people get aroused, when they get nervous or anxious, we interpret this as a failure. I’m nervous, anxious, I must not be able to do this. So we want to use what’s called a reframe. Like an athlete does when an athlete walks up to the starting line and they feel nervous, they begin to visualize, they begin to get into their routine. They know that they’re nervous because they should be. They’re about to start a race. You want to reframe some of your physiological arousal and notice, okay, I’m nervous because I’m trying something new, which is great. I’m feeling a little anxious because this conversation is a big deal. How appropriate. You want to make sure and use that physiological signal as an indication to you that you’re building self-efficacy. You’re challenging yourself, not that you’re an incompetent failure. So try this out before something hard next time. I want you to take a deep breath. Name that feeling and see if it can help you understand that you’re gearing up for something. You’re not falling apart.

Number four, encouraging words. As a therapist, I’m really well versed in this and it’s something I love about my job, which is being able to see a little bit more objectively sometimes, the hope or the possibility or positivity that’s waiting for somebody in their future and encourage them with some good words. We’ve got to do this for ourselves and for those around us. Encouraging words are really simple. It starts with, you can do it. You’ve got this. I know that this is a big challenge. Using our ability to understand that encouragement is necessary. Why? Because when we’re building self-efficacy, we’re up against challenges. Building more resilience, building self-efficacy, a lot of times this is kind of branded as, I don’t know, like easy, simple work. It’s not. This is about addressing yourself in the face of some of your biggest emotional and personal challenges and making sure that you’re there for yourself. We do this by encouraging ourselves that we are up to the challenge and that if we’re struggling, if we’re failing, if we’re not meeting the mark, that’s okay. That’s information. And that information allows us to build more skills, build more processes, have more resilience and get back to that challenge another day.

Self-efficacy is so specific and key to our mental health. It’s your confidence in your ability to do stuff, to get stuff done. And it’s so important to rack up these points so that you begin to, as we’re going to talk in the next video, build self esteem. There are four ways that we’ve talked about building self efficacy in this video. Please comment below which one really resonates with you. Please subscribe so you don’t miss any of these videos. And most importantly, please share this with somebody who needs a little bit more self efficacy, a little bit of help building more resilience. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey everybody. I’ll see you in the next video. Thank you.

The post How to Build Real Confidence (According to Science) appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

Do you want to be more resilient? It’s one of the major attributes that folks who have great lasting mental health possess. So how do we build more resilience? Well, this three-part video series is exactly for that, talking about some of the major concepts and how science and research tell us that we can build more resilience, more self-esteem, more self-efficacy.

Are you with me? I hope so. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board certified psychiatrist. I have spent my whole career trying to help people self actualize, build self esteem, be more self efficacious, have a better sense of themselves. And in this video series, we’re going to try and accomplish that talking about some of the leaders in the field and what they found and how that gives us tools today.

Two students fail a test. One thinks, I’m not enough, I’m not smart enough. The other thinks, I haven’t figured this out yet. I’ve got to work harder, try harder, learn more. Same failure but two different brains in terms of reaction. That reaction dictates so much about the outcomes of these two individuals’ lives and it leads to the mindset shift that we’re going to talk about that you need today.

Psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford spent her whole career studying this and she came to understand there are two types of mindsets. A fixed mindset and this posits that our abilities, our intelligence and personality traits are fixed. You either have it or you don’t. This means that a failure is a real challenge because it’s a failure of you and there’s really not much you can do about it. A growth mindset means that we can develop things we can grow. We can change, we can develop skills, and that over time, our struggles really show us about our growth and our opportunities to grow. As the brain is learning and struggling and you’re struggling, you’re wiring yourself and you’re wiring yourself for a process that a growth mindset, the ability to grow and change is central to how you’re in the world.

This isn’t just motivational poster stuff. Carol Dweck’s research shows that when you have a fixed mindset, you’re at much higher risk for depression or anxiety and this makes sense because challenges and failures become personal and they feel permanent because things are fixed. People with a growth mindset are much more resilient after facing failure or challenges. They’re more likely to seek help. They have lower rates of depression and anxiety, and overall, they function better in their personal and professional relationships. Growth mindset really makes sense because the brain does have neuroplasticity. You know that word from all of our videos where we’re trying to get you into this brain grow mode, right? Harnessing the new science of mental health that we can affect change to the neurological level, and being in a growth mindset is a really big part of this. Growth mindset isn’t naive optimism, it’s biologically accurate.

Let’s talk about three science-backed ways that you can shift your mindset. Number one, I love this. I use it all the time in my practice. Add the word “yet.” I talk about how that extends our runway for whatever we’re worried about or thinking. I can’t do this – yet. I don’t have the skills I want – yet. My relationship isn’t as close or as deep as I want it to be – yet. It’s one little word but it creates a huge shift for us. Studies have shown just adding that word “yet” improves academic performance because it shows students you can be in a growth mindset, not in a fixed mindset.

Number two, praise the process, not the outcome. Dweck’s research showed very clearly that when you praise kids like, “hey, wow, you’re so smart”, it doesn’t help them in the way that we hope. We want to praise a process, not the outcome. Praising effort and strategy “wow, you worked really hard on that” is what really matters to developing a growth mindset and this really applies not just to students, but for all of us in terms of how we talk to ourselves. Understanding that engaging, strategizing, building skills, it might not lead to a win or the outcome we want, but that process and seeing ourselves involved in that process is absolutely critical. Remember, we’re here to play, not to win.

Number three, treat setbacks as information, not as failures. There’s exciting neuroimaging research about this that shows that people in a growth mindset actually process failures differently. Their brains get more engaged, almost more curious, because they’re trying to understand what happened as opposed to seeing this as a personal failure. This one of those really exciting secrets about a growth mindset. It’s not that you don’t feel failure or that you never fail. It’s that you look at those opportunities as moments to learn, as moments when you’re getting better, you’re building tools, you’re learning more about your process. And as you can see in this research, your brain actually processes failures differently. Now, they’re information for you to learn from.

This is something we do in therapy a lot where we get to ask questions. What does this teach us? How would I have tried things differently? What could have I understood better? We were able to take this information, learn from it, and improve our process. That’s at the core of growth mindset.

So do you have a growth or a fixed mindset? The truth is most of us have a mix of those things. Maybe you’re a little bit in a fixed mindset about your cooking, but you’re in more of a growth mindset about your relationships. The goal here isn’t to change overnight. It’s really to practice the self-awareness I talk about in Healing The Modern Brain as you’re building mental fitness. Pay attention to these places where you have more of a fixed mindset and use some of the tools that we’ve talked about in this video to shift yourself more of a growth mindset.

If this resonated, stick around. We’re going to talk more about building resilience through self-efficacy. Now that you’ve got a line on growth mindset, self-efficacy helps you achieve what you want and it’s one of those absolutely critical parts of mental fitness. Please stay tuned, subscribe, share this with somebody who needs it. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey and in the next video we’re going to talk about the importance of building self-efficacy. I’ll see you in the next one.

The post Why Some People Bounce Back Stronger appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

If you’re having trouble with your mood, with your focus, with your energy, there’s one word that’s buzzing all around social media that you have to know about, self-regulation. A lot of what you’re hearing, I don’t think really passes muster in terms of what you need to do to self-regulate. Let’s talk about it. Everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board-certified psychiatrist. I do a lot of therapy. I spend a lot of time with people working on self-regulation.

Now, let’s just start with a basic definition. What is self-regulation? This is our ability to notice what’s going on inside ourselves, inside our minds, in our bodies. And then this is the part I think is tricky, respond in a way that brings us back into balance. Self-regulation is about the fact that often when we have triggers, we’re anxious, we’re terrified or catastrophic, we’re really down and sad and have no motivation or energy. Those states, those mood states are something that we have to work on regulating.

Now, first of all, I’m a therapist. I like all of your feelings. In no way do we want to suppress or ignore or say that some feelings shouldn’t exist. We want to get rid of them more than we want to notice them and respond. If you’re having a grief reaction, sitting with sadness, loss and grief is a really important part of it. So the ability to self-regulate in some ways, to tolerate and sit with a lot of these feelings and hopefully some of the lessons and some of the meaning of them that become more apparent when we approach them and meet them in a state that helps us honor our feelings by using them to better self-regulate.

How do you know if you’re dysregulated? Let’s talk about some of the symptoms.

Now, a lot of times these fall in these classic clusters where people talk about flight, fight, freeze, and fawn as being these classic nervous system and emotional system responses when we become dysregulated, when we sense a threat, when we become anxious or catastrophic. Let’s talk a little bit about these.

Flight is when we want to flee. And all of us can see this in situations where, whether it’s emotionally or physically arduous, we’d just rather not handle it. The extreme version of this of course is we get very avoidant and we do flee.

Along with flight, the classic response of fight, this is when we get dysregulated, agitated, oftentimes we tap into our aggression, our voice goes up, we want to intimidate or dominate, we’re ready to fight. Well, that oftentimes on the other side doesn’t feel really that good when we’ve mobilized all that aggression and not thought through, self-regulated, gotten back into balance and think about what it is actually that’s upsetting us.

Next up is freeze. This one can be very uncomfortable. I’ve experienced it a lot. It’s terrifying. You just your body freezes up, you can’t move, you often have this experience of watching something happen in slow motion and you just don’t do anything. And so this is a very classic response that happens when we’re overwhelmed. Part of the self-regulation is noticing that, almost like numbing and dissociation that happens, noticing times when you really have to pay attention or you’ll get into a mild type of freeze dissociative response when there’s stress or anxiety.

Then a fourth one, you hear about some on social media, but also in the literature is fawn. This is when you’re in a dysregulated spot, you begin to become a real people pleaser. You want to fawn on people, you want to give a lot of others attention, you kind of in some ways dissociate or ignore the self by focusing on the service of others. So those are some of the ways that you might notice that you’re becoming dysregulated. If you see in yourself flight, fight, freeze or fawn responses.

Now, it seems obvious, why do we want to regulate? Well, it feels better to be in that state. It feels like a sense of mastery for people. But also our ability to self regulate really is at the core of our ability to communicate more effectively, to have healthy relationships and to connect with people. You’re really showing up with a measured sense and a good sense of who you are, how you’re acting and responding and communicating according to your set of values as well as what you’re hoping for in these relationships.

When we don’t self-regulate, we all know where that shows up. It’s when you get a critical comment at work, instead of hearing that constructive criticism, taking it in, thinking about the real pearl of truth in there, we fire off that angry email. Or when we’re in a fight with our partner or our spouse, and instead of really sitting back counting to 10, thinking and choosing about our words somewhat carefully, we say something mean or hurtful that doesn’t promote connection, doesn’t promote the conversation. So we can see really quickly where more regulation is so helpful again, not to deny that we get angry or sad or sometimes we’re obnoxious or even a little bit rude, but more so that we want to self-regulate. So we’re choosing our words. We’re being more thoughtful and meaningful in our encounters with others. So we’re working to build connection, closeness, and safety over time within our relationships.

So with those couple of examples, then it’s clear to see why we want to have a great toolbox for self-regulation, right? We can’t just be like, hey, box breathing. I love box breathing but we want to have a lot of different tools because we need to self-regulate in a lot of different settings in our professional lives and in our personal lives.

Let’s build your self-regulation toolbox. Number one is breathing. I don’t mean to throw any shade on box breathing. It’s one of the many types of breathing that’s so helpful when we’re dysregulated. When you take slower, deeper breaths, particularly a longer exhale, you’re signaling safety to the body. You’re activating that parasympathetic rest and digest and be calm part of your nervous system. You can do it right now. A nice inhale through the nose. Ideally, I like to hold there for a few beats. I like to feel my heartbeat, especially if I’m anxious and it’s pounding. Boom, boom. I like to really, again, self-regulate to first sense that. Then the long exhalation. That long exhalation gives you a feeling of mastery. It right away induces into your body a sense of calm. So controlling your breath and being able to control your breath for anyone, a performance athlete, race car drivers, astronauts, teachers, anyone who’s suddenly in the public and suddenly confronted with a lot of anxiety or a lot of anxiety inducing situations, breath and breath control is key to self-regulation.

The next tool in your toolbox would be the five, four, three, two, one sensing technique you want to ground in your senses especially if you’re prone to the freeze response and so quickly when you when you notice that coming on and you’re in a spot where you can use your senses to better self-regulate you want to think about seeing five things. What are five things that you see? Use your senses. What are four things that you feel? It can be the feeling of your your sweater on your arm. What are three things that you hear? Two things that you smell? And what’s one thing that you taste?

Grounding in your senses allows you to be more present in your nervous system. It also reminds us our nervous system has a lot of different functions that we can use to calm ourselves down. For example, the smell or scent of lavender, studies have shown has very calming effects and can help with some of that acute anxiety or situational anxiety. So use your senses to self-regulate your nervous system.

Your third, free amazing tool is movement. It’s one of the tenets of mental fitness and I don’t call it exercise for a reason because movement is medicine. All of this stress response signals to our body via all these stress hormones, that we need to move, we need to do something. So it’s very important, especially if you’re in a period in your life with a lot of nervous system dysregulation, you’re feeling a lot of stress, it’s very important to move your body and to broaden your definition. Stop sitting with a bunch of guilt that you don’t exercise and start moving. It can be a walk, it could be right now, shaking your hands in your arms. One of my favorite mentors, Jim Gordon, does these kind of jumping, shaking meditations. You do that for two minutes and it completely shifts how your nervous system is feeling. So using movement or stretching is another great one. Others include playing sports, going out with someone, hitting a ball back and forth. When I have patients who are oftentimes having a lot of agitation, a lot of struggle, I’ll recommend things like kickboxing, where you’re moving your body and you’re hitting things, you’re discharging all of that agitation. Use movement to help you self-regulate your nervous system. I know you know this one, but I always want to say it just to remind you, we all need encouragement to get out there. Move our bodies to take care of our minds.

Our next tool is co-regulation.

This is where we want to use other people or even animals in our life to help us settle our nervous system. Making eye contact, shaking a hand, even holding the door for someone are all things that you can use in terms of co-regulation with other people. In particular, with my patients, I recommend that you think about the people in your life who are naturally supportive or calming to you. They can be people in your family. They can be friends, they could be a therapist or a coach. Sometimes in a bounded way, some of these people at work, especially with work problems or professional mentors are really helpful. But making sure that you co-regulate, it’s really helpful when you’re upset and you see somebody who hears the same fact pattern and they’re not that upset by it. That’s curious. You see that they’re regulated and you settle down a little bit. I also like co-regulation because part of regulation isn’t just settling down. It’s also when we freeze, for example, like at a funeral and we don’t sit with grief, a very powerful, meaningful and important human emotion. Part of one of those phenomena of going to a funeral or going to a wake and mourning with people is naturally more of that emotionality, more of that sadness comes out, that healing, it’s so good for you. And it’s another example I see of co-regulation, right? When we’re together, when we’re connected, when we’re sharing in this emotional journey that we’re all on, we just do so much better in terms of our self-regulation, our ability to be present, our ability to communicate better and have more meaningful relationships.

And then lastly, naming your emotions. This is one of the major goals of psychotherapy and one of my favorite definitions of psychotherapy, putting our feelings into words, finding the right words to describe what’s going on inside of us. A lot of dysregulation happens, and I see this often in my practice, when people don’t know why they’re so panicked, they don’t know what they’re feeling. They haven’t maybe put a few things together that, of course, it makes sense that they’re really upset, really sad or really anxious. So being able to name your feelings and get specific about them allows you to begin to uncover more of what’s going on. And then of course, more of what you can do about it. It’s one of the most powerful muscles in your emotional health that you can build and really one of the most important parts of your toolbox, learning to get better at naming your feelings and understanding more of what’s going on inside of you.

Check out my other video on journaling and make sure and sign up for Mental Fitness Mondays, which is our tips that come in every Mondays, prompts, ideas, little tiny assignments. It’s kind of like therapy homework, things for you to do to better enact and improve your ability to self-regulate, improve your mental fitness, and live a whole and meaningful life.

Self-regulation isn’t just a buzzword that you hear on social media. It’s a really important set of tools that you build to help you better be present, help you have compassion for yourself, to help you better understand what’s going on with your emotional health, and most importantly, make good choices and do things about it.

These are some tools of self-regulation that we see in our practice help people do a better job. What we see over and over again is the more you practice these skills, the more you try to enact good self-regulatory practices, the better you get at it. So don’t get frustrated. It’s not like a good deep breath always works, but the more you do it, the more it will. The more words and more clarity you have with where you’re struggling in your emotional health and your ability to self-regulate, the more you’re clear about when this happens.

A lot of times there’s a specific context that we really struggle with in terms of our regulation. That’s great. Hone in on that. That becomes your therapy at homework, kind of your arena to get better at your self-regulation. Step into that challenge. Step up to all of your nervous systems ability and all of your ability to self-regulate, to connect, to have deep relationships, to build your mental fitness.

Everybody, that’s self-regulation. Thank you so much.

I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. Please sign up for our newsletter and subscribe here. Leave a comment or a question. It’s such a treat to get to spend a little bit of time with you encouraging you to do a better job with self-regulation and taking care of yourself to build your mental fitness. I’ll see you in the next video.

The post 5 Tools to Calm Your Mind & Feel Better appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

It’s time to really work on our mental health and get our mental fitness in top shape. And I want to talk about the tenet of self-awareness, which is really the foundation of that. I’m a board certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist. I’ve been in practice for over 25 years. And I love talking to people about self-awareness because it’s really where our journey of mental health starts. Also it’s an important every day, every week activity for us as we seek to understand our minds and build really great mental health and resilient mental fitness.

Self-awareness simply is our ability to notice what’s going on inside in our minds, in our bodies, and to observe it. That observational power, call it interoception, where we’re really sensing what’s going on. We’re used to that with our physical body where we feel something in our gut maybe, or we feel a little pain somewhere, you wonder what that is. The same thing happens with our mind. We have certain feelings or emotions and thoughts that get stuck. We have memories that come back to us. We have certain feelings that are associated with situations, maybe when we’re social or when we’re alone by ourselves. And so all of this and our ability to really cope and understand and deal with it hinges on this ability to harness self-awareness. I think of self-awareness a lot, just like a muscle. Our ability to really understand what’s going on and then to build the tools and resources that you need in times when you don’t know what’s going on to understand that.

As we’re building self-awareness, wanting to understand our feelings, our thoughts, our patterns and reactions, there’s a tool that stands out above the others that I like. It’s low cost. You have access to it right now. We all do. And that’s journaling. And a lot of times I think journaling gets a little poo-pooed by patients. I’ll bring it up and people say, “I’ve tried that” or “I don’t really like it.”

A lot of times it’s a similar thing I hear about therapy. And I have a theory about that. The reason is because it’s so hard for us to face some of these feelings and put words to them and it’s so easy for us to avoid them. Mental health and self-awareness is hard work. I think that’s one of the things that gets missed. The journal entry isn’t simply saying, dear diary, life’s going great. I look at a lot of my entries and usually in our journal entries, there’s some celebration and gratitude, but certainly it’s where a lot of us work out our struggles.

So how does journaling work? Well, it works similar to all talk therapies where we’re seeking to better understand our internal world using our words. There’s a difference between feeling lonely and feeling guilty and feeling sad with grief or sad with depression. There’s a big difference between the grief that you feel when you lose a pet or when you lose a loved one. Even in the joyfulness and delight that we feel at times, that gets really complex. Finding words for that complexity and really describing your internal experience in a detailed way is fundamental to all mental health work and fundamental to our mental fitness.

In our practice, one of our social workers, our lead therapist, Samantha, introduced me to this great PDF called the Feelings Wheel. It’s this graphic that has different adjectives that you can use to describe different feelings you’re having. I look at it and sometimes I think about it, it’s like a buffet of my emotional life. It has the spectrum of our feelings and there are lots of other words that we can use, but it’s a nice place to start if this is really challenging work.

How does journaling affect our mood and lead us to feeling good and feeling better? Well, the first is that you really quickly get a feeling of more mastery. Imagine that you’re in a dark room and you’re scared and you don’t know what’s there. You have no idea. Is it a dragon? Is it a monster? Is it some awful person from your past? Is it a ghost? And as soon as you know, you see what’s making that little noise, you settle down a little bit because you can then begin to plan and prepare.

Journaling helps us understand what’s there lurking in the dark. It gives it shape and form. It becomes something that we can address. It becomes a set of maybe goals that we can make. It allows you to have more of a sense of coming mastery. Once you know what’s in the dark and you can sit with it, you can observe it, you can describe it, you can begin to transcend your fear of it. And that’s really when the power of self-awareness and internal observation begins to pay off for us.

Another way that journaling is great is for improving our power of self-regulation. We’ve all had that experience, right? You wrote out that big email, all the agita, and you didn’t send it. Almost always we’re glad we didn’t send it. Maybe we just needed to kind of get it out there, but not really communicate that to the person. We needed to self-regulate. And writing down our feelings, honoring them, being angry, being rageful, being in love and putting it down there, it allows you again, to see it. And so this really helps us with our self regulation.

It’s a feeling we had, but feelings are a little bit like waves when you’re surfing. They come, they hit you, they’re powerful, and you’re kind of left in the wake. and then they’re gone. And a new set of feelings comes. So our self-regulation, our ability to surf in this analogy, our ability to feel some anxiety when you see a big wave coming, but go and position yourself well, paddle over it. That’s a really important way to think about self-regulation.

So that’s how journaling can help with self-regulation. It’s an extension of finding words for these feelings, observing what’s going on inside and describing it. And then the pattern of the slowing down and putting it down, bearing witness to it all helps us self-regulate.

Is there a right way to journal? People get all worried. You can journal in so many different ways. This is about getting your thoughts out. Sometimes I voice journal. I’ve got great voice memos, especially if I’m maybe driving along or sometimes when I’m traveling or pacing, I just love to kind of talk it out sometimes and you capture things about a certain moment that you’ll never remember. I have a traditional journal that I like to write in. This is I think an important aspect. I see a lot of people have small journals, bulky journals. I think it’s important to be efficient with your journal in my opinion. You can use anything, but it’s important to cherish it. I try to keep this mostly in my home or in my office. I’m hesitant to travel with it because it’s not so much that it’s private or personal, it’s more because it contains things that I want to be able to reflect back on.

I think that some people like to email and type. Some people feel that is putting too personal or private of information on the cloud. I think it’s also important that some people journal but it’s not always in the written word. There are a lot of people I work with who are very creative and their journaling is they’ll write a poem or visual artists might make something. When I work with clinicians and trying to help them in their clinical work. I’ll often note if they’re working with someone like a creative person, a dancer, a painter, a musician, just hearing about that process, it’s not exactly journaling in the conventional sense of putting words to feelings, sensing what’s going on, but it’s a form of expression, what’s going on inside.

So those are some of the different ways that I see people using this act of journaling. My other tip is get a pen that you love. I journal exclusively in these pens. I have them in a couple different colors, but it’s just what I find works the best for me, my hand, my pace. Have the pen you love, have a journal you love, and then creating space.

That’s the other thing I find people, you know, they schedule so much, schedule the gym, schedule date night, schedule our work obviously, but we don’t spend a lot of time scheduling space to sit with ourselves. It’s really the first thing to go. It’s one of the reasons that psychotherapy is often so powerful for people. People come back and and say “wow I haven’t been thinking about that really powerful, important thing going on in my life since last week when I saw you in session.” So the journal and having some protected time is helpful. It doesn’t have to be forever. Start with 15 minutes, fill one page, see what comes out.

And then I think the other tool that’s really important that people rarely bring to journaling, is people are really awful and mean to themselves about what they write down. They judge it, they critique it, they fear what people will think of it. This is a really natural part in early journaling, especially when you’re younger and it feels really consequential and you need to do something with this stuff. I write a lot, I publish, I want everything I write to be efficient and go out. But I don’t think like that for journaling stuff, that’s not what this is about. I think it’s much more about tuning and lubricating the machine, the engine, to keep it flowing and moving right. And then the stuff that you need to write what will come out.

That’s the part I like about journaling. It really allows me to keep getting back to those things that are true for me, like those values that I am either not enacting or I’m striving for but not reaching and to put it right down there. It’s almost just like a good therapist who will confront you gently, lovingly, but will confront you with the things that you’re doing to get in your own way.

How do you get started journaling? It’s so simple, but it feels daunting for people. Some of those feelings get in the way that are going to be exposed. You may worry people are going to find it, that you’re going to maybe not write the right words. This is a private document, not a lot of people are going to see it. The big challenge in journaling is getting it out. Journaling is definitely a place to put down our fear, or sad thoughts or loneliness or pain. But journaling is also an important place for us to recognize our triumphs, to really work on better expressing our gratitude.

A lot of times when people think about mental health work and inner work, they want to avoid it because it’s like all about the painful, awful stuff and what’s wrong with us. That’s a piece of it. But as I’ve learned from my patients and in my experience, the part that’s really great is also recognizing our joyfulness, our hedonism, our capacity for pleasure, of having gratitude for the things that fill us up.

For really like noting like you would mark it on a map. Wow, that’s a special spot. I want to make sure and get back there. You really need to do the same thing with our emotional lives. Wow, this connection is wonderful. I want to make sure and honor it. Wow, this trip was so great. Here are a few things that I want to make sure and remember, or I want to make sure and capture and carry forward.

So some of the prompts, things like what worked today or what was great today? I’m a psychiatrist. I like also getting into the feelings. How am I feeling right now? What’s been bothering me? What am I struggling with? I’ve been in a bunch of different workshops where some prompts ask people to think about their goals and things that are on the way and then some solutions.

Sometimes with journaling, I encourage people to have a little less form, to not have such a need for the structure, the productivity, the goal-driven behavior that drives so much of us. The idea that this needs to become a Pulitzer Prize winning journal of middle-aged male pain. It’s not what this is for. This is for helping self-regulate, helping to strive what’s going on, helping me become a better person, a better man, a better therapist, a better dad, a better husband. That’s the point of this journal.

Let’s look in Healing the Modern Brain for some great prompts. As I write in Healing the Modern Brain, self-awareness is at its most basic an act of self-discovery.

• Right now I feel the things I do best are
• The emotions I find hardest to accept
• My greatest strength is

These are all prompts that are in Healing the Modern Brain that sometimes help us get started when we look at that blank page and it feels maybe a little intimidating. Starting with a prompt is going to pull lots of great information about you. You can use these in Healing the Modern Brain, of course, as well as many, many others. It’s a great question for a friend who’s a journaler. “Hey, do you have a favorite prompt that you use?”

Mental fitness is the skills, the knowledge and the habits that give us a more fulfilling, a more insulated, happier life and allow us to deal with all of the mental health challenges that we’re going to encounter. The first tenet of mental fitness, how we take care of and build our mental health is self-awareness, our ability to understand what uniquely is going on inside of us, what we’re feeling, how we’re reacting to things, understanding more about our patterns in our emotional life.

Today, we’ve talked about journaling and it’s been such a treat to get to share with you some of my enthusiasm, but also my encouragement for you, some specific prompts and a request that you can really box out and make time for your internal process via journaling. It’s something a lot of people are doing more. I see it now on the plane. I’ll look over it. It’s not just me. We’ve got some fellow journalers. It’s a way of you understanding your internal experience of finding power in your words to describe what’s going on with you to really know that internal state. I hope this video helps you journal, helps you with your self-awareness, helps you build more mental fitness.

The post The #1 Tool to Build Self-Awareness (It’s Free) appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

How long has Nutritional Psychiatry been around? Well, it’s been at least a decade. This is the 10 year anniversary of my cookbook, Eat Complete, the first Nutritional Psychiatry cookbook. I wanted to talk to you about this book and about this project and a lot of people haven’t heard about it. It’s just absolutely wonderful if I do say so. It’s filled with these amazing pictures by a top food photographer, Ellen Silverman. And the book goes over 21 nutrients. It really shows you my early thinking about Nutritional Psychiatry.

Back then, boy, this is 10 years ago, I mean, just turned 40. And I’m thinking there are these nutrients that people don’t know enough about things like potassium, selenium or iodine and the impact on our mental health is just incredible. It also seemed to me then very clear that people were eating more and more of these ultra processed foods. We were losing food tradition and people were losing the ability to nourish themselves. That knowledge of what these nutrients do for your mental health. Once you learn it, you just can’t eat the same because you know you need the right nutrients.

And so these 21 nutrients, are what we highlight in the book. I talk about each one, why it’s important for your mental health, some of the research behind it, but then we get to the most important aspect for a Nutritional Psychiatrist. What foods have the most of these? Each nutrient has a couple of foods, five or six or ten, that are just more packed with that nutrient than anything else. Selenium is a great example, Brazil nuts. In fact, if you eat more than one or two Brazil nuts a day, you’re going to get selenium toxicity. Or iodine, which I mentioned earlier, there’s just a couple of foods, seaweed is one, that if you’re a vegetarian, you’ve got to eat seaweed or you’re not going to get any iodine. Why is that important? Well, iodine deficiency is the top cause of intellectual disability worldwide. So these nutrients are just absolutely important. Iron, magnesium, omega-3 fats and we thought about which fish has the most of these.

So we go into it in the book and through the sections, I talk about each of these really important foods. I give you top recipes in the book for each of the nutrients, because what we do is we take the top foods that have the most of let’s say potassium or magnesium, and we combine them in a way so each recipe has 40 to 50%, more than 100% in a lot of cases, than a few of these nutrients. The idea is that you’re eating for nutrient density, that each bite is just packed with the nutrients, the specific nutrients that you need for mental health and brain health.

This book came alive when my agent Joy Tutela and I went to see Karen Rinaldi, my publisher, and I pitched this big book about all kinds of things. You can see I was a young guy going to farmers markets, a young psychiatrist. And from the whole pitch, she said, Drew, I’m really interested in the food. Could you do a book just on the nutrients in the food? And could we do it as a cookbook?

We walked out of that meeting and Joy just couldn’t believe it. She said no one gets a four color cookbook anymore. We just walked into what was really one of the most creative projects that I’ve been involved with, getting to work with a food stylist, a chef, a recipe developer, an amazing photographer, an incredible editorial team and create really the first Nutritional Psychiatry cookbook. As you can see, the book is just filled with some of the most interesting recipes that I’ve ever gotten to collaborate on and develop. It’s been an absolute treat to see those come to life and to think about how we can combine these different foods, how maybe this book can help you expand your palate a little bit, and most importantly, how this book right here can help you get all of the nutrients that you need for your brain health and your mental health from the foods you eat.

That’s really been my goal in this space as a Nutritional Psychiatrist is to help you feed your brain, feed your mental health with real wholesome foods. I wanted to celebrate 10 years. Thank you Harper Books and Harper Wave. Thank you Joy Tutela and Karen Rinaldi. Thank you Jennifer Iserloh and the team that came together to cook and execute this incredible cookbook. Thank you for everybody who supported Eat Complete. It’s been a decade and I wanted to celebrate. Check out the book. Let me know what you think.

The post The Cookbook That Changed Brain Health appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

Cabbage is having a cultural moment and it’s also one of the most amazing sleeper foods for your brain and for your mental health. Hey everybody, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey, one of the pioneers in Nutritional Psychiatry. I’m a board certified psychiatrist in active clinical practice and I want to talk to you about cabbage.

If you’ve never talked to a psychiatrist about cabbage before, it’s okay. It’s going to be a great conversation for both of us because I’m going to get to share with you all of the amazing information from the perspective of the psychiatrist. Why cabbage is amazing for your brain health and your health and why it should be having the great cultural moment that it’s having right now.

What does cabbage mean to us? Well, I want to talk to you as someone who’s grown cabbage and prescribes cabbage. Luck, prosperity, and wealth. And right now, when we think about what we’re hoping for, what you’re hoping for here in 2026, I would say that we need a little bit of luck, some good fortune is a way to think about that, especially when we think luck favors the prepared. So how can we be doing this? All of my tips and hope that you’re working to achieve mental fitness. So luck favors the prepared, prepare your mental fitness. Prosperity and wealth, this is the idea that we’re going to be generative. And right now, especially with all of the headlines we’re seeing about a lot of destruction, a lot of decay, a lot of really challenging moments, to be sitting and meditating with your cabbage on wealth and prosperity, centering down a bit, thinking around your goals for 2026.

Cabbage should be a centering and focusing food for you this year because cabbage has been there. Cabbage is one of those foods that sustain us through all difficult and challenging times in history. And the cabbage, as any farmer knows, is a little bit challenging to grow. Unlike its cousin kale, where you get hundreds and hundreds of leaves from a kale plant. But from the cabbage, just one head. One head you’re watching grow all season long, you’re protecting, and then there you have it, usually in the late fall, sometimes after a frost, so it sweetens up just a little bit.

Why is cabbage an amazing food for right now? In 2026, we need foods that are simple, wholesome, and are economical. And cabbage fits the bill. This is one of the reasons it’s a key traditional food. When we think about this trend we’ve seen in health and mental health to start eating a more traditional diet, what that really means is eating more simple plants, more traditional foods like cabbage and all of the wonderful things that throughout history, so many cultures have done with it.

Let’s get into the Nutritional Psychiatry details about one cup of purple cabbage. Now we’ve picked purple cabbage for a good reason. I’ll tell you in just a minute. So first vitamin C, this cruciferous vegetable cabbage has got lots of vitamin C, 56% in just a cup. Vitamin C is one of our favorite antioxidants, but in Nutritional Psychiatry, we want you to get it from food, not from supplements.

All right, up next is vitamin K. You don’t think enough about vitamin K. It is one of the fat soluble vitamins. Now, why in Nutritional Psychiatry do we care about fat soluble vitamins? Because your brain is mostly made of fat. So you’re looking to take care of, to kind of prevent from oxidizing these very long, delicate fats. And vitamin K helps with that. So 28% of Vitamin K in one cup of cabbage.

Why purple cabbage? That’s for the anthocyanins. Everybody makes such a big deal about blueberries and blackberries. Amazing for your mental health. As we saw in a huge nature paper that came out looking at anthocyanins, those purple and blue pigments that are in plants, we found out that it’s not that they go to the brain. What they do is they they prune and influence the microbiome, that decreases the inflammatory signal. It’s amazing new science and one of the reasons we want to look at your plate and see that rainbow and we want to see purple in there whenever possible. This is why a purple cabbage is a great option. Another one that’s related is radicchio.

Nutritional Psychiatry is always asking you to consider thinking about your microbiome and the fiber content of things like cabbage. Cabbage is this great mix of soluble and insoluble fiber. Those are the two types of fiber that we’re eating in your microbiome. All the organisms that live in your gut, all these bacteria, they thrive on both. And so we want to make sure we eat a variety of plants.

One of the things I see here on my couch in clinical practice is oftentimes when people think about prebiotic foods, these are foods with fiber, right? Plants. They go to that list online, right? Jerusalem artichokes. And they think, I’ve never made that at home. It’s always concerned me. What you want to think about is plants. All plants have fiber. So cabbage, onions, garlic, all these are great prebiotic foods. So don’t leave out the cabbage just because it’s not on everyone’s prebiotic food list. It’s amazing food for helping your microbiome.

Let’s talk some of the deep science of why purple cabbage just so great for your mental health and your overall health. Cabbage belongs to the family of cruciferous vegetables. Now, cruciferous vegetables are some of the most healthy, most powerful vegetables that we have on the planet. Things like broccoli and kale. They’re all cousins. They’re cruciferous vegetables. They’re called cruciferous because when you grow them, their flowers make a little cross, which is just a little fun botanical fact. Now these cruciferous vegetables are filled with these sulfur containing phytonutrients, things like sulforaphane or quercetin. And these are very powerful antioxidants. But here in Nutritional Psychiatry and on this channel, you’re going to learn a little bit more beyond that. They’re more than antioxidants. They’re cell signals. So what happens when you eat these molecules is our body, our cells recognize them and it shifts how we transcribe, how we express our DNA. There’s this really profound, over time, anti-inflammatory effect that you get from eating more cruciferous vegetables. This is one of these things that everybody seems to agree on. The vegetarians, the carnivores, everybody thinks cruciferous vegetables are amazing because there’s so much science behind them and behind these molecules. Instead of getting them in a supplement form in Nutritional Psychiatry and on my channel, I’m always going to be asking you to try and get these from food. That’s really the most active, most live, most healthy source, in my opinion, and it’s where we’ve always gotten it from.

All right, here we go. Our favorite part of Nutritional Psychiatry. After all the brain benefits, how do we eat this and how do you get more red cabbage into your life? That’s my favorite part of being a Nutritional Psychiatrist is thinking about you as an eater. So I’m going to talk through some of the ways that I’ve incorporated purple cabbage into my life and I encourage my patients to.

So first of all, when I think about cabbages, I love them in a fermented form. So that’s going to be a sauerkraut or a kimchi. You can add on to your rice bowl, to a pasta dish, drop in your salad and so I love having that in the fridge whenever possible. Next up for me is the simple saute. I like to chop it up really thin and get it going in a in a hot cast iron skillet with a little bit of garlic and some olive oil. This is just a wonderful way for me to do any type of cruciferous vegetable, but I love cabbage this way. Now sometimes I’ll cut the cabbage and I’ll do a red or purple cabbage steak where I really sear it on both sides. That’s a favorite for me for sure. Other ways that we see cabbage being used is just chopped up in a salad or who doesn’t love a great super healthy coleslaw where you can have it in there. It adds a nice pop of color. Then a way that I probably do cabbage the most is on my sheet pan because I love oven roasted vegetables. This is just one of the simplest ways that you get that great caramelized, yummy, kind of crunchy, kind of carby, delicious cabbage. So I’ll take a cabbage, chop it up. A bigger chunk is going to roast a little bit less, still have a little more crunch in the middle, whereas if you go thin, you’re going to cook it all the way through. Slide it in the oven, usually around 375 degrees. I’m going to say about 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how you prepare it. Now keep checking on it, get it right to where you want. You’ll see it starting to kind of brown up and crisp up. I like to put it in with a lot of other vegetables.

Those are some of my ways to really enjoy cabbage. If you have some other ideas, please drop them in the comments below. You see cabbage in all kinds of wonderful dishes. We didn’t mention soups or stews or all these wonderful ways to get both these purple pigments but also all these health benefits of cabbage that we’ve been talking about.

You heard it here first. Nutritional Psychiatry vegetable of the year 2026 is purple cabbage. We’ve been seeing cabbage pop in 2026, but we want to put our little twist on it of Nutritional Psychiatry information and science of how purple cabbage is so amazing for your mental health and your brain health. It’s one of those foods that I bet isn’t in your rotation yet. And after this video, I sure hope that it is.

Please check out all of our resources to help you really start to optimize how you think about food and mental health. Take the really important practical step of integrating Nutritional Psychiatry and how you take care of yourself and build more mental fitness. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey, everyone. I hope you’ll share this video. I hope you’ll save it and I hope you’ll sign up for our newsletter so I can keep helping you get the right molecules into your brain to optimize your brain health and your mental health.

The post This Cheap Vegetable Boosts Your Brain appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

If you’re a survivor of sexual assault after the release of the Epstein files, perhaps you’ve been flooded with a lot of things that you thought you’d dealt with in the past. I want to put a trigger warning on this video out of respect for many people having different experiences, and ask that you listen to this or watch it when you have some personal and private time.

I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey, I’m a board-certified psychiatrist, and I’ve spent thousands of hours with patients talking about assault and sexual assault. I wanted to make this video in the wake of the release of the Epstein files to talk to you if you’re having experiences, you’re being activated or triggered, and to talk about what’s happening and what you can do about those today to help you with your next steps forward.

Often, patients are very triggered, and it’s a little confusing as to why, especially if it’s something that happened a long time ago. I wanted to make sure and let you know that this isn’t backsliding. This isn’t because you haven’t done your work. This isn’t in any way indicative that you are still struggling with the active phases of trauma.

It’s what has happened, and all these headlines in the news, and more importantly, the details of horrible, horrible things, bring up so much about assaults.

It’s filled with so many complex emotions, shame, grief, triumph, anger, disgust, and trauma come up in so many almost sinister ways. It haunts us in nightmares when we sleep. It comes up in the middle of stressful situations, or I think the part that’s most confusing when people are activated or triggered, and you’re not clear why.

A lot of times patients feel like this is backsliding. You know, I did the work, I dealt with that trauma, why am I feeling this now? And it’s one of the ways that trauma is so pernicious and so horrible. You can do such great work in therapy, and it just takes someone maybe being aggressive, making an off-color joke, or grabbing your arm in a bar, and suddenly you’re brought back into one of the most horrible experiences of your life.

When I’m working with patients, I wanted to make this video for all of you who are sexual assault survivors to talk about the importance of right now, today, and how you care for yourself.

It’s very, very important that you break out all of the tools that you have at your disposal about self-regulation and use the knowledge that you have and the work that you’ve done, whether that’s in formal therapy, whether that’s in your journal, whether that was talking to a friend or fellow survivor, that work of processing your trauma, it counts. And just because you’re having symptoms now, that doesn’t mean that you haven’t done the work that you need to do.

But it does mean that you have some work in front of you today and in the coming weeks. And I want to talk a little bit about that. I very much want to normalize the experience of having trauma and having it reactivated, but in no way do I want to normalize what has happened or what is in the Epstein files.

I want to talk about some of the prominent symptoms that happen with trauma, and I also want to talk about some of the resources available to you. Some of the symptoms that come up with trauma, one is dissociation, not feeling like you’re in your body or in this present reality with us. This is very common in trauma because it’s part of how people deal with acute trauma. We leave our bodies a bit to deal with the extreme things that are happening. It’s a way of protecting ourselves.

But then, later, when we hear echoes in the trauma, and you feel this echo in your body, people begin to dissociate. Other symptoms can be surprising to people like losing your appetite or feeling really nauseous, not being able to sleep, or feeling uncomfortable socializing. These are all symptoms of trauma activation. And it’s really important to acknowledge these and find the space in your life to care for yourself.

Some of this care is the very basics.  I worry sometimes it sounds silly, but I’ve heard over and over again from trauma survivors that they need a little reminder that you are worthy of eating healthy meals every day, that you don’t need to use food as an emotional regulator. You can use it as a sense of nourishment, as a sense of power, that you are going to continue caring for yourself. Bathing, showering, and those basic self-care hygiene rules tend to go out the window. Oftentimes, people have a really awful and disparaging view of themselves after trauma. And one way to kind of lean into that is to stop caring for yourself. You’ll stop showering, stop caring for yourself. You’re going to, in some ways, lean into or slip into thinking about yourself in the ways that perpetrators think about you. It’s not worthy of care. It’s not worthy of hygiene. It’s not worthy of nourishment. You are. You know that. And it’s so important that during times when your trauma is activated, you make active efforts to reclaim that. It’s part of the process of healing, and it’s part of the process of being victorious over perpetrators.

If you are being pulled into the past, it’s very common, and it’s very important to recognize that right now. Maybe it’s in your dreams and nightmares that have gotten reactivated. Maybe you’re feeling hesitant to go outside or socialize, and you’re getting more isolated. Maybe you’re feeling it in your body with nausea, loss of appetite, or feeling hypervigilant, that you’re always on edge.

And so often the feelings of shame come up. So often, sexual assault survivors are thinking through what happened and what they could have done differently. This type of thinking ignores that you’ve encountered a horrible, depraved individual, someone who has used power and force to dominate, and you should be very, very clear with yourself to place blame where blame is supposed to lie, and that is with perpetrators, not with victims.

So many sexual assault survivors I’ve spoken to sit in a horrible world of conflict. They want justice more than anything. However, that means naming the perpetrator. That means going public. That means perhaps having this individual’s name tied to yours on the internet for the rest of your life. And as you understand, many people want more separation than ever before. As you know, separating from the past, separating from the perpetrators, not having them on your mind, not having them control the narrative of your life is absolutely essential to healing. That’s why it’s so important today, right now, when this video finds you, to make sure and reclaim the day, to separate the past from the present.

In the present, you have done so much work to create safety, to create structure, to create relationships, and to get help. It’s important to lean into all of those right now. Sexual assault survivors know not everyone should hear your story, that the idea of being vulnerable doesn’t work all the time.

Everyone can’t be aware of what’s happened to you, and I’m not suggesting in any way that this means you should just start sharing. But I do want you to make sure and double down on your efforts to connect. It doesn’t have to be about your assault. Sometimes I have patients who take great solace in being of service, going and volunteering, having their hands busy. Maybe that’s at the food bank, maybe that is volunteering for someone very innocent, like a child who needs some help with their reading or writing. These are ways that you can actively step outside for a few minutes, step outside of your trauma and be of service to others in a way that is a mix of distraction, but also tapping into some of those good and wonderful feelings that happen when we connect, when we don’t feel alone or because if you are a sexual assault survivor, these headlines, they hit so hard.

There’s such a mix of emotions, of some justice perhaps, and then just absolute disgust at these individuals. A lot of you have done great work in terms of using self-reflective tools like journaling and writing. And one of my top recommendations, of course, is to connect with the community. For some of you, that will be a community of people who have suffered from assault or struggled with the aftermath. For others of you, it might be the community that supported you as you got through this. For other people, perhaps it’s individuals who don’t even know about the assault, but they give you great comfort, they give you great support.

If it helps you to reach out to someone, I want you to hear my encouragement that you do that, and you pick that person carefully. Not everyone is equipped to hear about assault and sexual assault, and it makes a lot of people really uncomfortable. That’s not going to help you right now. You need to speak with people who are thoughtful, perhaps well-trained, experienced, and regulated. Your nervous system needs to see that other people can receive this and can sit with you and can hold on to the narrative of what happened without it overwhelming them or scaring them or angering them to the point that they need to do something other than be with you and support you. You are not alone, and what you’re feeling and experiencing in your nervous system right now is a very reasonable and normal response to having sexual assault trauma reactivated by the release of the Epstein files and all of the details that have come with that.

There are resources available to you that are free and that are anonymous. I’ve listed a few of these on the blog that accompanies this video on my website. The first is RAINN, R-A-I-N-N. RAINN is the national sexual assault hotline. On the other end of this line, you’re going to find an experienced, thoughtful, well-trained individual who has an expert-level knowledge of the resources available to you and is very used to speaking to people who are very distressed. This is a wonderful resource, and I encourage you to call. It doesn’t mean you have to do anything with the information, but it’s good to understand what resources are available, particularly in your local community. The next resource is the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. This is a trove of information ranging from the research that’s being done to national organizations and local organizations that have tools and resources to help you.

I hope this video helps as you think about the next steps forward, and specifically as you think about today. I hope it helps you really break free of any guilt or shame that you have because you’re feeling symptoms, no matter what they are, and reactivation of your trauma. Having worked with so many trauma victims, I also know something that I want to share, which is that the resilience of the human spirit is unbreakable. Your spirit is unbreakable.

So care for yourself today and tomorrow, the next day, maybe a little bit longer from now. I know that you’ll be back to full health. It happens every time, and it’s a remarkable aspect of the human spirit. I wish we weren’t in this state again, hearing about awful events and having my patients and individuals like yourself be reactivated. But it’s important that you know that you’re not alone, to hear the normalization that this is what happens, and that there are tools in front of you right now that can help you take small steps back to health. Thank you for your time. I hope this helps. I’ll see you in the next video.

Resources:

RAINN: National Sexual Assault Hotline https://rainn.org

National Sexual Violence Resource Center https://www.nsvrc.org/

The post Trauma Reactivation by the News: What Survivors Need to Know appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.

We are living under chronic stress, grief and moral injury. It is feeling like the world is on fire and that is completely changing how you take care of yourself, the foods that you’re eating and your hunger cues. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. I’m a board certified psychiatrist. I’m a nutritional psychiatrist. I’m used to working with people in times of chaos and times of crisis in their life. This video is to help you understand what’s going on right now in your brain and with your mental health and how that’s affecting things like hunger cues and what you’re eating. We’re going to talk about solutions to make sure that you remain in the stance that you need to be in to get through times like this. Trust me, I’ve spent a lot of time with people at moments of extreme chaos and crisis in their lives. Some of the basics are to make sure we stay, as we say in my field, in our stance, meaning that we are empowered, we’re making choices and decisions, we’re facing our challenges with our head up, using all of our resources and all of our strengths. This is how we maintain hope and I hope this video is going to give you a lot of that.

First, I want to point out this isn’t a personal failure. If you’re struggling right now, it likely has nothing to do with your sense of discipline. What’s happening right now is our bandwidth is getting overwhelmed. And because of the chronic stress, because of moral injury, because of your individual history with trauma, with oppression, with bullying, your biological cues are almost going haywire because so much is true. You might be having a good day at work and see something online that horrifies you about the state of our country. You might have a great interaction with a colleague and then be seeing the most vitriolic comments from somebody that you thought was a friend on Facebook. All of this is swirling together.

I see so many people who consider this a personal moral failure. They lack discipline, they’re off their game. I think it’s very important for you to recognize this and take a step away from feelings of guilt and shame, except for how they help motivate you to take a step towards more mental fitness. We’re going to talk about some details of nutritional psychiatry. We’re to talk about things that you can do today to take a step towards more mental health, more brain health, and having your chin up with some hope and all of the force of you to take on these challenges that are in front of us and in front of our country.

So quick note about the biology of what’s happening. We can talk about all the neurotransmitters and cortisol, but I really think what’s important right now is for you to focus on function. There’s a couple of biological functions that get affected by stress and everyone’s a little different. Some of you have horrible insomnia. You’re worrying, you’re seeing images, you’re really needing to do things like up your exercise, decrease meals in the evening, watch your caffeine intake. That’s very different than those of you who have more of a defense to sleep a lot and that you’re avoiding, you’re numbing. I’ve heard this from a number of patients this month, boy, “the only time I’m finding peace is right as I’m falling asleep.” So those are very different examples of how our biology is individual in response to stress. The other part of this, of course, are hunger cues. Some of you watching are anxious, you’re triggered, you’re not eating, you’re getting to the end of the day and you’re irritable, you’re sad, you’re really struggling and you think back to what did I eat, what did I have for breakfast, for lunch? And maybe it wasn’t much, maybe a latte. So if that’s you, getting meals in the calendar with an alarm right now for a few weeks might be important. Others of you are struggling with sleep and your carb craving and you’re dealing with anxiety by going back to those comfort foods and those junk foods.

Who here has not been hitting the fast food places a little bit more or ordering in a little bit more or the one I hate where I’m standing and I’m looking at my fridge at night and I don’t know what to do for dinner and I can’t think of anything else that people eat other than hamburgers or pizza and whatever these leftovers are in my fridge. It’s like a state of confusion. Again, it’s one that I really try to recognize in myself and help my patients pinpoint so we can be responding less kind of on how we feel and on those natural biological cues and recognize that’s really being challenged right now. So instead we’re responding to our schedule, we’re responding to the things that we know keep us well, we’re engaging in the things that we know nourish and feed our mental health.

Let’s talk about some of the solutions, what I do in my own life when I have a lot of stress or when I’m really upset by what’s going on in our country and in the world, and what I advise to my patients. Our first step in this is that self-awareness, understanding where you are, how you specifically are being activated or triggered, how your biology is really shifting some of these basic cues and making it harder to care for yourself.

Let’s start with the basic rule of nutrient density. This means that you want to be getting a lot of nutrition for every calorie, for every bite. The reason is that oftentimes as our appetite is shifting, we’re having more of a craving for junk food or we’re just not feeling as hungry because we’re really upset. You want to make those bites count. And so this is where a lot of those classics of nutritional psychiatry come in. Things like soups and smoothies, things that are easy, like a kefir smoothie is a great example where you’re getting some great fermented foods in. There’s some data that fermented foods help us with the regulation of anxiety and our response to stress. So I like eating those good bugs or drinking those good bugs. It helps a little bit with the placebo effect almost or what I call the foodcebo effect, which is in the midst of all this chaos, in the midst of all of the distressing images we’re seeing in our country, I’m doing something that I know is great for my microbiome. It’s great for my mental health and it helps settle and calm me. So again, knowing that I’m making an active choice.

Another set of meals that are great and are very comforting are from your personal history. One that’s strange in my life, is I like toast with butter. It reminds me of my mom. It settles me down. Other people tell me they love things like fruit or cheese, things that are maybe from your culture of or things that maybe you and your parents or your family of origin always enjoyed together.

I want to talk about a few other easy meals that I love and to remind you again of that great nutritional psychiatry tool, the simple swaps. If you love pasta and you’ve been eating a lot of pasta with red sauce and you like pesto, wow, you just tripled the nutrient density of your pasta meal. Put a little pesto on there. Maybe add in some small fish. Increase the nutrient density of those comfort meals. If you’ve got to have french fries, what about sweet potato oven baked fries? These are all some of the techniques that we use when we’re working with patients who are in distress and they’re having a mental health crisis. When maybe they’re not having an appetite or maybe they’re really having to struggle with organization around their food. Some of the tools that we use in our practice, like simple swaps, finding something that’s a little bit healthier is often helpful.

Another very important tool that we use in mental health is around the idea of harm reduction. I think about that with food too, that we can eat in a way that increases our stress, increases our guilt, feeds into the problems that we’re having, or we can eat in a way that has more intention, more engagement with what we need and what our bodies need right now. This is one of the real powers of nutritional psychiatry and mental fitness that in the midst of no matter what is happening in our lives, in our country, even in our immediate community, we’re able to take a step back and eat and live our lives according to a set of values that ground us and that calm us. And so I hope that this helps you think about meal choices and foods that are helping you right now and to give you more structure and organization. Have a time that you’re going to the grocery store. If you’re feeling very anxious and worried about crowds, go when there aren’t going to be as many people there. If you’re worried about your finances and your budget, your food is a great place to address that. So many of our favorite brain foods are great on the budget. Things like lentils, beans, whole grains, frozen fruits and vegetables. These are all wonderful things that you can add on a budget.

Those are some of the tips. Another one is around decision fatigue. A lot of you might find yourself kind of standing looking at the fridge. I find this happens to me and I’m like, what food is there in the world other than hamburgers and pizza? And I’m looking at a lot of food, but somehow my brain’s not working. Again, that happens during the swirl of emotions when we’re worried so much about the state of the world or the country or your family. This is where the tool of organization comes in again. So many of you have great skills, whether it’s batch cooking, being really efficient with leftovers. Spotting what we call the low hanging fruit, whether its noticing you keep ordering pizza or you keep going out for fast food. Instead, finding time where you go to the grocery store, get those nutrient dense foods, focus on the food categories that we talk about. I have more blog posts with resources for this and also in my books, particularly Eat Complete, my cookbook is all about nutrient density and the foods that have the most of these nutrients like magnesium, thiamine, omega-3 fats.

There’s a lot of information. I hope you hear my encouraging, helpful and hopeful message to you that there are things you can do even as simple as what you eat to help yourself during times of stress. When I wrote Healing the Modern Brain, part of the modern world that’s coming for your brain is all of this increased stress, the increased bandwidth of information, the more awareness we have about outrage, injustice, violence, and oppression that’s going on in our world. With that comes some responsibility and with that certainly comes us responding as an organism and having a lot of shifts and how we care for ourself and how we eat.

I hope this video helps you settle down a bit and know that there are steps ahead, there are things to do, there are things medically, clinically and in the evidence that when we engage in, they help us face our challenges. If there are people in your life and in your community, who are going to benefit from your good cooking, your smile, or a neighbor who could use your help with groceries, remember, this is one of the best ways that you can settle down is when you get a little bit regulated, pass it on. And when you get a little bit of nourishment, pass it on. There are people right around you in your family, in your community, in your friendship circle who need your strength right now. I hope this video helps you get there. Please share it with anyone who needs it. I look forward to seeing you all in the next video. Hang in there. I’ll see you soon.

The post This Is Why You Can’t Eat Normally Right Now appeared first on Drew Ramsey MD.