Surprising Facts That Improve Your Mood

Surprising Facts That Improve Your Mood

Most people think that your mood is based on what is going on around you. While it is true that life can impact how you feel from day to day, there may be an underlying factor that causes mood changes: your microbiome.

The bacteria that live in your gut have a far-reaching effect and can trigger mood changes as well as digestive issues. By getting to know these microorganisms, you can naturally enhance your mood along with your gastrointestinal health.

When Your Gut Meets Your Brain

The discovery of the gut-brain axis allowed science to identify an important relationship betweenyour gut and your brain. You are likely aware of the sensation of butterflies in the stomach when you feel nervous or anxious. This is but one indication that what is going on in your brain affects your stomach.

In addition to this, several studies have shown that gastrointestinal disturbances frequently coexist with mood disorders. If your brain can impact what happens in your gut, then the reverse is also true.

The lines of communication along this gut-brain axis run both ways. Just as an unhappy brain can trigger digestive problems, an unhappy gut tells the brain to be unhappy too. The trillions of bacteria that live in your gut control digestion and also impact your immune system and brain.

Unfortunately, when these bacterial communities are altered, so are your overall health and mood.

Why the Problems Start

Poor diets with high sugar and fat content promote the growth of harmful bacteria in your gut. When this happens, the beneficial strains that boost your health are overrun. Taking antibiotics, as well as frequent use of NSAIDs, also depletes the numbers of your friendly bacteria.

Once your gut microbiome is unbalanced and favors harmful bacteria and yeast, your risk for disease increases and your mood decreases.

The discovery of this link between gut and brain allows for a new approach to the treatment of mood disorders. Some antidepressants have been shown to cause additional symptoms or unpleasant side effects and in many cases, patients become resistant to the drugs.

As antidepressants fall from the popularity list, the idea of treating moods through gut health has gained momentum.

By cultivating good bacteria in your gut, you can ultimately improve brain health and enhance mood.

There are several surprising changes you can make to your diet and your life to help boost the bacterial strength of your gut. With a healthy balanced gut environment, your immune system and your brain will benefit. The lowered moods associated with harmful bacteria can be elevated in the presence of beneficial flora and support from probiotics.

Boost Probiotics and Boost Your Mood

What are probiotics? Basically, anything that contains bacteria friendly to your gut. By ensuring that your gut microbiome stays balanced in favor of the beneficial strains, there are a few things you can do. Improving the health of your gut could be a more natural and more effective way to improve your brain health and mood.

1. Cut Out the Sugar

“You are what you eat.” The Western diet contains a lot of processed and sugary foods and the more you eat, the more at risk your health becomes. Sugars are easily digested by your body, which means the gut bacteria are left without anything to do. To keep busy, they end up feeding on your intestinal lining, which exposes you to digestive troubles like leaky gut syndrome.

In addition to this, harmful bacteria thriveon sugars, so the processed diet allows harmful strains to take over. Once the gut microbiome has become unbalanced, inflammation will occur and impact brain chemistry and mood in a negative way.

2. Increase the Fiber

Dietary fiber is the treat your beneficial flora thrive on, so the more you eat, the stronger your gut community becomes. Fiber promotes growth and diversity of microorganisms. Since the absence of certain bacteria is associated with mental health and cognitive issues, the more you have on hand the better. By giving your gut bacteria fiber to dine on, they stay away from your intestinal walls and produce essential vitamins and nutrients your brain needs. Mood disorders have been linked to nutritional deficiencies, and daily fiber for your gut can work as well as any mood-boosting drug or multi-vitamin.

3. Limit Antibiotics

Antibiotics are often necessary to help your body fight invading bacteria. Sadly, the antibiotics wipe out beneficial bacterial strains in the process of killing off the harmful one. Should you need to follow a course of antibiotics, it is advised to stick to the recommended time only and to increase your intake of probiotics to keep your gut balance in check.

4. Exercise

The more active you are, the happier your gut bacteria are. Exercise causes changes in your digestive system that provide additional benefits to dietary changes. The rate of digestion increases with regular exercise, which improves metabolism. This not only promotes immunity by reducing inflammation, but this keeps your weight down. Since obesity has been linked to harmful bacteria in the gut, weight control will help keep your gut balance in check.

5. Increase Probiotics Consumption

Whether you eat the best probiotic food, like yogurt or kimchi, or you invest in a quality probiotic supplement, you will benefit from a stronger gut microbiome. Because of the many factors that cause your gut balance to shift in favor of harmful strains, probiotics every day can ensure a healthy balance remains.

The key to a healthy gut and a healthy brain lies in a diverse community of microorganisms. Probiotics ensure that your gut maintains bacterial diversity and strength, so as to protect digestive function and cognitive function. Probiotics essentially keep your gut happy, which means your brain stays happy too.

In Conclusion

Life has a way of altering your mood throughout the day. However, with mood disorders such as anxiety and depression increasing in incidence every year, we need to get a better hold on this. Protecting the health of your brain and ultimately your mood can be successfully achieved by keeping your gut healthy.

Surprisingly, you can avoid medications and the development of serious mood disorders by subscribing to a probiotic regiment each day.