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Mental Health and Nutrition

Serotonin, Your Gut, and Mental Health

Jim Sugel on June 15, 2024

Most people know of serotonin as the “happiness” chemical. That’s so much true that you can buy jewelry with the chemical formula for serotonin alongside words like “Happy”. The truth is, serotonin is much more complicated than simply prompting an emotion or a reaction in the brain. Instead, it’s a chemical known as a neurotransmitter, which works to move messages between the nerve cells in the brain and body. Its role is in mood, cognition, reward, learning, memory, and physical processes like the digestive tract, organ development, and bone metabolism. As a result, serotonin has wide-reaching impacts on a significant portion of your body’s daily functions.

In fact, if your body isn’t producing or processing serotonin like it should be, you’ll see major issues across your body. That can mean depression, fatigue, gut health problems, and much more. Worse, because mental health disorders often result in reduced serotonin production or absorption, side-effects of mental health disorders like substance abuse also reduce serotonin production, and stress reduces your ability to produce serotonin, these issues are likely to be self-aggravating, meaning that depression results in reduced serotonin, resulting in a downward spiral where you feel worse and worse.

Understanding serotonin, how it impacts the gut, and your mental health can give you better insight into that process so you can get the help you need.

What is the “Gut-Brain Axis”?

The “Gut-brain Axis” is a term used to refer to how changes in the gastrointestinal tract impact mental health and vice versa. Persons who have mental health problems such as depression and anxiety are significantly more likely to experience major problems with digestion and gastrointestinal health. Vice-versa, individuals with gastrointestinal health problems such as chronic diarrhea, Cronn’s disease, etc., are more likely to experience mental health problems such as fatigue, depression, and anxiety.

This axis happens because serotonin impacts the nervous system. This includes the central nervous system, which runs from your brain down your spinal column, and into the body. It also impacts the Enteric nervous system, or the network of neurons that line the gut. That also includes the Vagus nerve, which is well-known as the nerve that runs from the brain to the colon – and which plays a major role in nausea and vomiting. As a result, individuals experiencing a significant amount of stress are more likely to experience nausea and vomiting.

Finally, the gut-brain axis refers to how serotonin actively influences the ecosystem of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in the gut and vice-versa. When things go wrong with gut bacteria, you experience negative effects that impact the rest of the body. That in turn influences mental state, emotional regulation, and regulation of the adrenal and pituitary axis – meaning you have more trouble with managing your emotional state and your mental health.

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Serotonin’s Role in the Body

Serotonin plays a far-reaching role in the body. In most cases, it can be considered a communicator. It transmits messages across the central nervous system and across the enteric nervous system – which goes on to impact the adrenal system, pituitary system, metabolism, and multiple other functions. This allows the reward circuit in the brain to function by transmitting signals to and from the brain and body as necessary. It allows the brain to properly process information. It regulates emotions and mood. It also helps to regulate feelings of anxiety and worry – both through the central nervous system and through the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) which is behind the human stress response and cortisol production.

Eventually that breaks down into:

Emotional Regulation – Healthy serotonin production means you can regulate emotions more easily and manage stress, negative emotions, etc., as they come up.
Stress Regulation – Serotonin impacts cortisol production and adrenal production, both of which cause stress and feelings of stress in the body. Healthy serotonin levels mean you’re better able to regulate that in the body, which means stress levels better match what’s happening, you process cortisol more quickly, and go back to feeling better more quickly.
Digestion – Serotonin impacts microbial gut health as well as nerve regulation. Nerves impact muscles moving food through the digestive tract. Low levels of serotonin can lead to indigestion in the form of constipation and poor nutritional absorption. However, serotonin also impacts the vagus nerve, which impacts the colon as well as your vomit and nausea reaction. This can result in chronic diarrhea and nausea.
Sleep – Serotonin plays a significant role in healthy sleep-wake cycles as well as in having energy throughout the day.

As a result, people with low serotonin or unregulated serotonin reuptake typically experience symptoms like:

Depression
Anxiety
Fatigue
Insomnia
Chronic pain
Brain fog
Memory issues

All of that can be self-reinforcing, which means you feel worse because of low serotonin, and then produce less serotonin because of the side-effects. As a result, depression, anxiety, and even gut health problems often spiral and become worse over time if you don’t get treatment, even if the original issue is a physical one rather than a mental one.

Of course, Serotonin also plays many other roles in the body. Therefore, it can impact your body in other ways. Often, that means you’ll see side-effects from mental health and from gut health problems that can look like a range of mental and physical health problems. However, mood regulation, gut health, and fatigue issues are generally the most common problems and very often tie in together – so that if you start with one, you eventually end up with all three.

Getting Help

Getting help for mental health problems, especially when they are tied into physical health problems, can be complicated. For example, it’s often difficult or impossible to tell which came first, gut health problems or mental health problems. For that reason, the starting point is often medication and taking steps to ensure you’re producing serotonin at a healthy level.

You might be aware that one of the most common medications for people with depression is an SSRI or a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. This class of drugs reduces how quickly your brain breaks down or reabsorbs serotonin, meaning you have more serotonin available in the brain and in the body, even if serotonin production is low. These drugs are safe, non-addictive, and allow you to increase serotonin levels in the body, which can be used as either a short-term measure to aid in treatment or a long-term measure if your body is not producing enough serotonin.

In each case, treatment is generally also backed up with additional treatment including nutritional therapy, behavioral therapy, and counseling. That means creating a tailored and personalized approach to treatment, adapting it as you respond or not. That can also include medication for gut health, it can include exercise and nutrition, it can include behavioral treatment to help you improve how you regulate emotions even when you feel bad. All of that comes together to give you a toolkit to better manage your mental and physical health, both of which will work to improve each other.

Otherwise, getting help for serotonin issues, even if they are mental health problems or rooted entirely in physical health problems, means getting a tailored approach that specifically targets your actual health problems and works to respond to those as you move forward in treatment.

The Connection Between Diet and Mental Health

Andrea Wagner on November 7, 2023

In 2021, an estimated 21 million people, or 8.3% of the population had a severe mental health disorder. Among adults aged 18 or older, 57.8 million people, or 22.8% of the population qualified for a diagnosis for a mental health disorder. That’s without considering the frequency of episodic mental health problems, which typically last 3-12 months. 1 in 5 U.S. adults will have a problem with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, paranoia, and other mental health problems over the course of their lives. While that’s most related to such diverse risk factors as environment, genetics, and coping strategies, less obvious factors like nutrition and diet can also play a significant role. For example, the symptoms of many nutritional deficiencies mimic those of depression and anxiety. And, having an existing mental health disorder can result in a poor diet and exacerbated mental health symptoms.

Understanding how your diet plays a role in mental health and managing your mental health disorder is an important part of taking control of your life and your wellbeing. A good diet can be difficult to maintain if you’re struggling with mental health. However, not doing so can often cause you to downward spiral and worsen your mental health disorder.

How Does Diet Affect Mental Health?

Diet affects mental health in multiple ways. The first is that a good diet is the foundation for feeling good. Fueling your body with the micro and macro nutrients it needs gives you the foundation to feel good. That means eating well about 80% of the time, following government nutrition guidelines, and eating diverse foods. Eating well gives you energy, helps to stabilize your mood, and prevents you from crashing.

A poor diet also directly impacts your mental health in much more direct and negative ways. And a poor diet can mean many things.

Diets that are high in caffeine and sugar can exacerbate mental health problems by causing rushes of dopamine and serotonin, disrupting your brain’s reward system and balance. People who reply on caffeine and sugar to feel good will often have periods of high and low energy with crashes and fatigue, headaches, and other negative impacts to mental health.
Diets that are low in fruits and vegetables can result in nutritional deficiencies. For example, if you don’t get enough vitamins, you can start to develop deficiencies, which can cause fatigue, lack of resources for mental health, anxiety, depression, and much more. For example, amino acids, omega 3s and B-vitamins are the building blocks for dopamine, GABBA, and serotonin (you probably know the latter as the happiness hormone). Without enough of those nutrients, your brain literally won’t be able to produce the hormones you need to feel happy. Vitamin D deficiencies, which effect as much as 42% of the population, can also mimic depression, with symptoms of fatigue, joint pain, and a “down” mood. And, Vitamin A deficiencies can result in symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Essentially, if you don’t eat well, you’re sabotaging your health in more ways than once. Unfortunately, the more problems you’re having with your mental health, the harder it will be to eat well. And, that creates a negative cycle.

Mental Health Problems and Diet

While poor diet can worsen or even cause mental health problems, mental health problems often cause a poor diet. Often that’s because you don’t have the energy to cook or to go to the store. Or because you’re looking for an outlet or comfort food to temporarily improve your mood.

In either case, people who are struggling with their mental health often struggle with self-care. That means basic self-care like eating healthy meals, exercise, personal hygiene, and cleaning the home become difficult and exhausting. People in these situations can skip meals, eat prepackaged foods or make unhealthy food choices regularly, or go through cycles of starving and binging as energy levels cycle. That all worsens mental health problems by creating nutritional problems.

In addition, mental health problems can cause nutritional issues in other ways. For example, the worse your mental health, the worse your gut health. If you’re anxious, you’re more likely to have inflammation of the intestines, which means you’re having a harder time actually absorbing nutrition from the foods you do eat.

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What do Nutritional Deficiencies Look Like in Mental Illness?

It’s often impossible to tell if you’re having problems with nutrition in addition to a mental health diagnosis without a blood test and analysis. This means that only your doctor can say for certain if you’re low on Vitamin A or B or etc. However, doctors will more and more often use blood tests as part of diagnosis, which means that you may have to tackle issues of nutritional deficiency before getting a diagnosis for depression or anxiety. However, you should still be able to get treatment for the mental health problems, because many treatments are about coping with and managing mental health problems – not about curing disorders.

Treatment and Next Steps

If you’re struggling with mental health problems, it’s always important to ensure you’re getting enough nutrition. That means paying attention to how you’re eating and eating well. Unfortunately, without a blood test, you cannot decide if you have nutritional deficiencies. However, if you do, your doctor will likely prescribe remediating diets or supplements that can help you to recover more quickly. Otherwise, your best bet it to eat a healthy diet following the guidelines of something like myplate.gov.

If you’re struggling with mental health, making those decisions and consistently making good choices around food can be extremely difficult. For that reason, it may be a good idea to ask for help, to look into living in supported or shared living facility, or to ensure you have friends and family to help. Many people also benefit from meal prep and similar tactics. It’s also important to note that eating well is always more important than taking supplements, because supplements are rarely absorbed properly and may not help at all – while they cost a great deal.

Getting Help

If you’re struggling with mental health you can always reach out and ask for help. Often, that starts with your doctor, where you can get blood tests to check nutrition and recommendations into therapy and treatment.

Here, treating mental health disorders with comorbid nutritional deficiencies is often a multi-disciplinary approach. For example, you’ll typically receive:

CBT or another traditional mental health treatment to help you manage and cope with the mental health problems
Nutritional therapy to help you recover from the nutritional deficiency as quickly as possible
Life skills therapy and training to ensure you have the skills and the habits in place to take care of yourself and to eat healthy meals

Good treatment should take a whole-body approach of looking at your body and your mind, taking time to allow both to heal. And, that can take a long time. That’s especially true if you have intestinal inflammation that reduces your ability to absorb nutrients. Recovering from nutritional problems can take months or even years. Mental health problems may also never go away and you may instead learn skills to cope with them and mitigate them.

However, getting treatment will ensure you have the tools to live your life in as happy of a way as possible.

Redeemed Mental Health is a mental health & dual diagnosis treatment center offering PHP, IOP, and individual levels of care. Contact us today to begin your journey of recovery!