The Intersection of Exercise and Mental Well-being

How can neuroscience help us personalise mental health diagnoses and treatments? How are mental heath stats changing and why? How effective are life style changes as a prevention? What other new treatments are proving promising and effective?

In this episode we’re going to get an update on all the recent research from neuroscience that’s studying mental health, and not just the issues and the treatments being used to deal with them, but also the importance of the brain itself in the perception of our mental health, and the lifestyle choices that can preventatively ward off the issues before they arise; things like nutrition, sleep, exercise, and social contact. We’ll be looking at the big one: depression and its connection to inflammation, and a wide range of buzz therapies including psychedelic therapy and cold water immersion.

Today’s guest has just written a book for the public on this topic “The Balanced Brain: The science of mental health”, and her lab at MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences in Cambridge bridges the gap between the nuts and bolts of cognitive neuroscience and the more mind base of clinical psychology. She is neuroscientist and author Camilla Nord. In 2022, she was named a Rising Star by the US Association for Psychological Science, and received the Young Investigator Award from the European Society for Affective and Cognitive Science.  

Now it strikes me that if we can integrate new evidence from brain research into the clinical psychology field, we‘ve got a much better shot at treating ever rising numbers of mental health diagnoses and perhaps educating a good portion of the next generation enough to avoid these issues all together. It may be a pipe dream but we’ve got to try.

What we discuss: 

00:00 Intro

07:00 Our perception of pain.

11:00 Body changes lead to mental health changes.

12:00 Our ‘Inside-out’ perception is an active predictor of our mental health and the outside world.

16:00 The importance of narrative repetition to our self-perception.

18:00 Individualised data and solutions to mental health are impractical for our one-size-fits-all medical systems on a budget.

23:30 Nutritional Psychiatry - the connection between diet and mental health.

26:30 Gut-brain axis importance.

28:00 The risk of dieting affecting pleasure centres and thus motivation and mental health.

30:00 Inflammatory diet choices and lifestyle leading to depression.

33:30 Microbiome research: promise vs wishful thinking.

37:45 Social connection, nature connection and connection to meaning.

40:45 Some mental health symptoms can be useful and adaptive.

43:20 Sport and physical exercise to improve mental health.

46:00 Depression leads to a lack of drive to obtain pleasure - Anhedonia.

48:20 Sleep neuroscience.

53:30 Anger management and ‘hangriness’.

56:20 The Placebo effect is a useful part of a treatment’s effect.

58:00 Changing diagnosis rates in mental health.

01:02:00 Psychedelic therapy was unpopular before the last 10 years of study.

01:06:00 MDMA’s uses for PTSD, and modifying beliefs and expectations.

01:08:10 Connection between psychosis and cannabis.

01:09:20 Cannabis CBD Oil treatment of THC addiction.

01:11:15 Cold water immersion for euphoria and pain tolerance.

01:13:00 The changing nature of mental health.

References:

Camilla Nord, “The Balanced Brain, the Science of mental health”.

Felicity Jacka, Nutritional psychiatry, Guardian Article

Metabolic health influences learning paper.

Clinical psychosis vs mediumship paper. Connection to symptoms changes mental health outcomes.

Oliver J Robinson - Adaptive anxiety paper

Wim Hof, Cold water Immersion method, list of science papers