Your body

Two to be careful with in particular. Yohimbe reliably ramps anxiety up, so much so that it has been used in research to bring panic on, and kava is a sedative that stacks with alcohol and with sedating medication and has damaged livers at higher doses.

Kava has been restricted or banned in several countries over liver harm, which tells you how seriously that risk is taken. Yohimbe is a poor choice…

You cannot patent a plant, so there is little commercial reason to fund expensive trials of one. When you read that a herb has no evidence, that often means nobody paid to look rather than that somebody looked and found nothing.

Both halves of that need saying. No evidence is not proof of no effect, and it is also not permission to assume one. It leaves you with an open…

Some of these do have real evidence behind them. St John's wort has repeated support in mild to moderate depression, SAMe and methylfolate have reasonable backing as additions to treatment, and omega-3 has looked weaker in the larger and better run trials.

That last part is worth sitting with, because it is what usually happens. An early promising effect shrinks as trials get bigger and better…

If you want to use herbal remedies, two things carry most of the risk. Make sure whoever prescribes for you knows what you are taking, and buy from a source that has been independently tested.

That is a short list on purpose. Nearly all the harm in this area comes from an interaction nobody knew about or a product that was not what it…

Herbal products are rarely covered by insurance and they add up quickly. That cost belongs in the decision, particularly when you cannot be sure the capsule holds what it says.

Money spent here is money not spent elsewhere, and often the alternative is a treatment that is covered and has been tested. Nobody is telling you…

What you feel does not stay in your head. Emotional states register in the body's immune signalling too, which is one reason a long stretch of unspoken distress can leave you physically run down.

This is not a claim that you can think yourself well or ill. It is closer to saying the body keeps a tally. If you have been carrying something heavy…

Water, sleep, food and digestion are not the boring preamble to the real work. When those are running badly, everything else you try has less to work with.

It can feel almost insulting to be asked about breakfast when what you carry is so much bigger than breakfast. But a body short of sleep and short of…

A physical symptom is not a free floating fact. Read it next to what your life has actually held, the early parts included, and it often makes more sense than it does on its own.

This works in both directions. It stops you treating a body complaint as something random that landed on you, and it stops you treating it as a…

Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.

People who have been disbelieved by doctors are very sensitive to this, and with reason. The choice usually gets offered as either it was all in your…

Months of fog, where thinking feels like wading, is a real complaint and deserves looking into rather than waving away. It usually has more than one cause, which is part of why it gets dismissed.

Fog sits where several things overlap: dissociation, anxiety, poor sleep, thyroid and iron problems, infections, medication. Because it belongs…

If your attention runs low on stimulation, salty and sweet food is the fastest legal source of a lift and it is available all day. Worth knowing about yourself, because it explains a pattern that willpower alone never seems to touch.

Rates of overweight and type 2 diabetes are higher in people with ADHD, and the reasons are not moral ones. A reward system that is under stimulated…

Caffeine buys about half an hour of sharper focus and takes the payment out of your sleep. It is a decent tool for a particular hour, and using it in place of treatment usually leaves you worse off across the day.

Four cups a day and upwards starts producing insomnia, irritability, tremor, an unsettled stomach and a racing heart, and a few people go sleepy on…

Very low vitamin D produces fatigue, low mood and a flatness that looks exactly like depression, and it is not part of routine bloods in most places. If you have never had it measured, it is a fair thing to ask for.

One clinician telling this story about himself had a level that was almost undetectable, and no antidepressant would have raised it, because what was…

The vitamin D in a general multivitamin is a maintenance amount, nowhere near what is used to correct a real deficiency. If your level is genuinely low, that is a prescribing conversation with blood tests behind it, not a shelf in the chemist.

Correcting a deficiency usually means a high dose for a defined period and then a steady daily amount, with the level rechecked to see where you have…

Before settling on depression as the whole story, ask for thyroid function and vitamin D to be checked. Both are common, both are cheap to test, and an underactive thyroid produces a picture that looks like depression from the outside.

An untreated thyroid problem also blunts how well antidepressants work, so missing it can mean months on a treatment that was never going to do the…

If a health habit keeps sliding, attach something immediate to it. The apps where you put real money on hitting a step target work for a reason: the payoff arrives now instead of in twenty years.

The natural reward for walking more is invisible and decades away, which is no use to a brain running on what happens next. A small stake, a streak,…

Before settling on a purely psychological account of months of anxiety or broken sleep, it is worth having the ordinary bloods done. Low iron, low vitamin D or low magnesium can produce symptoms that look exactly like a mental health problem.

This is not about swapping therapy for supplements. It is about not spending a year working on something a blood test could have partly explained. If…

If your body has something going on as well, try to get both looked after at the same time rather than in a queue. Therapy for what happened to you does not have to wait for your gut to settle, and it often goes better when the two run side by side.

Plenty of people park the physical thing while they do the psychological work, or the other way round, then wonder why progress keeps sliding back. A…

Low mood that arrives with bloating, fatigue and a foggy head is worth looking at from the food side too. An immune reaction to something you eat regularly can produce all three, and it gets labelled depression far more often than it gets tested.

The point is not to start cutting foods out on a hunch. It is to say the possibility out loud to a doctor, particularly if the gut symptoms and the…

When something has gone wrong across several systems, expecting one treatment to fix it is usually the mistake. Movement, processing what happened, changes to food and work on calming the body tend to add up in a way that none of them manages alone.

This is not an argument for doing everything at once until you are exhausted. It is an argument against giving up on the whole idea when the first…

Stand on one leg for a few breaths. Your body has to work to keep you upright, and that work is loud enough to feel on a day when nothing else registers.

Balance pulls in the joints, the inner ear and the muscles all at once, so it gives a far stronger signal than sitting still and hoping to notice…

A long body practice is a teaching version. In real life, take one small piece: just the feet, just the hands, just a minute of noticing.

Long stretches of inward attention can tip into flooding or into drifting off, and neither leaves you better than you started. A minute done often…

There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.

If tuning into your chest feels like too much, that is worth knowing rather than pushing through. You can go instead to what your feet are pressing…

Thirst, hunger, the ache of having sat too long: these are not nagging, they are instructions. When self-care keeps failing, it is often because the instruction never arrived.

People who have been through a lot sometimes stop registering the signal at all, and then eating, sleeping and resting all go sideways. If that is…

Your nervous system decides whether a room is safe before you have had a single thought about it. Tone of voice, a face, the way someone walks in: it reads all of that and answers underneath your awareness.

This is why you can leave a perfectly pleasant meeting wrung out, or take against someone who has done nothing you could point to. The reading is…

The reading happens without you, but you can catch up to it. Naming what your body has already concluded, out loud or in your head, is most of the work.

Something like: my shoulders came up when he walked in. That is all it needs to be. You are not deciding yet whether it was fair, you are bringing a…

An alarm system can be wrong in two directions. It can scream in a safe room, and it can stay silent somewhere it should not.

Most talk about trauma assumes the first: too much alarm, too often. But some people come out of hard years with the volume turned right down,…

You do not have to close your eyes. If keeping them open, soft and lowered, is what lets you stay in the room, that is the better version for you.

Closing your eyes takes away your ability to check the room, and for anyone whose body is used to watching, that costs more than it gives. Make it an…

Try going into the next few minutes without deciding in advance what will happen in them. Curiosity in place of prediction.

A mind used to danger plans constantly, because planning once kept you safe. Sitting somewhere ordinary and letting the next moment be unknown is…

The body answers in sensations, in pictures, in a mood that turns up without explanation. If no words come when you check in, nothing has gone wrong.

People often decide they are bad at this because they went looking for a sentence and found a tight jaw instead. The tight jaw is the answer. Take…

If a few quiet minutes with your body turn up an ache or a tightness you had not noticed before, the practice has not made things worse. It has shown you something that was already there.

This catches a lot of people out. They sit down hoping to feel calmer, meet a knot in the stomach instead, and decide the whole thing is not for…

If you keep falling asleep whenever you sit quietly, take it as news rather than as a failed attempt. Your body is telling you how tired it is.

Welcome the first few times. Being tired enough to drop off the moment nobody needs anything from you is worth knowing about, and the honest response…

If you are moving attention through the body, start at the feet and work up. Leave the throat, the chest and the face until last.

The far edges of the body carry less charge, so they are a gentle place to find your bearings. Include the back, which people tend to skip: attention…

There is a difference between watching your hand and being in your hand. See whether you can move from looking at a part of your body to living inside it.

Observing keeps a small distance, which is useful early on and can quietly become the whole practice. Inhabiting is the further step: filling the…

Sleeping until the middle of the afternoon, day after day, is usually not rest. It is closer to the body shutting down, and it tends to leave you flatter rather than restored.

The tell is how you feel on waking: real rest gives something back, while shutdown leaves the day already gone and you no better for it. Nudging the…

You do not need a diagnosis to be worth teaching this to. Something that takes seconds, costs nothing and travels with you is worth having before you need it.

Practise it on an ordinary day, sitting on the bus or waiting for the kettle, so your hands already know it when the day is not ordinary. That is…

If talking about feelings has always felt foreign or a bit embarrassing, treat this as a once a day checklist instead. Five boxes, no discussion, nothing to perform.

Plenty of people who go blank at how are you feeling can tell you straight away whether their shoulders are tight or their breathing is shallow.…

Ask who you are today and what body you are living in today, and let the answer be different from yesterday's. You are more fluid than solid.

Hard experience tends to freeze a person into a description: the damaged one, the difficult one, the one who cannot cope. Asking the question daily…

When you sit down to breathe, notice your pelvis. Tucked hard under or tipped hard forward both squeeze the breath; somewhere in the middle lets the diaphragm move.

Rock gently forward and back a few times and stop where the breath feels easiest, rather than aiming for a posture that looks correct. You will…

Before twisting, draw your belly gently in towards your spine. It looks after your lower back, and it is worth feeling for its own sake: you steady the middle before you turn towards anything.

The physical version is simple. A light drawing in of the abdomen, not a clench, held while you rotate and released as you come back. The felt…