Mental Health Awareness: Understanding the Gut Brain

Today we are sharing the final post in our month of raising awareness for mental health 🧠  

Mental Health Awareness Week two weeks ago offered us an opportunity to focus on building strong mental health.

The theme this year was loneliness. It’s now affecting more and more of us and has had a huge impact on our physical and mental health during the pandemic. Our connection to other people and our community offer a lynchpin to protect our mental health. We need to find better ways of tackling this epidemic. 

Loneliness doesn’t just affect people one week a year, which is why we decided to highlight this topic across several areas of mental health this month, with the help of our collective experts and leaders in mental, emotional and physical health at Tula Wellbeing.

We hope we’ve offered some useful and practical tools we can all use to help support one another throughout the year. 

Reducing loneliness is a major step towards a mentally healthy society. We can all play a role to make it better 💪

For our final post today we’re focusing on Understanding the Gut Brain. Our friends at Tula are helping us address how we can understand the relationship between our gut and brain. You may not know but the connection between our diet and mental health is closely linked!

Tula’s Collective own, Alex, brings us perspective on how diet and the health of our gut microbiome influence our mental functions. This is integral to our emotional and mental experiences, and so directly impacts our health and wellness. 

The Gut Brain

You may already know that food has a great impact on our physical health. But, did you know that diet & nutrition have a key role in not only human physiology and body composition but also significantly impact our mood and mental well-being? Food is extremely important and not just a source of energy, calories and macronutrients. It is information that we’re feeding our body everyday. 

One example of the connection between food and mental wellbeing is gut-brain access. So, what is gut-brain access? This is the signalling that takes place between the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system. This has potential to impact our mental and emotional health. Research indicates how gut bacteria plays a key role here and has impacts on our mental wellbeing. Supporting our gut bacteria can have beneficial impacts on our mental wellbeing. Nutritional Therapy uses scientific evidence to support people in both body and mind.

With this being said, we need to be mindful of what we consume and the impact that can have on our mental health. Ensuring that we have a healthy and balanced diet can help improve our mood and emotional wellbeing.

Want to know more about Tula?

Tula wants to shift the conversation around workplace wellness. By supporting teams from the ground up. Think of them as wellbeing strategists. Identifying your needs, within the context of your business culture, and giving everyone the tools to actually feel good and do good.

They help leaders and teams better understand themselves. They dig deep into the fundamentals of what it means to be happy, healthy and function well. Using our expertise to inform each session, workshop and conversation.

For more information on Mental Health Awareness, please head to The Mental Health Foundation or Mind.org 🧠

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels