When you’re looking for relief from your depression symptoms, there are a few different treatment options available to you. Many people suffering from depression commonly use therapy, coping mechanisms, and drug treatments to attempt to improve their symptoms. But these aren’t the only potential remedies. In fact, there may be others that can offer you similar benefits with a lower cost and fewer side effects.
Most people know exercise forms like yoga, as well as good nutrition, are key to your physical health, but they’re often thought of in terms of purely physical issues. In fact, though, they can play a crucial role in helping reduce your depressive symptoms. The degree to which they can help varies depending on your specific circumstances, but at the very least, they can serve as a beneficial complement to other treatments.
In this blog post, we’ll take a deeper dive into how yoga and nutrition can serve as powerful elements of your medication management plan when it comes to reducing the impact of your depressive symptoms on your life.
We’ve written on our blog before about the benefits of good nutrition when it comes to reversing the effects of depression, but it warrants a brief review, as the way you eat can have a serious impact on your mental health in a number of different ways. It can affect your mood and mental state directly through changes to hormone levels and other biological elements, but it can also affect your long-term mental health in more indirect ways by impacting your physical fitness and health.
A diet full of refined sugars, trans fats, and other unhealthy substances can wreak havoc on your body and mind over time, causing you to gain fat more easily and contributing to oxidative stress and brain inflammation. Conversely, though, a healthy diet that mainly incorporates fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fish, and other nutrient-rich foods promotes better body and brain health by improving your energy levels and reducing stresses on the brain.
Good dietary habits are a great step toward better mental health, but adding exercise on top of them exacerbates those improvements to an even greater degree. Exercise is another way in which you can tackle your depressive symptoms from a physical standpoint, as it begins a domino effect of biological health benefits that promote new connections between nerve cells in the brain, improve your sleeping habits, reduce your blood pressure, and more.
Low-intensity exercise sustained as a habit over time is so beneficial, in fact, that it can even serve as an alternative to medication for certain people. Yoga is an excellent way to form this kind of habit, as it’s a fairly low-intensity form of exercise that doesn’t carry much risk of injury for most people. Additionally, it’s a great form of exercise for breaking through physical depressive symptoms like reduced energy, aches, and disturbed sleep.
The combined benefits of yoga and good nutrition habits allow you to do any of three things: determine whether drug therapy is right for your circumstances, replace it with a lower-risk alternative, or complement conventional treatment methods to improve their effectiveness.
In some cases, the benefits introduced by these habits may aid medications that tackle your symptoms through methods like forming neurological connections and pathways. They may also help by counteracting some of the side-effects experienced as a result of some drug therapies, like an increase in suicidal thoughts or sleep disruptions.
At Bella Jace Center for Health, exercise and nutrition are important parts of holistic medication management for depression, and we’re committed to helping you improve your symptoms in as low-risk a way as possible. You can schedule a consultation with us by calling at (615) 846-4558 or sending an email at brentwood@bellajace.com. You can also fill out our contact form,
