Just a few minutes ago, I submitted the manuscript for my new book, The Mental Fitness Diet – Harnessing Our Three Brains to Maximize Mood, Motivation, and Mental Wellness.
Ten Chapters and almost 200 scientific references covering the entire Gut-Brain-Heart-Axis with practical approaches to using nutrition, movement, stress/sleep management, mindset, and supplements to improve mental fitness and physical health.
Due to the very long lead times of the publishing industry, we won’t expect to see The Mental Fitness Diet in print until September 2021 – but I expect that we’ll need it even more a year from now than we do today?
Until then, you can always see what “mental fitness” topics I’m writing about at my blog and talking about on YouTube.
Check out the Preface below to see why I wrote this one (my 14th book)…
Mental Fitness Diet – Preface
At no time in human history have we ever been so “advanced” technologically and yet so miserable psychologically.
It’s no exaggeration to describe stress, depression, anxiety, and burnout as epidemics – literally the “Black Plague” of our modern times.
We’ll get into the reasons underlying why we so terrible soon enough in the chapters to come. Suffice to say for now, that how you feel is not just in your head, it’s also in your gut, and your heart, and your immune system, and in many other places inside and outside the actual brain in your head.
I’ve been researching, speaking, and writing about the “Mental Fitness” topics covered in this book for more than twenty years, and I’ve written a dozen previous books on related topics.
I started writing this particular volume in early 2019 as a way to bring together some of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs around the “Gut-Brain-Heart-Axis” linking psychology, neurology, biochemistry, physiology, and microbiology into the emerging field of “nutritional psychology” (which is what a lot of people now refer to as the area of my expertise).
At the start of 2019, I really didn’t think that our collective mental wellness problems could get much worse.
Boy, was I wrong!
National surveys showed that happiness and life satisfaction levels were at all-time lows, while depression, suicide, drug addiction, and use of prescription antidepressants and pain-killing opioids were at all-time highs.
And then COVID-19 hit.
At the end of 2019 and going into the first weeks of 2020, we began to see the emergence of COVID-19 and its subsequent spread around the globe to devastate health systems, economies, and individuals – both physically and mentally.
At this writing, more than 25 million COVID-19 cases with almost 900,000 deaths have been recorded worldwide – with more than 6 million cases and 180,000 deaths in the United States alone.
The COVID–19 pandemic resulted in more than half the world’s population being placed under different levels of quarantines and lockdowns to stem the spread of the virus. These restrictions in many nations are expected to significantly influence the physical and psychological well-being of everyone affected – and research studies are already showing a clear and consistent increase in mental health issues around the globe, particularly among adolescents and young adults.
Some of the reasons underlying the increase in mental health problems are biological, some are psychological, and some are financial – but they all coalesce toward numerous predictions of a looming mental health crisis that was already bad and is only expected to get worse in a post-COVID world.
I hope you agree with me that there is no physical health without mental health. They are two sides of the same coin, and they are vital for each other and for our ability to reach our peak potential in this one life that we have to live.
We will cover many of these topics in The Mental Fitness Diet and how research-supported natural approaches can improve how we feel mentally and perform physically in every aspect of our daily lives.
Thanks for joining me.
Shawn Talbott
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
August 31, 2020