Your Mental Wellness Podcast for Your Voice and Sanity

Mental sanity 101: eating for attention

November 16, 2021 Dr. Sibylle Georgianna's Leadership Practice Season 2 Episode 7
Your Mental Wellness Podcast for Your Voice and Sanity
Mental sanity 101: eating for attention
Show Notes Transcript

There is an exciting ingredient to our mental well being called attention. Because we needed a specific given tasks at hand seem mundane, or where we have so many distractions at our fingertips at all times these days. So to really be at our best, we got to harness our mental capacities. Vitamin Bs and vitamin D get to support our attention.
For detailed information on vitamin B9, click here.
Vegetarian foods high in vitamin B12 include fortified cereals, fortified fruit juices, fortified tofu, yogurt, milk, cheese, eggs, vitamin water, and whey powder.
Interested in a vegan, sustainably grown and harvested food novelty that is packed with vitamin Bs? Learn more here.

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Tools for Vitality: Therapy, Coaching, Optimizing Nutrition and Movement for Mental Wellness

Sibylle Georgianna:

Hey there, today I get to talk about this exciting ingredient to our mental well being we call attention. So attention is, is one of those key ingredients to our mental wellness. Because we needed a specific given tasks at hand seem mundane, or where we have so many distractions at our fingertips at all times these days. So to really be at our best, we got to harness our mental capacities. In in as if we were to look at a situation like through a lens or through a funnel, where we sort out all those things, we don't want to look at why we've just honing in on one aspect, we can have ways to organically grow our attention span. And that's actually what I want to talk about. So instead of sending us onto another multitasking challenge or any other mind strategy where we could feel easily overwhelmed with just thinking of just one more thing to do, let's just reroute our attention to things we do anyways, to make them work even better for us. Because as you may have remembered your mom's talk or your grandmother saying to you, there's key A gradients that you need, in order to have your attention go well. One is good nutrition to exercise three sleep in for rest. Because if your brain doesn't get the right fuel, the brain will not function at its best. A number of these ingredients foodwise play a particularly important role. omega three fatty acids found naturally in for example, coldwater fish are a major component of the ability for you neurons in the brain, and the efficiency of all brain cell operation to go smoothly. Those omega three fatty acids affect the reward center of the brain, and that's called the dopamine system. And it helps us in maintaining brain cells that release and respond to dopamine. Vitamins are equally important for weight, otherwise known as benign, is another do gooder for this. So it's the B nine is responsible for the development of your nervous system, starting as early as you know in in utero, but also folate contributes to forming myelin, which is the casing of your neurons, that we have a strong casing around your brain cells, the neurons that speeds up nerve signaling. Vitamins play continuing as the contingency a role in the brain function. Because we need to keep productive using dopamine and norepinephrine. So now nothing different is a chemical of alertness. And it promotes mental vigilance, we see it released when we a little bit in a fight or flight or freeze response. But we needed in general levels, not just in extreme situations. If we keep using, for example, folic acid, which is a synthetic form of folate, it helps with your cognitive functioning, it also helps with reducing inflammation, and we talked about that before folate is linked to vitamin B 12. And without B 12. It cannot be produced. But all B vitamins are essential for every aspect of brain function, including the production of neurotransmitters that help transmit information from one brainstem to the other. So if we look at the B vitamins, they also work with a vitamin D to enhance performance. And vitamin D, we think about it a lot by people being outside and we get it through the sunshine. It really is also, you know, not just something that we need for our mood we really also needed for our brain. And it plays a quite a role in memory and cognition. But that say the vitamin D, I think they're looking at it in terms of that it helps to build the connection between the brain cells or they call that and scaffolding of brain cells. And then the vitamin D helps to fortify that connection among brain cells and underwriting your overall brain health. So I just wanted to focus our attention now on just a couple of key takeaways. One, which is probably the hardest one for me is that multitasking is a myth. Unfortunately, it's just what it does is we switch off our attention from one thing to the next. But that's really at the cost of accuracy and speed. And it also jeopardizes our working memory. And I'm guilty of that for at least a decade in my life. When I'm trying to not do that. as much anymore. But it seems to be instead that if we focus our attention by like by prioritizing just one task. But again, there's many brain areas, there's so many ways that our brain can be disrupted. And so the research is now seeing that we can even look at attention training. And that helps people as young as little kids with anxiety. Number two, studies show that vitamin D supplements can be used, even with kids who deal with ADHD to boost their attention and behavior scores. Three older adults are less distracted by negative information than younger adults, that the stress and attention of the older adults is a little bit biased to more positive information, even before the older adults have a chance to evaluate it. So that's good to know. And as we're looking at all these interesting ways, let's just focus maybe this week on making sure that we get our vitamin B 12. In as well as our vitamin D. I can't wait to talk more about this. I do think that if we focus on the small things such as the food intake, even finding ways to rest of that's like four different episodes. Just think that we need to do anyways, it can go a long way to boost a mental hobby. I'm so happy to have you on this podcast. And I can't wait to talk to you soon. Bye for now.