Episode 23: My Bipolar Diagnosis and the Gut Brain Connection: How Nutrition Changed My Mood Stability

In this episode, I share something deeply personal about my own journey with mental health.

At 35, I was diagnosed with bipolar type 2. At the time, it felt like a life sentence. I was told I would likely need medication for the rest of my life and that mood instability would always be something I had to manage.

For years before that diagnosis, I had experienced cycles of depression alongside periods of elevated energy, creativity and productivity that I later learned were hypomania. I believed those high energy periods were my baseline and something I needed to maintain to succeed.

When depression returned, it felt like failure.

But what unfolded after that diagnosis led me down a path of exploring something I had already sensed for years: the connection between nutrition, gut health, trauma, the nervous system and mood stability.

In this episode, I share the journey of how I began looking at my mental health through the lens of physiology and nervous system support rather than simply trying to control my symptoms.

Inside this conversation we explore:

• what it felt like to receive a bipolar diagnosis
 • how that diagnosis impacted my identity and confidence
 • the gut brain connection and why digestion affects mood
 • how trauma and chronic stress influence digestion and nutrient absorption
 • the role of blood sugar stability and nutrient status in mental health
 • why the brain cannot be separated from the body
 • the difference between controlling your body and resourcing it

Since January 2020, I have not experienced another bipolar or depressive episode.

This episode is not medical advice and it is not a suggestion that mood disorders can be solved with supplements alone. Mental health conditions are complex and deserve proper professional care.

But this conversation is about something important.

Sometimes the path toward stability begins with learning how to support your body and nervous system in ways you were never taught before.

The Self Led Woman podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy, medical advice, or professional healthcare.

If this episode brings up anything difficult for you, please consider reaching out to a trained healthcare professional, therapist, or support service.

In Australia you can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the Butterfly Foundation National Helpline on 1800 33 4673, which provides support for people experiencing eating disorders and body image concerns.

Come find me on Instagram → ⁠⁠@megandarnelltherapy⁠⁠

Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle is coming. If you're ready to understand what's actually driving the cycle — not the food, the parts underneath it, join the waitlist to be the first to know when doors open and receive founding member pricing. → ⁠⁠[Join the waitlist here]⁠⁠

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Self-Led Woman. This is a podcast about emotional eating, the experiences that shape our relationships with food, and the path back to self-leadership. These conversations go beneath behaviour, held with deep respect for the wisdom of the body and the ways it learned to cope, adapt, and survive. And when we can peel back those layers and meet the parts of ourselves that need care, we begin to see that food was never the problem and we can return to who we really are. I'm your host, Megan Darnell. Let's dive right in. For those of you who are new here, there's something that you might not know about me if you are new to my world. I was diagnosed with bipolar type 2 at the age of 35. And for a long time that diagnosis felt like a life sentence. So I had struggled with depression on and off my whole life. Well, since probably primary school, I would say. I would have times where everything just felt heavy and hard. And then I had periods of what you would call hypomania, which is not full-blown mania, but it's just where you feel a lot more energetic, you need a little bit less sleep, you're very creative, you're a bit more talkative, you're a bit more social, a bit more no-filter. And could take on, I guess, a lot more than I could normally. It can look like high functioning or successful. It can look like you're thriving essentially. And I thought that that was what to aim for. Like that was when I felt my best. So I we thought that was the goal. Not that I knew I didn't have a diagnosis prior to that, so I didn't know that this was actually a thing. I thought it I needed to maintain this energized, creative, on top of everything, capable of doing more than everyone else. That was my baseline, I believed. And I didn't see it as part of a cycle. And when depression would return, it would feel like failure. Like I'd lost momentum. And because I'm wired the way I am, I tried to control my weight out of it. And I did this through food, through supplements and exercise and routines, and through trying to optimize things. I guess trying to sometimes biohack before that was even a thing. And long before my diagnosis, I'd already started experimenting with nutrition because I could feel that what I ate affected my mood. I knew that if I had enough protein, that would stabilize me. I knew that too much sugar would make me crush. Refined carbs made me really sleepy, and then made me want to eat more later. Alcohol, well, it just had a negative effect on everything, really. And eating too little made me anxious, and eating too much made me feel low and heavy and tired. So I was constantly observing all of these things and tweaking them and adjusting them and kind of just treating my body like a science experiment. And admittedly, a lot of this was tied up with diet culture, and I was also, when I was younger, obsessed with the way that I looked, and I was very focused on being lean and quote unquote healthy. So there's a streak of like what we would call orthorexia in there, and an obsession of doing things right, or I didn't use this language, but upon reflection, wanted to do things perfectly. But I could also feel that my mood was not separate from my physiology. And in my early 30s, I had a parasite, and that sent my gut health into chaos. And I reacted to started reacting to foods randomly. I would go out for dinner and eat something quite simple, but I'd wake up feeling hungover without alcohol. I started to have like my throat would start to tighten up after I'd eat dairy and I'd start to have like allergic reactions. Nuts would sometimes trigger reactions and itchiness. My digestion was all over the place. I knew that there was something wrong with my gut, and I'd also gone on to read a whole bunch of books and like do all this research on it. And I noticed that when my gut was inflamed, my mood was worse. I had less capacity. When my blood sugar was unstable, my mood became like up and down, like your blood sugar would. And when I was undernourished, my brain was under-resourced. And then through this journey and still dipping in and out of like periods of depression, I wouldn't say I had depression that floored me. I could still go to work and all of those sorts of things. But after a particularly bad bout of depression, I started doing my own research because it was this particular depression at 35 flawed me. And I was reading about the criteria for bipolar type 2, and I had a lot of the symptoms. So I went to the doctor and I said, I think this is what's happening. They sent me to a psychiatrist and gave me a diagnosis along with some medication. And it wasn't the diagnosis, it was the psychiatrist told me you'll be on medication for the rest of your life. You will have this condition for the rest of your life. And that felt like a death sentence. And I believed him. But I lost confidence in myself overnight. It was about my identity. Here I was thinking, I don't think I can do all these things I once thought I was capable of. You know, I don't think I can have a business. I don't think I could do these things because depression could just come back at any moment and flaw me like it just did. I wondered if I was fundamentally unreliable because of this inconsistency. And that belief was devastating. And I went on medication and I tried a few medications, and there wasn't really one that actually worked for me until maybe two years later. And then I came off medication because there were considerations for me conceiving. And it was a really beautiful book for me to read at that time because it gave me hope. And one thing that she said in this book that really stuck with me was the brain is like a baby. So if you think about a mother that's pregnant with their baby, the baby will take the nutrients in the mother. She'll take all the nutrients in the mother. If the mother's not getting her nutritional requirements met, the baby will still take the nutrients from her blood, her bones, her teeth. When the baby becomes earth-side, the baby will cry, the baby will act out in ways so you know it's hungry. The brain is the same. If the brain is not getting its nutritional needs met, it will act out to let you know it's hungry. So it's not necessarily about are we eating the right things or are we eating enough? It's also about gut health. And if our gut doesn't have the ability to absorb the nutrients from our food, which has certainly been an experience of mine, of course it's going to act up. So reading this book, I felt a real sense of possibility. It's just having some agency, which was really important at that time in my life. So I wrote down all of the things, the protocol that that book speaks of, and I took that to my naturopath. We ran tests, we did a hair tissue mineral analysis, we adjusted carefully, we tested for intolerances, and we monitored my responses and we refined them. And slowly my system stabilized. And I'm proud to say that I haven't had a single bipolar episode or depressive episode since January 2020. And that's because I'm supported. I've supported myself in so many ways. And I still do, like I still do tests every year to make sure that my nutrient levels are good. And I feel it when they're not. I eat what I want. But I understand my body and I understand my physiology. And what I understand now that I didn't understand then until I learned about it was the brain is not separate from the body. Around 90% of our serotonin is produced in the gut, and our vagus nerve directly connects the gut and the brain. So chronic stress will alter your gut permeability, your ability to absorb nutrients from your food. And trauma dysregulates the HPA access, which affects our cortisol, the stress hormone, and our blood sugar. Blood sugar also, like blood sugar instability, also impacts like anxiety, irritability, mood swings, and inflammation influences our neurotransmitter production. So if digestion is compromised, our nutrient absorption is also compromised. So if you grew up in chronic stress like I did, your nervous system survived like lived in survival mode for many years. And in such important years, there are developmental years. And when you're in survival mode, your digestion will be deprioritized by your body. So if you grew up in stress, your gut did too. And childhood trauma is often associated with conditions such as IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory gut conditions, ultra gut microbiome composition, which all affects our digestion, which all affects our ability to absorb nutrients from our food, hypervigilance, like that fear of that something bad is going to happen. And if you grew up in chronic stress for years, you probably have this part of you, but it reduces our digestive enzyme production, which again is the enzymes that help our body to break down our food and extract nutrients from it to feed our bodies and our brains what they need. And cortisol, that stress hormone, also impacts our intestinal barrier. Like we can't separate trauma from our physiology, from our gut. This is why I care so damn much about the intersection of trauma work, of nervous system regulation and nutrition. You can't separate them. And for years I thought there was something actually wrong with me. But my system was dysregulated and under supported. And this isn't about controlling your body into submission. It's about resourcing your nervous system so it has what it needs to function. And that means blood sugar stability, mineral balance, protein intake, nutrient intake, sleep. Sleep is so important. Stress reduction wherever you can. Trauma healing where required. Boundaries where required. Just because you're capable doesn't mean you have capacity. None of these are glamorous, like they're quite boring, really. But they're powerful. So if you've ever felt like your mood makes you unreliable, I want you to hear this. Like mood disorders, not taking anything away from them, are complex. They're real and they deserve proper care. I don't like to call them disorders because they're adaptations. And interestingly, I've read a lot of literature since this diagnosis that says a lot of people with complex trauma often get misdiagnosed with disorders, including bipolar, which is interesting. But you're not powerless if this feels like you, or that you feel like you're up and down. But stability isn't something that you chase, or something you work on when you don't feel resourced or you have don't have capacity, but it's something that you build with consistency, and to know that like our brains are not separate from our bodies. So before I finish this episode, I want to say something very clearly. This is my lived experience. This is not medical advice, it's not a protocol, it's not a suggestion that medication is unnecessary, even though I've found another way, or that mood disorders or other conditions can be solved with supplements alone. These conditions are very complex, they're biological, they're psychological, they're environmental, and it deserves proper medical care and treatment that meets you as the individual for your specific needs by a professional. But what I'm sharing is the way that I chose to take responsibility for the pieces that were within my control, but under supervision of the right professionals. I've worked alongside doctors and a naturopath. I get tested, I monitor things, I adjust carefully, I don't just go stabbing in the dark, which I think a lot of people do. They go to say, someone's like, You should take magnesium, and so they just go and take magnesium, but not knowing if that's actually what their body needs. And it's not what changed, what changed for me is not just my physiology, but it was also my relationship to myself, and I stopped seeing these things on my body as the enemy, and I stopped chasing the high and trying to avoid the crash, or like I stopped trying to override my own system, and I started resourcing, I started listening, and going from control to self-leadership, that's what changed everything. So if you're navigating these things, whether it's mood instability, whether it's gut issues, blood sugar crashes, chronic stress, if you have a trauma history or any combination of these things, I want you to know this. Like your brain's not separate from your body, your nervous system is not separate from your history, and stability is not built in one area alone, it's built in layers, and you absolutely deserve support while you build it. No, this podcast is for education and reflection only. It is not a substitute for therapy or healthcare. If this episode brought things up for you and you need support, please reach out to a trained therapy practitioner or health professional in your area. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated, please follow or subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or share it with someone who might benefit from hearing it. You can also connect with me on Instagram at Megan Darnell Therapy. If you shared the episode or want to let me know what landed for you, you're always welcome to message or tag me. I love hearing from you guys. Until next time, I'm Megan Darnell, and this is the Self Led Woman.