Nature Knows - Natural Nootropics

NKyTribune reporter

The table is set with the good china, cornucopia centerpiece, and Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. There may be fewer loved ones around it this year, but with grateful hearts, we look forward. Eating the traditional Thanksgiving meal with small twists can be beneficial for our overall health, boost our brainpower, and mental health. Ending this year with a healthy note can help us get 2021 off to a great start.

Registered Dietician, Monica Smith from the Northern Kentucky Health Department (NKHD), provides ideas on how to turn the traditional Thanksgiving dinner we love to eat into a delicious, nutritious meal. Monica Smith When thinking of Thanksgiving dinner, turkey is an absolute. This Thanksgiving staple is on top of the good for you list. It is a great protein, being lean, not high in saturated fats, says Smith.

Most have heard of tryptophan in turkey, an amino acid that makes us sleepy, but it also influences our mood.

“It helps increase the neurotransmitter serotonin which is a feel-good hormone in our bodies,” Smith says. Research shows that our attention, memory, and mood are all positively affected by tryptophan, she says.

Proteins are the building blocks of the body. All cells contain proteins that are needed to help repair cells and make new cells. Smith stresses the importance of lean proteins that have less processing and nitrates. These along, with the higher saturated fats, cause health problems.

Turkey is a good protein to have year-round. Deli turkey provides almost the same benefits. Smith says to look for turkey that has less processing and fewer nitrates.

A Thanksgiving Salmon could be a fun, healthy alternative this year. After all, the Pilgrims had access to an abundant amount of seafood, which would have been an important food source. Salmon is a fatty fish, good as an anti-inflammatory, and is a great source of Omega 3, says Smith. She found a Thanksgiving Salmon recipe which includes another Thanksgiving favorite, cranberries.

Eating more fruits and vegetables is something most need to do daily.

“They are rich in numerous protective antioxidants (help to reduce the risk of chronic diseases), have numerous vitamins/minerals, and help increase immunity and our cognitive function,” says Smith. These are easy to incorporate into Thanksgiving dinner. Smith says to think dark leafy greens. Sauteed spinach, kale, or swiss chard in olive oil, with a little garlic, is tasty and healthy. Must have turkey (Wikimedia Commons) “All of your orange veggies like butternut squash, pumpkin, sweet potato, and carrots,” are all good Thanksgiving vegetables, Smith says. “You can make roasted pumpkin the same as you would butternut squash. Just coat it with a little bit of olive oil or avocado oil, a heart-healthy oil, and salt and pepper or you could add a little cinnamon and nutmeg. It’s really good,” she says. If roasting pumpkin, roast the seeds too! Pumpkin seeds are a good source of protein and Omega 3.

Skip the green bean and other casseroles this year.

“This is kind of a problem with Thanksgiving, all of the casseroles and all the extra things,” says Smith. Having just the green beans, sauteing them like the other leafy vegetables, would be fine but swapping out the green beans for leafy greens is best, she says.

Enjoying cranberries is a perfect complement with Thanksgiving and keeps it traditional. Cranberries have a lot of antioxidants in them and are anti-inflammatory. Antioxidants are important because they prevent and help slow down damage to cells. A lot of berries, cranberries, and cherries are high in antioxidants and anti-inflammatories. The canned cranberry is fine; however, it has added sugars, Smith says. If making a cranberry dish, be careful about adding too much sugar. “The cranberries themselves are pretty tart without adding some sort of sugar to them, but yes they are still good, the whole berries are best though,” she says. Smith says that when thinking about eating sweet potatoes and cranberries, add walnuts or pecans to it. Nuts are a good source of Omega 3s and are a healthier option than the marshmallow topping.

No Thanksgiving dinner is finished until dessert is eaten. Desserts can be delicious, sweet, and healthy. Enjoy a pumpkin pie or berry cobbler, Smith says. The berries and pumpkin are sources of those, anti-inflammatories, just try to eat less crust and more of the filling.

A baked turkey, sauteed leafy greens, roasted squash, cranberries, and a pumpkin pie or berry cobbler make a well-rounded and hearty Thanksgiving dinner.

To keep from overeating all this delicious food, Smith says to eat breakfast. Smith likes a green smoothie. It is an easy way to get in leafy greens. She uses kale, apple cider, a frozen banana, and some vanilla yogurt.

“It’s really tasty and the apple cider covers up the taste of the kale,” she says.

“Those are good foods to try to incorporate every day,” says Smith. Eating healthy means improved mood, less brain fog, and better cognitive functions, she says. Eating a variety of fruits and vegetables and eating less sugar and saturated fats goes a long way to improve body and mind health. In this season of giving thanks, let us give thanks for a healthy year to come.

Read more at www.nkytribune.com

Imagine this: You enter your dorm room after a long, difficult day, and you’re in a bad mood. You’ve been in the library all afternoon, you’re drenched to the core from walking back in the rain, and you still have what feels like an actual mountain of homework left. As you’re unpacking your bag, events from the day run through your mind, and they’re all negative: the test that didn’t go so well, the lunch that wasn’t great, the workout that felt particularly hard… the list goes on. Your day was not entirely bad, yet you’re only able to remember the not-so-great moments.

If you can relate to the above story, you’ve experienced the effects of mood-congruent memory, which is the idea that the memories we retrieve tend to be consistent with our current emotional state. This explains why people who are in a bad mood recall negative memories, and the same goes for all types of moods. Interestingly, mood-congruency affects people’s attention, too, as is mentioned in this post on attentional biases. However, for the purpose of my blog post, I’m going to focus on memory. Essentially, individuals’ moods dictate the types of memories to which they have access, which in turn reinforce their current mood state. This can be helpful when the positive memories contribute to the happy mood, and it’s generally not a big deal when the bad mood is temporary, since the negative memories will likely soon be replaced by more cheerful ones. That being said, the reciprocal relationship between mood and memory can be dangerous when the unhappy mood state is constant. Consider, for instance, individuals who suffer from depression.

Mood-congruent memories play a harmful role in reinforcing depressed people’s negative moods, creating a somewhat inescapable cycle. This means that depressed individuals are especially likely to have depressing memories –– memories that contribute to their already-depressed state, perpetuating this cycle and maintaining the depression. Why does this occur?

Mood-congruent memory, in general, can be explained by the cognitive psychology principle of encoding specificity, or the concept that memory retrieval –– accessing stored memories –– is easiest when the retrieval context matches the context in which the encoding –– the initial formation of the memory trace –– took place. When we encode memories, we also take in information about the encoding context. Emotions are a form of contextual information, so when an individual’s current emotional state is similar to his/her emotional state at the time of encoding, the memory trace is most accessible (McBride & Cutting, 2019). This is why mood-congruent memories powerfully affect depressed people: the depressed mood upon retrieval matches that at the time of encoding the memory, so these individuals are biased toward retrieving depressing memories. https://twitter.com/ap_psychology/status/1072132699605950466 It is easiest to access memories when the mood during encoding matches that upon retrieval. Interestingly, existing research suggests that these mood-congruent memories need not even be accurate to be retrieved by depressed people.

In one study on mood-congruent memory and depression, Howe and Malone (2011) compared depressed and non-depressed subjects’ false memory for different types of words. The researchers utilized the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm , presenting participants with positive, negative, neutral, and depression-relevant word lists. Then, the subjects took a memory test and here’s where the study became really interesting: as opposed to the non-depressed participants, depressed subjects had a significantly greater number of false memories for the critical lure –– a non-list word that fit the category of the list –– when the word was depression-relevant (Howe & Malone, 2011). In other words, both groups performed similarly when the words were positive, negative, and neutral, yet the depressed participants were more likely to incorrectly believe that they’d seen a word when it was related to depression.

I use these findings to highlight two significant points relating to mood-congruent memory: first, considering that depressed participants had higher false memory for depression-relevant –– but not negative –– critical lures, it is clear that these false memories were specific to the depressed mood state; second, if depressed individuals are not only accurately remembering depressing memories, but are also falsely remembering them, this means that they are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of mood-congruent memory. Why do mood-congruent memories seem to have such a strong impact on depressed people? https://www.ft.com/content/b02fd44e-13ba-11e2-9ac6-00144feabdc0 Depressed individuals’ bias toward retrieving depressing memories in conjunction with their inability to suppress these memories maintain this dangerous mood-memory cycle. Well, some psychologists have hypothesized that depressed individuals have a higher resting automatic activation of depression-related stimuli (Roediger et al., 2001, as cited in Joormann et al., 2009). By activation, I mean that depression-related information –– words, in the case of the above study –– is so relevant for depressed individuals that it quickly brings forth other, similar information, such as the depression-relevant critical lure, as demonstrated above (Joormann et al., 2009). Additional findings suggest that depressed individuals are often unable to suppress these harmful (and sometimes false) mood-congruent memories. So, in addition to their increased access to true and false depressing memories, depressed individuals have a hard time getting rid of the memories, which means they remain stuck in the cycle of depression. Let me elaborate:

Existing research reveals that depressed individuals’ tendency to ruminate is related to their difficulty blocking out depressing (or mood-congruent) and irrelevant memories. Rumination is a major symptom of depression, and it refers to repetitive dwelling on negative thoughts. In the case of depression, someone who suffers from this mood disorder might constantly think about the cause of his/her depression, the reasons why his/her life is difficult, etc. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that depressed individuals can choose to control whether they dwell on these harmful thoughts and memories, but I’d like to challenge this potential assumption. https://www.everydayhealth.com/depression/depression-and-ruminative-thinking.aspx Rumination is a common symptom of depression. In a study conducted by Joormann and Gotlib (2008), depressed and non-depressed participants were instructed to memorize two lists of emotional words, some of which were negative and some of which were positive. Then, subjects took a test […]

Read more at web.colby.edu

Photo by Megan Cusick Nursing school is tough. It has to be, after all. Nurses battle on the front lines against infections, injuries, and diseases every day. To top it all off, they often have to handle unruly patients while simultaneously treating their ailments. The life of a nurse is not easy, and so too must nursing school be in order to weed out those who aren’t up for the challenge that face nurses of the future.

But thriving in nursing school doesn’t have to be a fantasy. You can succeed here and move on to fantastic things with a little patience, positivity, and some rock-solid habits.

Get plenty of rest.

Sleep is the great equalizer. Your body and mind crave recovery time after a long day in the classroom, office, or library. No matter what you get up to during the course of a typical day, not sleeping enough can create a powerful knock-on effect that negates any positive developments you are working toward over the long term. Sleep deprivation creates the possibility of unpredictable mood swings and a degraded ability to process external stimuli. With this in mind, your social and educational environment gets harder to comprehend and interact with while you are overtired.

Similarly, REM sleep is important for remembering the day’s lessons, whether in a classroom or the more general classroom of life. REM sleep is essential for high functioning cognition and a lack of it can create brain fog or trouble reaching the precision you need in order to succeed in the highly challenging environment of nursing school.

Resources like a Simmons Beautyrest Mattress is also a great defense against poor sleep. Buying a new mattress that perfectly contours to your body’s needs can give you that totally reenergized feeling in the morning that will power you through a hard day full of challenges. Memory foam has come a long way in recent years and is now lighter and more heat wicking than ever. On top of the advancements in mattress technology, nearly all new mattress and box spring combinations come with a warranty or a trial period that will give you ample time to try out the new equipment and decide whether the exact specifications you are sleeping on are the right choice for your comfort and sleeping needs.

Exercise regularly to maximize productivity.

Exercise is also essential for proper bodily function throughout the strenuous days that lie ahead. Exercise gives your muscles the stimulation they crave and running, in particular, is a fantastic total body workout that also gives your brain the opportunity to kick into a sort of processing mode. The increased blood flow throughout your entire system is a great way to increase your overall health and increases lung and heart health in the process.

Exercise makes you look and feel great, and many people find that regular exercise helps them sleep better at night, too. The truth is, running or lifting weights pumps up your natural mental acuity and can even help you diffuse the debilitating effects of stress on the body. Running also helps you to manage your stress levels which are sure to increase with the responsibilities and demands of nursing school.

Exercise gives you a semblance of control that is not present in many other daily activities and as mentioned before, it increases total blood flow throughout your body, giving your limbs and brain the extra oxygen they need to tackle the increased workload. The effect, of course, is that your mind has the opportunity to work harder without you even knowing it.

Runners often consider this as a “runner’s high” but essentially this is your mind’s way of doubling the workload while it has access to what feels like the equivalent of additional computing power. It’s a calming experience and can be achieved by anyone — even non-runners looking to change up their routine to alleviate the effects of stress in their lives. Just getting out onto the road and jogging once a day or a few times a week will help you enter this meditation-like state and unchain you from the swampy effects of high-stress levels.

Improve your eating habits.

Changing up your diet is another great way to improve your overall handling of the mental load that awaits you on the other side of your front door every day. Including some high powered health foods like organic milk thistle or the omega-3 rich fatty acids and proteins in fish, avocados, or nuts and seeds is a great way to boost your mood and energy with little additional effort.

Eating well is a surefire way to improve your sleep, mood, and overall outlook on the everyday events that affect you. Eating healthy means staying away from takeout meals and other fatty dietary choices that strip away the nutrients that your body needs for proper functionality. In nursing school, you will often find yourself short on time between study sessions, class, and a testing schedule that seems to never subside. But turning to burgers and fries, or Chinese takeout every night will only slow you down over the long run. These foods are great occasionally but eat them often and you will begin to see the sluggishness that persists with MSG-laden food choices.

Similarly, takeaway foods are often a cheap way to get a bite to eat, but over the long run cooking for yourself can save you a ton of money. If you are pressed for time, meal prepping strategies can help you cut down on the price you are paying out per meal even more while giving you a huge amount of free time during the weekday evenings after a long session in the library or a series of classes.

But your university’s college of nursing has chosen this schedule of classes for a reason. Once you graduate and become a fully licensed nurse, the schedule will only get harder as you work long shifts and provide for dozens of patients’ needs simultaneously. Learning to meal prep now while the pressure is off, so to speak, is a […]

Read more at www.thebatt.com