Category: Politics

Hey there! Welcome to Life Noggin.
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Depression is a serious illness that affects over 300 million people worldwide. While everyone feels sad sometimes, people with major depressive disorder — or clinical depression — can be down for weeks, months, or even years. It’s not something they can shake by changing their routine.
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For many, the activities that used to make them happy don’t anymore.
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They may feel hopeless and exhausted, have trouble sleeping, lose their appetite, or have a decreased libido.
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It can be hard for them to get through the day or complete routine tasks. At its worst, depression can lead to suicide.
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I know this is a delicate topic, so I teamed up my YouTube friend and licensed therapist Kati Morton! Kati, could you give us some insight on why people get depressed? Sure thing! There isn’t really one particular reason people slip into depression.
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It can be triggered by an event or stress, but it can also start without a clear cause. Either way, it’s real, and serious.
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One in 10 people have been depressed at least once in their lifetime, and it’s the leading cause of disability worldwide.
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For decades, scientists believed that the illness was caused by an imbalance of certain chemicals in the brain, like serotonin, that help regulate mood.
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Many medications that treat depression boost these chemicals, but they often take weeks to work.
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This may be because the chemicals are actually helping build new neurons and connections in the brain.
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Several studies support this theory, suggesting that the root cause of depression could be problems with the brain’s circuits.
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One study showed that depressed people have weak connections in the parts of the brain associated with reward and memory, and strong connections in the areas associated with punishment. Another study found hyperactivity in the areas controlling concentration and mood. This might be what causes negative thoughts to stay at the front of someone’s mind, even when they try to push them away.
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Scientists are now looking for treatments that target these circuits directly to provide better relief.
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But depression can be more than just bad feelings.
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It’s also been linked to chronic pain, immune system problems, heart disease, and hormone imbalances.
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In fact, physical symptoms are often the first sign of major depressive disorder.
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In a study of roughly 1200 people who met the criteria for depression, nearly 70% went to the doctor for physical symptoms, not mental.
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So, does depression cause physical problems, or is it the other way around? Well, It may be both.
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For example, researchers have long thought that stress can cause stomach issues, but there’s also evidence that irritation in your gut can trigger mood swings.
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Since the mind and body are so closely linked, mental illness is often felt physically even though there is no illness in the body itself.
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Those physical sensations are called psychosomatic symptoms.
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Some scientists believe that physical and emotional pain share similar pathways in the brain, and it’s necessary to treat both types of symptoms to get relief.
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No matter how depression manifests, the most important thing is to get the right help. Many people suffer silently because they think admitting to depression is a sign of weakness. But it’s not, and you are not alone.
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Talking about it with a professional is one of the main things that can help, and most forms of depression are treatable.
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If you know someone who might need help, or if you need help now, you can check the links in the description for free resources.
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And please, speak to a professional.
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Depression can be very difficult to live with, but there are lots of ways to get help. Thank you so much to Kati for helping with this video! She’s a great friend and is helping people every week on her youtube channel. Her channel focuses on mental health and being your best self! If you wanna dive right in, i highly recommend starting here or click the link in the description.

Hi, I’m Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos. Today, I’m talking about the critical role magnesium plays in your mental health that you probably didn’t realize.
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Magnesium is considered one of the essential minerals that’s involved in more than 300 different body processes, including keeping your heart beating and maintaining electrical stability of your nervous system. Magnesium is used by the body to regulate serotonin and other neurotransmitters, and some researchers believe that low magnesium is the problem behind treatment-resistant depression. How could that be? Well, magnesium is an NMDA receptor blocker.
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Blocking NMDA increases the brain chemical called BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotropic factor.
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BDNF is like fertilizer for the brain cells.
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Neuro means brain and trophic is Greek for feeding. BDNF is one of the chemicals that’s responsible for cell regrowth and neuroplasticity.
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Neuroplasticity is the ability to improve nerve connections by destroying damaged nerves and growing new ones. Think of it as neuro-flexibility.
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There’s another popular NMDA blocker called ketamine. Ketamine was approved as a medication for treatment-resistant depression in 2019. Ketamine is a hallucinogen, and so it’s not very easy to take for depression, but it works very fast by its powerful effect on increasing BDNF. I have a video talking more about ketamine for depression. Magnesium also helps anxiety, and here’s how.
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You have NMDA receptors in your amygdala. Those receptors control fear conditioning and avoidance behaviors.
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Avoidance is key in maintaining phobias. I talk a little bit about it in the video that I did on safety behaviors. So blocking the NMDA receptors in the amygdala and the rest of your limbic system decreases your fear response and avoidance, thus reducing anxiety. Another way magnesium helps anxiety is it decreases glutamate, which is a brain chemical that stimulates and excites the cells, and it increases GABA, which slows cell activity. Benzodiazepines and most sleeping pills work by increasing GABA.
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Now, you may be thinking if magnesium is so good and it’s already in our food, why would anyone be depressed or anxious? We all eat magnesium, right? Wrong.
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According to the National Institutes of Health, 68% of the population doesn’t eat enough magnesium, and that’s most of us, and therein lies the problem. Even if you consume enough magnesium, stress and anxiety deplete magnesium levels, and here’s how that works.
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When you have a physical stress, like an illness or anxiety, you get an increase in your sympathetic nervous system.
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You get elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline. These elevations make you excrete more magnesium through your urine, so during times of stress and anxiety, even people with normal levels of magnesium can become temporarily magnesium deficient. In one of the studies that I have referenced in the description, the researchers saw this phenomenon when they studied a group of college students during final exams week.
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The students had normal levels of magnesium before the exams and became deficient while under the stress of exams. And if you have a temporary situation that can make your magnesium dip, you can recover when that stress goes away.
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But imagine the person who has an anxiety disorder or who’s depressed.
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That person becomes magnesium deficient, and the magnesium deficiency keeps them anxious and depressed.
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It’s like a loop that feeds on itself.
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So anxiety depletes your magnesium, and low magnesium makes you anxious or depressed. How much magnesium do you need? The recommended daily amount for men is 400 to 420 milligrams, and for women, it’s 310 to 320 milligrams, and it’s always best to get your vitamins and minerals from nutrient-dense food.
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Nutrient-dense food is food that has a lot of minerals relative to the calories.
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The highest natural source of magnesium is pumpkin seeds, carrying a whopping 156 milligrams for one ounce. Three ounces of cooked chicken breasts only contains 22 milligrams.
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There are good reasons to take supplements. Supplements are good if you just can’t eat enough through your food, or if you have digestion problems, and as we get older, we have less stomach acid, which can lessen how much of it you absorb. Another reason to take magnesium supplements is if you have depression or anxiety. Having those conditions suggests that you may still have reduced magnesium levels. Antidepressants do increase magnesium levels, but as I mentioned before, some people whose depression doesn’t get much better with antidepressants may be stuck in depression because of low magnesium. We still don’t have that much research evidence to support using magnesium as an add-on agent, so your doctor may not have recommended magnesium because nutrition and mental health are relatively new focus in medicine, but the research evidence is growing.
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Here’s what 225 milligrams of magnesium looks like, at least for the brand I use. They’re pretty big capsules, and it still doesn’t meet my daily requirement.
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I’d still have to eat my ounce of pumpkin seeds to get closer to my requirement. If you take other supplements, it can be a chore getting down all these pills. There are several different formulations of magnesium supplements.
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Here’s some of the popular options.
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Magnesium oxide has a lower absorption but a higher concentration of elemental magnesium.
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Because it’s not absorbed well, it can cause diarrhea. Sometimes it’s paired with calcium as a combination tablet, because calcium is constipating.
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Magnesium hydroxide is sold as the laxative called Milk of Magnesia.
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You don’t want to take it as a nutritional supplement, because you don’t want to have diarrhea every day. Magnesium citrate is the most common form of magnesium supplementation, and it’s better absorbed.
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Magnesium diglycenate and magnesium aspartate are more biologically available than magnesium oxide, but still less than the citrate version.
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Biologic availability refers to how much of the pill your body actually uses.
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Magnesium L-threonate is supposed to be more absorbed by the brain, but the research on this is still new.
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The most common side effect associated with magnesium is diarrhea, and you see this most often with the oxide and hydroxide forms. So that’s magnesium, an important nutrient for your brain health. If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at this video on gut health and depression. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

Hi, I’m Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos.
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I’ve talked about dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, as the best treatment for borderline personality disorder. But there are modified forms of DBT that can be helpful for other conditions like bipolar disorder, anxiety, eating disorders, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Today I’m going to teach you one of the many techniques that’s used with DBT to be able to manage your emotions.
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It’s called distress tolerance.
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Distress tolerance is the skill of being able to accept the emotion that you’re feeling without resorting to coping behaviors that make your situation and your overall condition worse. The top three categories of negative emotions are sadness, anger, and fear.
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And we all have different degrees of tolerance for these kinds of emotions. It’s a normal reaction to wanna get rid of the negative emotions.
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But what you do to get rid of these emotions makes all the difference in what happens to the emotions. Let me explain.
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Suppose I lose my job.
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I’m going to be upset about that. It’s not realistic to think that I can just take the news and say, “Oh, that’s a shame, but I’m happy to be alive.” That’s unnatural.
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We’re built to experience a wide spectrum of emotions, from happiness to sadness to anger to fear. You may say a person who’s secure in themselves and in their faith has no reason to be fearful.
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But if a bear walks into the room and bares his teeth at me, I will wet my pants and run. Being afraid and wanting to run is an adaptive response for self-protection. So we’re all wired to experience the full spectrum of emotions in response to both external and internal experiences. Internal experiences would be what you’re thinking about in your head.
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How you tolerate and experience the different emotions is molded and shaped by your temperament, which is your nature, and your upbringing, which is how you were nurtured. I like to call your temperament your factory-installed reflex.
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It’s basically what you were born with and is based on your genes.
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But you can be raised to believe that certain emotions like anger are bad and you should never show your anger. If you grow up believing this, then you’re going to have serious issues dealing with and being or feeling angry. You may tell yourself that you’re not angry, but your mind knows that you are, and the anger will show up as anxiety. Or unprocessed anger can show up as depression because that’s more acceptable than demonstrating anger or even admitting that you’re angry.
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So you have to be able to accept and handle the range of emotions that you experience. If you have trouble with that, then on an unconscious level you will find a way to manage that emotion.
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And here are some of the maladaptive or not so great ways that we try and escape the negative emotions when we can’t accept them. Avoidance.
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This is avoiding situations or seeking reassurance from people.
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You can also make futile attempts to distract yourself from the emotion. Numbing.
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You can use alcohol and drugs to numb the feeling, or binge eating, or even over-sleeping so that you don’t have to feel the pain.
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Another way to escape is to use self-harm, and this could be cutting or punching yourself or even pulling out your hair.
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Escaping the distressing emotion only works in the short term. What you do to escape it can cause more problems for you in the long term.
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So, what does it mean to tolerate the distressing emotion instead of escape it? It means you accept it, make room for it, sit with it, and let it pass on it’s own time. There are several techniques within DBT to help you tolerate distress.
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Here is one that’s based on the concept of mindfulness. I talk more about mindfulness in this video.
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The link will be in the corner and in the description. But in short, when you think mindfully, you focus on what’s going on at the moment with acceptance and no judgment. It’s just observation.
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And this is how you’re going to treat your negative emotions.
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Here is a template for how you can think about them. Let’s go back to my example of losing my job.
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I’m enraged because I think my company lied to me about keeping me around during the transition from one company to the next. And, to make matters worse, the job went to someone I trained.
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Now consciously I think, I’m so upset. But unconsciously, my real thoughts are, I hate my boss and I wanna beat him down to the ground. But with my upbringing, ladies don’t think like that, and especially a Christian woman.
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That’s evil to think such a thing.
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So I’m not consciously aware of my aggressive impulses, that’s what a therapist would help me see, and instead I bury my anger in a pan a brownies and I pick out my eyebrows.
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Here’s what I wanna do to process my rage, and this is a mindfulness exercise.
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Recognize and allow the emotion. This reflection is best made after I first hear the news that I’m being let go. I wanna deal with this early before I get to the pan of brownies.
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So I would say I’m feeling angry at Bob. In fact, I hate him.
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But I’m not bad because I have this feeling and I can allow myself to have it.
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I’m going to make space for it and I do not need to be afraid of it because I’m not going to take action against Bob. I can control myself.
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So I don’t need to get rid of this feeling. So here I am, admitting to the worst possible emotion that I can have about this situation.
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I wanna assume that I’m gonna downplay it in my mind, so go ahead and blow it up and own it.
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I’m not just mad, I hate him. But there’s no judgment here. It’s just an emotion. That’s it.
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I’m not going to act on it.
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I’m just gonna let it sit here with me. Next, you wanna watch the emotion.
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Let me watch this anger and hate and see what it does. While I’m watching it, I’m gonna call it what it is. Anger and rage.
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I don’t have to get caught up in it.
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Where do I notice the emotion in my body? I notice it in my shoulders. I feel tense.
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But it’s just an emotion, nothing more, nothing less. I am not my emotions.
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I simply watch my emotions.
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A good analogy is to think of the emotion as an ocean wave. I’m not gonna struggle and fight this wave, I’m gonna go with it and float with it, I may even ride this wave to the shore. The next step is to be present.
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You’re gonna turn your attention to what you’re doing now, what’s in front of you, and there’s two ways that you can do this.
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The first is to use your five senses.
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I’m going to notice what’s going on with all my five senses. What can I feel? What can I touch? What do I hear? What do I see in front of me? What do I smell? What do I taste? Another way you can be present is to turn your attention to your breath.
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My breath is my anchor for the moment. I take note of how I inhale and how I exhale.
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What do you do when the emotion comes back? When the emotion returns, you say, that’s okay, that’s what emotions do. They come and they go.
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But I’m gonna watch it again. I’ll let it sit here in the room with me, or I may float with it up and down again, just like the ocean wave. That’s the exercise.
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You should write it down as a script and say it to yourself.
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I have a template for you in the description. These negative emotions do cause distress, but accepting this distress doesn’t mean that you enjoy it nor does it mean that you try and fake like it doesn’t matter to you. Accepting the emotion is about changing the way that you look at it.
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You see it for what it is, and in my case, rage, and then I change how I pay attention to it.
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It’s like I’m detaching from the sting of the emotion because I’m simply observing it as one of many emotions that I can experience.
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So I don’t have to fear that it’s gonna consume me because I’m over here and it’s over there. And how I pay attention to the emotion changes how it affects me. Give it a try.
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I have a template for this exercise in the description. See you next time.

Hey Psych2go family, welcome back to another video. Do you have an overwhelming fear of losing your loved ones? You distrust other people or have anxiety about being abandoned? Abandonment issues typically arise in childhood, but can develop later on in life as well. The fear of abandonment is a serious type of anxiety that often stems from a traumatic experience.
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Some aren’t even aware of their own repressed emotional trauma. But it can manifest into unhealthy behaviours over time. So, here are 7 Signs You may Have Abandonment Issues. One: you’re a people pleaser.
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Do you want to impress everyone you meet? Whether it’s your friends, acquaintances, or family members, you try to meet their expectations to get on their good side. You’re the one who tries harder in your relationship, and you’re willing to put everyone else’s needs ahead of yours, as long as it gets them to stay. If you have a strong need to please people and gain their approval, you may still have some unresolved abandonment issues. Two: you struggle with insecurity. Do you sometimes think that someday, the people closest to you will get sick of you and leave? People who are afraid of being abandoned often struggle with feelings of insecurity and inadequacy because someone you loved has walked out on you in the past.
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You’ve internalized the emotional trauma. You may have wrongly believed that it was YOUR fault that they left. This can result in low self-esteem and a need for constant re-assurance.
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Three: you find it hard to trust people Do you find it hard to trust others to keep their promises or to be there for you? You want to be in control of your relationships and know everything that’s going on with your loved ones? Because you’ve been hurt in the past, you have a strong fear of being left alone. In certain cases, it can lead to feelings of unreasonable jealously, suspicion, and possessiveness over your friends and romantic partners.
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Four: you’re afraid to be vulnerable Do you feel uncomfortable during moments of emotional intimacy and honesty? Are you scared of getting close to someone or needing them too much? Your deep-seeded fear of abandonment may manifest into a fear of intimacy and emotional vulnerability. You may unconsciously sabotage your relationships by pushing people away just as you start to care for them. You may struggle with commitment, and act detached and indifferent when you really do care. Five: you look for reasons to leave. Do you always look for reasons to leave in fear of getting too attached to someone? You hold your loved ones to unrealistically high standards and you only focus on their flaws. You don’t give them any room for mistakes. You do this knowing that they’re bound to disappoint you. And when they fail to meet your expectations, you use it as an excuse to give up and leave.
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Six: you move on too quickly Do you have difficulty forming meaningful relationships that last because of deep-seeded fear of abandonment? When you cycle through relationships one after another and move on too quickly, you’re not allowing yourself the time and space to deal with the emotional fallout. Instead, you dive into something new and exciting to distract yourself.
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You never want to be alone, because it would force you to confront the personal issues you’ve been repressing for so long. And number 7…
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you cling to unhealthy relationships Do you find yourself gravitating towards all the wrong people? Have you stayed with someone knowing they’re bad for you? The trauma of being abandoned, especially at a young age, can stay with you for a long time.
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And since we’re all hard-wired to recreate our early childhood experiences for the comfort and familiarity, your childhood taught you the wrong things about love.
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It’s not uncommon for you to be drawn to people who treat you poorly.
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Do you relate to any of the signs mentioned here? I know I did…
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Is a fear of abandonment harming your relationships and keeping you from being happy? Let us know in the comments below. If you found this video helpful, be sure to like and share this video with those who might benefit from it! Don’t forget to subscribe to Psych2go for more videos! Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one!