What ends up in your mouth goes beyond affecting your physique; it literally determines what is happening inside the chemistry of your brain. The health of the gut is vital to brain function due to an interconnective nerve called the vagus nerve. This means that when you fail to take the right food, your neurotransmitters, inflammation, and blood glucose will be affected. Poorly functioning systems in your body manifest in the form of irrational anger, confusion, irritability, and depression. Here are 8 eating habits that might be sabotaging your mental peace.
Chronic Dehydration
If you only hydrate once you feel thirsty, it indicates that your brain experiences dehydration at least at a mild level. Even when a person becomes 1% or 2% dehydrated, it affects cognitive abilities negatively, causes exhaustion, and increases perception of task difficulty. Dehydration reduces the synthesis of serotonin, leading to unexpected irritation and sluggishness.
Complete Absence of Breakfast
The excessive extension of your overnight fasting period puts your body under additional pressure since it uses gluconeogenesis (turning carbohydrates into glucose) to keep stress hormone levels high to support basic brain activity.
Becoming an Ultra-Processed Food Addict
Continuous intake of such items causes a down-regulation of the dopamine receptors, which means that any activity will not produce dopamine in the absence of highly processed food, hence causing depression.
Consuming While Rushing and under Pressure
Eating while checking your emails, driving, or engaging in an argument activates your autonomic nervous system into the sympathetic or fight-or-flight response. It makes your absorption very inefficient, as well as reducing the speed of your digestion process, causing you to experience bloating and cramping among other gastric issues, thus making you irritable.
Excessive Use of Artificial Sweeteners
The excessive use of artificial sweeteners found in low-calorie drinks like diet soda and artificial flavors in food results in an imbalanced neurochemistry. Thus, it becomes inevitable that the individual experiences unexplained headaches, mood swings, depression, and many more.
Insufficient Intake of Protein
Protein gets broken down into amino acids that will be transmitted to the brain in the form of neurotransmitters. Due to insufficient synthesis of neurotransmitters in the brain, there will be feelings of laziness and lethargy.
Poor Habits of Night-Time Eating
It is strenuous for the digestive system to digest large volumes of food taken immediately before bed because it takes additional energy to break it down. Thus, as you sleep, your body temperature and insulin levels rise, resulting in fatigue in the morning.
Excessive Caloric Restriction
Excessive monitoring of your calorie intake or even unintentionally going into starvation mode activates a mechanism within the body designed to protect it during famines. The body starts acting as if it were in times of hunger and activates its instinct to conserve as much energy as possible, increasing your obsession with food along with your irritability.
