
Food & Mood: Color, Diversity, And Creativity

Founder, Brain Food Clinic
Food & Mood: Color, Diversity, And Creativity
Deanna Minich, MS, PhD, FACN, CNS, IFMCP
Full Transcript
Introduction to Color, Creativity, and Spirituality 0:00
Well hello everybody. Welcome back. Here we are at the Depression and Anxiety Solutions Summit and talk about solutions. We are just getting right to three of my favorite. Our friend and colleague Diana minnick is here with us. And she is just an expert on all things. Diana, I think about you as an expert on things that people with depression and anxiety need so much. When we're struggling with those symptoms, we need color and all kinds of ways. We're going to talk about in this episode. We need more creativity because it's just it's drained when we're struggling with symptoms like anxiety and depression and then so often I find patients need spirituality.
And you're such a wonderful person to help us kind of get right to the heart of getting more of that in our life. Diana, welcome to the summit. It's so great to have you with us. Well, thank you for having me. I always enjoy our conversations, and especially when we talk about everything that you just mentioned. So I'm looking forward to it. Will you really tap into those? I like to recount sitting next to you at a conference in San Diego, we were both presenting and you just have a wonderful radiance, just really warm.
I wanted to hop up and dance and do yoga and like a colorful meal with you and just be your friend and get closer. I felt like everybody in the room felt that way. It was really a it was a wonderful feeling. And so you bring so much color into your life in a way that I really love, that you walk that talk. Can you tell us what why do people need a diversity of colorful foods, colorful natural foods on our plates? Well, the science would tell us that eating more fruits and vegetables, which is nature's colors.
So when we talk colors, we're talking about nature's colors and not humans colors in the ways of dyes. Right. But the science would tell us that eating more fruits and vegetables, more colorful foods is associated with less psychological distress, better mood, greater happiness, greater flourishing, and even greater sense of well-being. One of my favorite charts that I'd like to show people when I'm giving a lecture on food and mood, because that's one of my main topics that I'd like to talk about, is showing the connection between greater life satisfaction with greater intake of fruit and vegetables servings, and I don't think that many people realize this.
They often think, oh, if I eat more fruits and vegetables, I will just have a lower risk of cancer and cardiovascular. A long time from now. Yeah, something a long time from now. And it feels kind of like a duh. It feels like, well, we know that. But what people don't know is that colorful foods give you colorful moods. And in fact, even as part of this, I put together a food and mood tracker so that people could track the colors
Why Colorful Foods Support Mood 3:00
of their food right next to the colors of their mood. So were they angry the color red? Were they feeling creative? The color orange in mapping our moods to our foods. And I don't think that many people think like that. I think children are a great example of showing us how food can impart different types of aspects in their mood or behavior. We see that relatively quickly because, you know, they don't have all of the filters that we as adults have. But it's true. It's true that our colorful foods make for colorful moods.
And if we look at the rainbow, the rainbow of foods, whether red, orange, yellow, green, even blue, green, blue, purple, and I'm going to also include in here white, brown and black, which many people will say, well, those colors aren't in the rainbow. But what we're talking about here is the broad spectrum of all the different colors and the different healing that they impart is. What the Potato and Hickam were to do, you know, how do they get in on this rainbow game? They need to be there, right?
It come out would be under the white. You know, when I grew up, my I had a very health conscious mother. I would say she was a health nut. And she would always say the whiter the bread, the quicker you're dead. And so I always kind of had this thing about white foods. That white salt, white sugar, white flour, these things weren't healthy. And they aren't they aren't very good for our mood. In fact, they can actually make us more depressed. Yeah. So there's lots of data on that. And Deanna, I love that you're combining this, colorful like the creative spirit of it, along with there's so much science here.
I mean, we've spoken before about, you know, the flavonoids, the carotenoids. These are two separate families, thousands of phytonutrients, plant based nutrients. So when we're looking at this colorful palette and we're thinking about how mood connects, there's both just the how we're feeling. And as you're noting, which is so important for people to be more mindful of that. Yeah. At the plate, you know, how is your mood check in with yourself. How do you feel before and after? I find often when I'm making something colorful, there is a pretty acute effect versus when I put something on the plate and it's like, I call it like the beige diet.
And I'm like, okay, it's nothing. It's just, you know, it tastes fine. There's just nothing really, I don't know, exciting happening there. It's true. We need colors not just for the body, but for the mind. And it's a form of art. I think that, you know, I know that you like creativity. And I think that one of the things that has been overlooked in food and eating is that eating is artful. We need to engage with the foods and the plate and look at all of those pretty colors already. That starts to feed us at the level of art, beauty, having that sense of a connection to something natural.
I think that we as human beings are wired like that. And then all of the nutrition, of course, comes secondary. But I do think that we need to spend more time on the art of eating, because I know that for many people, they can become depressed or anxious about their foods because of what I would call the analysis paralysis. All of the different aspects of count your calories. Whereas I think we need to be saying counter colors. How many colors do you have on the plate? How many colors did you eat today?
Because again, those colors are stacking up in the direction of helping us to have better mood states. Yeah, and calories is really not helpful. Other than calculating nutrient density and a simple way to keep your nutrient density high. And for everybody who hasn't heard that term throughout the summit and throughout, you know, this idea of nutritional psychiatry really rests on nutrient, nutrient density being we want more nutrients per calorie on our plate. And we're plants are interesting as they both deliver lots of traditional nutrients, you know, a dark, leafy green without so much vitamin C and vitamin K and vitamin E, because they also deliver all these phytonutrients which are, you know, special and unique.
DNA, along with the colors and the, you know, all the data about how that really, you know, impacts our psychology and how we feel. Can you share a little of the science between how maybe a couple of your phytonutrients impact our brain health? Well, you already mentioned one of the categories of phytochemicals, and those would be the polyphenols. So if we look at the family tree of all the phytochemicals, we're talking something like 10 to 15,000 compounds in foods that are not considered a vitamin a mineral or a macronutrient meant to give us calories.
So these are all of I call them the underdogs of nutrition, because they're in food. They often go unrecognized because you don't find them on a nutrition facts label. And you don't find them in nutrient density scale. So it's a really important fact. As we were creating the antidepressant food scale, it's really bothered me because if we're really going to, you know, think broadly about what foods we want to rank highly on this table. We want we want fermented foods, some fermented foods on there that live bacteria.
And we want polyphenols and carotenoids, phytonutrients. We want those to count. And and there's no way in a kind of traditional nutrient profiling system to do that right now. There isn't. There isn't an polyphenols just to go back to them. They're the largest category. They're very diverse. Many times you find them in red, brown, blue, purple and black foods. And also some green foods. You know, they are large in scope. So things like, I think that probably most people have heard of flavonoids before.
So if you look at the categories of polyphenols, we're talking about things
Phytonutrients, Diversity, and Gut-Brain Health 9:00
like resveratrol, flax, lignans, soy isoflavones, catechins and green tea. So many times, polyphenol rich foods will be things like tea, berries, herbs and spices. And in fact, I don't think we talk enough about spices. Know for sure not. Oh, yeah. We don't at some of it because there's so much nutrient density. It's like no calories and you're just adding polyphenols and carotenoids sometimes. And you know, oftentimes like really interesting sources of minerals and vitamins and flavor. You know, I think that, many times people think of nutrient density as being laborious, like, oh, I've got to get this food and it doesn't taste so good.
But spices give us so many things, you know, small amounts of many compounds stack up. And that's what we're looking for is diversity. In fact, my three principles I know we are talking about color here, but I have three principles when it comes to nutrition color, creativity and diversity. And I think what happens for many people is they get in a food rut, they get in a life rut, they get in a thinking rut. And many times it's all reflected in on the same. They're doing the same thing day in, day out.
They're eating the same foods, they feel the same way. And so getting diversity is just as important as getting color. I remember having a conversation with my sister some time ago, and I love my sister. And, you know, I was asking her, how are you getting the rainbow? You know, that's the common question that I, I asked people, what's your favorite color? And are you getting the rainbow foods? And, you know, she's pretty in tune with that. And she said, yeah, you know, I'm getting my red foods, I'm eating tomatoes.
And so in reflecting on that, I think what ends up happening is people tend to think of one food for one color, but really there's a spectrum, within one color. If we think of red, we just take red as an example. Goodness. So many different things. You know, we're talking pomegranate. We're talking strawberries, apples of all the different types, all the different varieties of apples, even though they may just look like an apple, they have different phytochemicals. They have different phytochemicals based on their growing season, based on their variety, and according to some literature out there, especially on the American Gut project research, what we see is that diversity.
We want upwards of 30 unique plant foods in seven days, and that confers better benefit when it comes to looking at just overall health, especially gut health. And if we have good gut health, then we have better brain health because of that gut brain access. So what I say is 50, actually, I like 50 foods per week. 50 different plants. And last time we spoke, I love that you said it's plants, fruits and vegetables. That actually really helped me after our last conversation. If anybody is listening, who right now is feeling a little overwhelmed with flavanols, polyphenols, Kronos, all this.
Let me just this is one of the simplest and most effective ways that you can quickly upgrade the quality of your diet in relation to what everybody is in agreement about. Every expert and food and mood and mental health and nutrition wants us to be eating more plants and more colorful plants. And so we're talking about some of the science here to really compel you and help motivate you, that in no way overwhelm you. And when you hear 50 plants, if you're not a big plant, ideas like, wow, that sounds like a lot, I'm sure you can do it.
I know everybody listening can do it because I was not the biggest plant eater. I do it. You can look at a single dish sometimes and you can see like ten different plants. You know, sometimes one of them is wheat. You know, I'm looking for bread. It's going to count. But, you know, it doesn't have to be a salad. I think is another great tip that you often have. There's so many different ways that we can incorporate plants into our diet. And can you share a few of your favorites of this? Beyond the colorful, amazing, yummy, delicious salad, how do you like seeing colorful fruits and vegetables on your plate?
You know I love combinations because this is how you maximize diversity. So, goodness, you know, we can talk about smoothies, stir fries, soups are probably one of my favorites because they can be very mineral rich and you can toss a lot into a soup. So even a cup of soup could have the diversity of perhaps like 15 to 20 different plants. So I'm not talking about measuring serving sizes. I'm just saying count up how many different plants you have in a meal. I have a curry powder at home that has 11 different types of, spices in it, so that counts.
That's 1111 unique plants in that curry powder. But if I have that, you're. Sure that you hear first it's 11. That plus some. You're like a third of the way there. It's, you. Know, it's like a contest. And I feel like we need to make eating fun. And, so one of the things I have a Facebook group and sometimes I run challenges and we did a diversity challenge, and it really compelled me to create a meal and count up how many, what is the maximum amount I can stuffed into a meal? And if you play it like a game like that, it's it's quite fun.
So I think this is. A great, great recommendation everybody because it gamify is that it also just creates a little challenge at every meal. Can you add another few colors? Yeah. You're not just to make it prettier for Instagram. It certainly helps. But but also is we're seeing the really tremendous amount of research here that whether you're thinking about gut health and more microbiome diversity or whether you're just thinking about straight up some of the cool research on things like lycopene or resveratrol and how they impact brain health over time.
There's lots and lots of benefits of more plants and lots of ways to do it. You know, people always want to know cook plants for all plants. Yeah. The olive oil sort. Like there's some tips you have for us on how to maximize the benefits of colorful plants diversity. Okay. I mean, do we apply diversity to the types of foods but also how we prepare them? So I think that there's a place for raw. I think that there's a place for steamed and cooked. What we don't want, however, is overcooked, broiled, grilled, fried.
Because then we start to introduce things called advanced glycation end products. And I think you said it or boiled. You've said in the past, you know, if we could avoid boiling vegetables in water because those water based nutrients are just going to push them down the drain, they will. And that's true. But sometimes, like the carotenoids, they can withstand some boiling. And they may even benefit like a carrot. If you cook a carrot very well. That will give you more in the way of the carotenoids that give you less in the way of the water soluble vitamins.
But that's okay, because a carrot would be higher in carotenoids. But even before we get to cooking, I want to give everybody a hack to increase polyphenols in food. It's one of my favorites. So let's just go back to the carrot so I can buy a carrot at the store. A full on carrot. In fact, I have some in my fridge, some purple carrots, which would be even better for mood. So the way to maximize carrots in cooking would be you can cut them up, just diced them. So just by dicing the carrots and letting them sit for a little bit will increase the number of phenols in that carrot.
And further, if you take a carrot and you shred it
Cooking, Chewing, and Mindful Eating 17:00
so you're actually creating more stress to the carrot which is still living, you can create up to five times greater the amount of phenols, which are again part of this polyphenol category of phytochemicals. So keep in mind that a plant is still living unless it's cooked. So whatever you're doing to it, if you're applying acid in the way of lemon juice, or you're changing the pH, or you're cutting it, dicing it, shredding it, all of those things can change the phytochemical properties. And so that's one that is in the scientific literature that shredding carrots can help to potentiate the phenols in that carrot.
It's a wonderful recommendation. And one of the other summit guests, Doctor Robert Graham, is a chef, and we're just speaking with him about the, you know, meditative property, but also health benefits of chopping and many different cuts. And I found both, the conferences really influenced me over the last few days. As I'm sitting there, I don't think I could have cubed squash for the first time in a long time, and really had a great five minutes with myself making these really perfect cubes. So, it's a wonderful way to tap into creativity.
It's also a wonderful way to tap into that culinary creativity. As we talk about with some of the chefs in the summit of getting those different textures, giving those, you know, many different ways that you can experience a carrot as an eater. And taking advantage of that, as a cook. And then the way that, wow, we get even more polyphenols, like, that's super cool. It is cool. Here's another thing too, because when I have mentioned this to people about shredding and dicing carrots, they say, oh, Deanna, what about just chewing?
And chewing is really important. In fact, I even say to people, to your smoothies and I learned this from Mary Ellen Chalmers, who is a functional dentist that I teach with for the Institute for Functional Medicine. And I heard in a lecture that she gave that chewing stimulates cognition. So in other words, each of our our teeth are connected to root fibers which then connect to the brain. So when we chew were this is for mental health as well. Like if we're talking anxiety, depression, cognition, brain health.
Chewing food is a stimulatory activity. So if we're only downing liquid foods all the time, we're just slurping down our smoothies or our juices or our broths or our soups or whatever it is, we're not getting the benefit of chewing, which will again stimulate the brain. So I think that we do want to chew it, add stress to the plant, and it's also better for us and our digestive system. Of course, that's the obvious one. It's also, a not often used diagnostic, like I would say, indicator that you're not focused, mindful or paying attention to your food.
I don't ask patients this, but it's something in my own life I really pay attention to. If I bite my tongue. And if you find that you're biting your tongue, often when you're eating, it's really a very clear indicator that your mind is somewhere else. Yeah. You're not sitting with the food. You're not chewing. I love the notion that, you know, there are nerve roots. Kind of like olfaction, like smelling things, which is very powerful psychological and mental health fact because it's, you know, such hard wiring or visual system.
Right. And I if we see more green in nature, we have more positive mood states. But chewing more is one of these very, you know, fundamental, foundational pieces of, taking care of your mental health and taking care of your nutrition that we often skip over. So I'm really glad you mentioned it. Did not have to be, you know, 30 to 50 times per bite, but making sure to chew things really regularly, because otherwise you're going to eat all the healthy stuff you want. But if you don't chew it up and start digestion, you're really not getting the maximum benefit because you just can't digest and absorb stuff as well.
That's true. I'm glad that you brought up that aspect of mindfulness, because we can't really fully digest and think at the same time in the way of, you know, my husband is an acupuncturist, so we have these West conversations all the time. And in Chinese medicine, of which I'm no expert. But what I understand is that when you eat, you need to focus on eating. You don't talk. You're not thinking, you're not ruminating because you need all of that chee or that digestive fire to be put towards the energy of the food.
Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have conversations with people and and eat with other people. I think sometimes that can be very stimulating and, and good for digestion, but worry having stagnation of thought. I think that this impairs in some way our digestive fire, even from an elemental, more of an energetic medicine point of view. And of course, there are indications of that in Western medicine, biochemistry and nutritional medicine that if we're worried overthinking over ruminating, we will change our digestive capacity through things like enzymes, secretions or stomach acid.
So I think. You know that it doesn't get emphasized, which is the quality of, the interactions and the conversation while you eat that. I think it's a great, way to invoke and think about other systems of medicine that focusing some of your life force your energy on the digestive process, and to prioritize that. Not that you can't be around other people, that you're primarily there to kind of ingest energy and and to be very mindful of that pick. Also, I noticed this around our table. I find dinner time is really probably a little over the top with this.
But, being a nutritional psychiatrist, very sacred time. The quality of the conversation, what can be talked about. And, you know, I'm not I'm a sensor. But if a conversation begins to trend towards, let's say, something really gruesome or really negative, not that I want to avoid, that I'm happy to talk about those things. I just don't find meal time is, is the time for it, politics, worry, contentious conversation. You know, such a cliche about family encounters that really, I think, shouldn't be a cliche.
It should be directly addressed in your family that, having there be good, you know, doesn't have to be fake. I'm not saying that at all, but. But conversation that helps with, the purpose of sitting down together, which is to revitalize ourselves and to, you know, nourish one another. And so I love that focused. And, I want to shift our conversation just a little bit. There's so much to show and talk with you and everyone. Please. DNA has so much information, and and we've include some of her content, that she shared with us, as part of, the the materials for the summit.
And so, please check out the rest of her material. She has wonderful courses on our website. And just a great way to tap into, a framework of more color in your life or creativity in your life. I want to shift our attention a little bit, although creativity is such a big part of this. But I like to talk about spirituality. So many people and people, often when folks are struggling with anxiety and depression and symptoms like this, spirituality is far from their minds. People aren't feeling held or seen or cared for or calm.
But spirituality is something that almost everyone hopes that a little bit more of. Maybe you're not a religious person per se, but feeling more subtle, more connected, more part of something. Yeah. Future is a little bit how you see spirituality, mental health connected.
Spirituality, Purpose, and Connection 25:00
I think that they are very intertwined. In fact, I think it's first important to define what is spirituality, just so that everybody is coming in at the same level of that conversation of what it is, because we might have different views as to what that is. And I think it's important to define it for ourselves so I can at least speak to, some circles of thought, which would say that spirituality is a sense of meaning and purpose. And further, a sense of connection. So, you know, it's kind of that feeling like if you go out in nature and you're taking a walk through a forest and all of a sudden you kind of have that feeling of, where it's like, oh, wow, I'm connected to the trees, I'm connected to the sky.
I feel one with everything around me. And sometimes those moments are very fleeting, and other times we might feel them through our work, our vision, our sense of purpose. I'm sure that you, in your work as a nutritional psychiatrist, you know when you work with people, you feel that sense of empathy, compassion, but you also feel that sense of vision and a way of connecting nutrition to psychiatry and really bringing that out to the world. Right. Like that you're helping and serving people in this way.
So it gives people a sense of their own purpose. So the connection with mental health is I think that, well, let me just say this. If purpose could be put into a dietary supplement, it would be the only supplement that we would ever need. But we don't have purpose as a nutrient in a supplement. It's something that we need to find throughout our lives. And I do think that for some people, depression can be incurred when there is a lack of purpose. In fact, there's quite a body of literature on this.
If you go to PubMed, you can search articles and they call it purpose in life or pill. And in fact, we've written blogs on this where you can look at people's overall health status being connected to their purpose in life. And this is why when people go through life like in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and up, they have to constantly redefine what is their purpose. Purpose can change. Purpose isn't set in stone. It might be raising children. It might. And that might shift once those children are out of the house.
And, the parent is an empty nester, right. So then you redefined you kind of go through that midlife shuffle of what is my purpose? So I, I love this area of purpose and meaning. I do feel that people do not really know, well, let me say this. You know, I feel that in ancient cultures, there was this sense of mentorship where you can actually talk with members of your community and you'd have mentors and grandparents and elders to coax you further into your life on purpose. Right. So and I feel like we've lost a lot of that.
So we have a lot of people that are younger and even older where it's kind of like, where do I go to figure out what am I doing with my life, what is the meaning of my life? And these transitions in particular? I think you're spot on. The and so many of us in these periods where we transition, into another stage or another chapter or, you know, life happens and we're in a situation we have to adapt. So often those are moments where people can feel separate and where, there is very little mentoring, I think, around this life transition.
It's really, it's a first for I spoke to pedis for the, for the summit, who's a person I've known, for most of my career but haven't spoken to in a long time. And I'm grinning because I went back and I said to my wife, well, yeah, works for personal retirement. I think I get to spend a little more time talking with him, you know, because I thought, oh, he's really, you know, a great mentor in the sense of, you know, really having managed a big health care system, but also really loving lifestyle medicine and just being a wonderful spirit.
And so everyone listening, there are lots of wonderful lessons in the top. One of them, I hope everybody here is, is thinking about mentors and the different meanings of that. Yeah, we always think mentor is that like older, wiser? I've gotten a ton of mentoring from peers. I've had a ton of, what I think of as mentoring, like life lessons from people who I guess I'm supposed to be the mentor, but boy, getting to sit with them as they struggle getting to offer some advice for counsel, that that's such a gift in terms of the things that teaches us. So, maybe purposely.
And I do think we overdo purpose. That purpose for humans is just connecting. And we have lots of different frameworks for that. Maybe it's our hiking group, maybe it's our church which growing stuff in a greenhouse. We was being like creative and dancing and singing, but all of those things generally bring us to connecting with other human beings. And, and, you know, with this, sense of all you were saying, is being alive, being an. Yeah. And I don't think we need to over complicate it. And it maybe it's not human to human interaction.
It can be human to plant, human to animal. You know, what comes to mind right now is I watched a documentary some time ago about Turkey, the country of Turkey, and how they have a, they just like cats roam free. And I love cats. Cats are like my. Go to turkey. I have to go to Istanbul. They're cats everywhere. They're just hanging out. Yes, yes. And as part of this documentary that I was watching, it showed how there was this older man who was probably in his 70s and how he was feeling depressed.
He was on the brink of suicide. And what brought him into purpose was every morning going to feed the cats, and he'd go with this bag of, I don't know, bones and food of some kind of, from the market. And he would put it there. All the cats would swarm around him, they eat, and you could just see the smile on his face. So to him, like, purpose doesn't have to be like a big shiny object, like, oh, I have a life goal of, I want to be president of this organization. I want to change the world. Changing the world could mean changing a cat's life by giving it food and feeling a sense of like that.
You're needed that you're changing, that you're having an impact, that you are outside of yourself in a way of serving. So I just want to put that in the context of it doesn't have to be all big and shiny and wrapped with a big bow as purpose. It might be something incredibly simplistic or what we would daemon's simplistic, but actually quite profound. In fact, I think that the more spiritual something is, the more simple and basic it is, if that makes sense. It's like. Well, I think you're encouraging us DNA to not be, kind of pulled away by shiny objects or the bigness or the challenge of it because it shuts so many of us down.
We say like, oh, you know, spirituality or whatever. We we don't engage with the idea in the simplest of ways that is, you up your food tonight, right? Make little perfect cubes or as you seek a sense of purpose, make it simple or make it right now. Make it today. Make it with the next person you interact with. The summit has caused me to, and healing the modern brain. The, working on the book has really caused me to be doing more reading about spiritual and, and I think that's why my question about connection.
Yeah, that's where that comes from in some ways, that just being such a powerful thing for us to work on and also my experience
Flow, Motion, and Closing Reflections 33:00
of depression and anxiety, just the worst of it, is how it separates us. We don't go out because we feel anxious or worried. We don't reach out because we feel small or isolated or less than or or or little or however you describe it. And so really working on your connections is absolutely fundamental and a real hope of one of the solutions that you find during this summer, summit, DNA, there's so much wisdom you have to share. We're going to have, links to your site up and to your material. You've got great books on this. You've you've just got.
I also really love the kind of courses that providing a framework around creativity and color in to for, as we call it, where you're getting to massive, massive tools in terms of helping you with depression and with anxiety, I wonder if you can share with us just some final inspiration, in these coming after this lecture. You know, my request at the end of all of these talks for you all as part of this summit, is a commitment to do something with this information that, you know, seeing more colorful vegetables.
But you can leave us with a little inspiration. DNA. I would like to leave everybody with a sense of flow. So what does that mean? You know, I kind of feel like when we're in the flow, when we are neuronal plastic, metabolically flexible, our heart rate variability is high. You know, when we're in that creative expressive potential state, you know, sometimes we need to let go of the shackles of things like perfectionism, needing to do things a certain way, like really stepping out of the box of who you become and maybe who, who you really are. Right.
So just to kind of put the the icing on this rainbow cake of, you know, finding ourselves into that state of coherence, I think that there's really great science on flow. And how do you get there for every person? I think it's a little bit different. It might be a swim in the ocean. It might be being engaged in painting with a lot of flowing colors. It might be singing a song and allowing that to flow forward. But I do think that mental health is connected to flow. I think that, having that sense of moving, as my dad would say, when you stop moving, you start dying.
I think he got that from a movie, but he got it from I love saying it because it's kind of like, yeah, you know, if you're not moving in your mind, you're not moving in your body, you're not moving through your creative potential. You're stagnant. You're stuck. You start to go down that rabbit hole of feeling depressed and anxious. And so I love my dad's idea of staying in motion. You know, having the flow in the in the mind, in the heart, in the gut, and having that come out in whatever way that people choose and what feels right for them.
I love that. Thank you for that. And I hope everybody takes that and incorporate it, incorporate it into the next few days, in coming weeks to think about being in motion. So often depression and anxiety symptoms paralyze us. We worry what's the next thing? What's the right thing? Yeah. And to really, listen to your head's advice of it's about keeping in motion. Not all of it feels good. Not all of it's the right best, perfect step. But it's the next step. And that's always the road step. And, to keep in motion, to see and recognize and be mindful of that flow state.
I hope it happens for you tonight, is you're chewing dinner through this. If you really settle down, don't bite your tongue. And really, think about focusing your energy on, really the nourishment that you're taking in. You know, it's so nourishing for me to speak with you. It's so inspiring. Our last conversation is really stuck with me. And so, I'm so grateful for this one. For you sharing just your wonderful smile and your radiance. Everyone, please, have a great next few days. Really listen to some of the highlights of this, and we'll see you in the next Depression and Anxiety Solutions Summit talk.
I'm Doctor Drew Ramsey. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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