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The past few weeks have been just plain weird. My mind has been something like a rainforest – pouring rain one minute, sunny the next, then pouring again without warning. It is confusing when you’re not quite sure if what you are feeling is connected to who you are at the soul level and it is very difficult to identify those false emotions. For this season of depression, I’ve found an extra need to identify who I am as separate from feelings of depression.

Mark & I have this book that has helped thousands of people. We recommend it to quite a few of our friends. It’s called The Mood Cure by Julia Ross, and it basically uses nutritional therapy in the form of basic amino acids to help restore the mood, come out of mind fog, and such. You can buy it here or on Amazon. I found it again the other day at the back of our bookshelf, so I started reading. The first three pages basically answered all the questions that had been rolling around in my mind.

So, I thought I’d share them right here:

Chapter One: Are Your Emotions True or False?

              If you’re often feeling depressed, anxious, or stressed, you’re not alone. We’re in a bad-mood epidemic, a hundred times more likely to have significant mood problems than people born a hundred years ago. And these problems are on the rise. Adult rates of depression and anxiety have tripled since 1990, and over 80 percent of those who consult medical doctors today complain of excessive stress. Even our children are in trouble, with at least one in ten suffering from significant mood disorders. Our mood problems are increasing so fast that, by 2020, they will outrank AIDS, accidents, and violence as the primary causes of early death and disability.

It’s clear that our moods are deteriorating at unprecedented rates. What isn’t so clear is why. What is this tidal wave of emotional malaise all about? Are our lives so much more unhappy than they were one hundred years ago, or even ten years ago? It’s true that we’re facing some unprecedented adversity in the twenty-first century. But even if it is the high pressure, or the absence of family support, or the terrorist threat, for example, why are we now so unresponsive to traditionally reliable remedies like long vacations, psychotherapy, and spiritual counsel? Why are we forced to turn more and more to medication for solace?

In this book, I’m proposing that much of our increasing emotional distress stems from easily correctable malfunctions in our brain and body chemistry – malfunctions that are primarily the result of critical, unmet nutritional needs. More important, I am proposing a complete yet easy-to-implement nutritional repair plan that can actually start to eliminate what I call our “false moods” in twenty-four hours.

 

True Emotions VS. False Moods

              Some negative feelings are unavoidable and even beneficial. They’re what I call “true emotions.” These true, genuine responses to the real difficulties we encounter in life can be hard to take. They can even be unbearable at times, depending on the kinds of ordeals we face. But they can also be vitally important. True grief moves us through our losses, true fear warns us of danger, true anger can defend us from abuse, and true shame can teach us to grow and change. These true emotions typically pass, or diminish naturally, and even when they get repressed or misdirected, they can usually be relieved through counseling. But when we suffer for no justifiable reason; when the pain of a broken heart doesn’t mend like a broken bone; when rest, psychotherapy, prayer, and meditation can make little impact – then we must suspect the emotional impostor, the meaningless biochemical error – the “false mood.”

Figuring out the difference between false moods and true emotions is the first step in your Mood Cure. Once you’ve mastered that, you can move on to eliminate the fraudulent feelings of depression, anxiety, sadness, and irritability that are interfering with your natural capacity to enjoy life.

…You shouldn’t have to live with these kinds of distorted moods on a regular basis. It’s like having an engine that sputters, preventing you from having a smooth emotional ride. When your brain’s emotional equipment needs a tune-up, you get clues: you don’t sleep well, you worry too much, you start feeling overwhelmed, you lose your enthusiasm or your ability to concentrate. You might also start depending on chocolate, wine, or marijuana to get some relief. If you experience these minds of symptoms frequently, you may have just come to accept them, assuming them simply to be unfortunate features of your basic personality. But chances are you’re wrong. Now you have an opportunity to discover your true emotional nature.

 

The Primary Cause of Your False Moods

              Your brain is responsible for most of your feelings, both true and false. In concert with some surprisingly brainlike areas of your heart and guy, it transmits your feelings through four highly specialized and potent kinds of mood molecules. If it has plenty of all four, it keeps you as happy as you can possibly be, given your particular life circumstances. But if your brain runs low on these mood transmitters – whether because of a minor genetic miscue, because it’s used them up coping with too much stress, or because you aren’t eating the specific foods it needs – it stops producing normal emotions on a consistent basis. Instead, it starts hitting false emotional notes, like a piano out of tune.

After more than thirty years of intensive, worldwide investigation, most of the false moods and their causes have been identified by one of the fastest-growing fields of science – neuroscience, the field that studies the workings and effects of the brain. Drug companies have been using this information to create products that give our emotional equipment a quick charge. But that’s not the same thing as a real repair job. Fortunately, the emotional tune-up that we need so badly now is readily available. In fact, the repair tools we need for this crucial effort are shockingly simple. They’re specific foods and nutrient supplements that are so exactly what the brain needs that they can begin to correct emotion malfunction in just twenty-four hours…

I hope that this first section of the book help you. The amino acids she talks about in the book have made a difference for everyone I know that has tried them, and no one is paying me to say so. She says you can feel better in twenty-four hours, but honestly, it’s a matter of seconds sometimes for me.

Anyway, it is good to know that some of the negative feelings we allow to speak into our hearts aren’t who we are. They do not define us. Sometimes, it is just our brain not functioning as it can, and this is something that can change.