Questioner: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. Nowadays, a lot of doctors are talking about the gut-brain, and how it sends signals to influence the brain in the head. So I was wondering if the kind of food we eat and our eating habits can also influence our emotional stability, mental health, and other aspects.
Sadhguru: In today’s world, a lot of people tend to “pig out,” eating whatever comes their way, without discrimination. Many textbooks describe human beings as omnivores, which means we could eat almost anything, which is technically true. But the question is, what do you want to make of yourself? If this is a concern for you, then you need to be discerning about what, how, when, and how much you eat.
An essential human quality is the ability to discriminate and choose what to consume consciously, be it food or otherwise. But the nature of commerce, including the food industry, is such that they want you hooked. The more you consume indiscriminately, the better it is for their business.
Putting that aside, it is not only your gut that has a brain. There is scientific validation that suggests that your heart also has a mini brain. Actually, every cell in the body has a mini brain of its own. If you put all of them together, it is much bigger than your brain and more efficient.
When it comes to mental health, there are two major areas of concern in the world today. Since people live a little longer – which is a good thing; people are living a full life – one major problem is mental decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. Such individuals become like hardware without software. Without software, one does not know what to do.
Another rising major issue is that children are becoming psychologically destabilized at an alarming rate, which was unimaginable even 20 years ago. The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that one in every three teenage girls in the United States is clinically depressed. In previous generations, especially teenage girls used to be giggly and bubbly for no reason. But now, they are becoming depressed. At an age when life should be at its highest level of exuberance, depression is increasingly common. This is where we are heading, and there are many reasons for that.
Whatever we have been involved in over the past few decades – whether it is trees, rivers, the water quality, the soil quality, and your mental health – they are very directly connected. Right now, about 27,000 species of organisms are going extinct every year. When microbial life vanishes, it means huge holes arise in the basic fabric of life that makes us and every other life.
Humans and many other species will not be able to survive once a certain amount of microbial life disappears. The disappearance of microbial life in the soil will result in all kinds of health issues. The first thing you will notice is psychological instability, because the mental structure, similar to software, is usually the first thing to get disturbed and crash. The hardware, your body, takes time to crash, because it is built in a different way, with less complex functionalities.
Mental health and gut health are absolutely related. What kind of food gets into you, how it gets into you, and how many times in a day it gets into you has a significant impact.
There are many different aspects, but one important point is this: If you want to maintain a certain level of consciousness, balance, and equanimity within you, it is crucial to decide when and how often to eat in a day. The best thing to do for your mental and physical health is to choose to eat within a span of eight to ten hours in a day. If you eat once or twice within that window, your gut health will be largely managed. For the next fourteen to sixteen hours, you allow for a break.
Also, because there is a “brain” in your heart, keeping it in good health is very important. There are studies that show that if you spend 24 hours without a moment of anxiety, anger, jealousy, hatred, spite, irritation, or any other unpleasant emotion, your intellect could become twice as sharp.
There may be bouts of anger, but most people do not have the energy to be angry all the time. To be angry for 24 hours, you need to be a Yogi. But you can carry on with your spite for 24 hours. What spite means is, aiming at another person, you will hurt yourself.
I am discussing spite, jealousy, and related emotions because you can keep them simmering for 24 hours. You cannot sustain anger or hatred for an extended period of time. You will be exhausted after some time. But if you keep simmering in unpleasant emotions such as spite, in 10 years’ time, your intellectual capability will decrease by at least 50 percent.
Maintaining a sense of pleasantness in your system is essential for one’s brain health. There are various levels of brain: one in the gut, one in the heart, one in your head, and one in every cell of the body. You are supposed to use all of them.
You need every bit of your brain functioning if you want to rise and be a significant life within yourself. This can only occur when you reverberate in a certain way. For that to happen, you need to be a pleasant piece of life.
Coming back to food and mental health. Being mentally unhealthy does not mean that you need not be that ill that you need medication. If you are irritable or miserable, you may be mentally unhealthy. If your joyfulness depends on whether everyone around you is the way you want them to be, then that is also mental unhealthy. Let doctors hold their own standards. For yourself, you must set your own standard of mental health.
Within 24 hours, there should not be a moment when you get irritated, agitated, resentful, or spiteful. This is what mental health should look like. If you create pleasantness in your system, life will naturally thrive.
