Brain Detox: How to Detox Your Brain Naturally

Detoxification is the conversation that we're having today. You're going to learn what are the signs that your brain needs a detox. Why detoxification is important, an at home detox test that you can do on yourself. And you're also going to learn some strategies for detoxing your brain. Hi, I'm Dr. Nicole and my passion is to help you turn the page on anxiety and depression, brain fog, and to help you get your life back. And part of that are doing live videos, posting blogs, offering courses. And so today make sure that you check out the link in the bio above because I have a ton of free gifts up there for you. And to Today we're going to be getting started by talking about brain toxicity. So there are a few signs that your brain might be due for a detox. Number one is are you dealing with brain fog where it's hard to concentrate or maybe you're not remembering things as well or you don't feel as crisp as you normally did. That may be a sign that it's time to do a brain detox. Number two is do you deal with mood swings? Are you finding that maybe you're irritable and then you feel a little bit anxious and then maybe you feel just sort of sad and lethargic? Do you find that your mood cycles and changes and this is outside of the changeable human experience, but rather do you feel or have you gotten feedback that maybe you're dealing with more mood swings than normal? That could be a sign that it's time for a brain detox. Number three is fatigue. And I have gone through that quite a lot in my brain detox. Journey is just feeling like you don't have the spark or the zest or the energy, not just physically but also mentally. Have you ever had that feeling where you just feel like mentally exhausted? Like I just mentally and emotionally can't anymore? Even if the thing that you're trying to do is really simple, like responding to a text, or maybe it's complex like writing a paper or creating a rapport or running numbers. If you feel like you don't have the zest cognitively, it may be time to do a brain detox. And so we've talked about brain fog, mood swings, fatigue and poor concentration. And then the last sign is do you have difficulties with sleep? Do you feel that you're oversleeping? Is it hard for you to sleep? Either fall asleep or stay asleep, or do you feel like no matter how much sleep you get, you're still exhausted or Maybe you get into that dreamy sleep. Have you ever had it where you're asleep, but you kind of know that you're not asleep? It's like that, walking the line between half awake, half asleep. These are all signs that your brain may need a detox. And so let's move on to why detoxification is important and why it's even relevant when we're thinking about anxiety and other mental health things. And one is, because metabolism is messy, our brain is constantly metabolizing and processing, detoxing, creating chemical reactions, sending signals. Just like in a warehouse where you have to clean up at the end of a shift, your brain is creating metabolic waste. And part of what needs to be detoxed is that metabolic waste. And your brain is designed to do that. For example, you have macrophage immune system cells in your brain that help clean up metabolic waste. But what could happen is if the demand is faster than your body's ability to detox, all of that waste is the waste can accumulate, and it could start creating the symptoms that, that you're experiencing. The second reason that we need to think about brain detox is that we live in a really toxic world. We drink water that has pollutants in it. We are in the air where there are radiant chemicals in the air. We're eating food that may have pesticides, chemicals, solvents, different things in it. The containers that we put our food in may be toxic. For example, yesterday we had Indian food, and the food was in heated plastic containers, which we know from the clinical research will leach phthalates, plastics, into your food. And then when we eat that, we absorb those phthalates, and those are xenoestrogens, and they can interfere with your estrogen metabolism and your hormones and cause quite a lot of problems. So we know that we live in a toxic world, and you can do a lot to minimize that. You can do a lot to try to decrease your toxic burden. But inevitably, if your body isn't keeping up with that, toxins can accumulate, and then you start to develop symptoms of toxicity. So metabolic messiness, too, is we live in a toxic world, and waste accumulation causes dysfunction. So again, if your body isn't detoxing, if your brain isn't detoxing, then you can start to develop symptoms. And I want to share with you a story, actually where this really mattered. And it's more of an extreme story than maybe what you're dealing with, but it's an important example of detoxification. So I was in my residency, and I was working with the late and great Walter Crinian. He was one of the leaders in understanding saunas toxicity and how to detox the brain and body. And he had a clinical rotation and we had a patient who was coming in to receive IVs is a part of his detox protocol. He would come in in a wheelchair and he had a lot of Parkinsonian symptoms. So he had rigidity. It was hard for him to initiate voluntary movement. He had a lot of tremors, he had masked faces where he couldn't really make a lot of expressions. And so he would do the iv, he would do the detox, and then he would be able to walk out of the session. At the end he was much better, but it was palliative. He wasn't really truly moving towards recovery. And so we started talking with him about diet and lifestyle. And he said, well, I've been juicing, I'll amp that up and make sure that I'm getting all of the good juices that can help my brain and body detox. And we're like, great, you do that. And so he upped his juicing, but he came in and he was worse. That shouldn't have happened, right? He's detoxing his body. He shouldn't feel worse. But he did. He came in and all of his Parkinsonian symptoms were amplified. It seemed as though his disease was progressing and it didn't make sense. We're like, we're doing all of the right things. Why isn't he getting better? So this is when we always ask why. So if you've been doing the work, if you've been following the steps and you're still not getting results, it means that you're missing data. It means that you have to go deeper in the why. And so we did that with this patient. We started to ask more and more and more information and then we found that the reason, and you'll never guess, there is a giant grocery store that has purported itself to be one of the healthiest grocery store chains. It has the word foods in it. And he was going, and he was getting juice every day from this foods market, right? Well, it turns out that they weren't using organic vegetables and fruits in the juices and that he was consuming, consuming large quantities of foods that were on the Dirty Dozen list. And his symptoms were getting so much worse. And so the Dirty Dozen list, you can find that from the Environmental Working Group EWG.org and it lists the foods that are the Dirty Dozen, which are those that are more heavily processed and sprayed with Chemicals and pesticides. And then they have the clean 15. Those are the foods that are less sprayed and that you might not need to focus on for organic purchases. And so when he was going to the juice bar, he was consuming really high doses of concentrated vegetables that were on the dirty dozen list and that were not organic. And so we talked with him about this, we re educated him about this, we learned this unfortunate fact about this foods market and we had him stop juicing there. And amazingly, within a few weeks time, his symptoms were significantly better. His treatment started working better. And by the end of my residency, he was able to walk in for treatment, walk out of treatment, and was empowered. The rigidity was better, he was able to smile. He was no longer in a wheelchair. He had more freedom of movements of his body. And it was simply by getting to the root cause of what was causing his symptoms and eliminating that root cause while doing a detox. And so detox is important. And so the next thing I want to share with you is how to assess at home your level of toxicity. And so this is an opportunity for us to talk a little bit about Ayurvedic medicine. Have you heard of Ayurvedic medicine? We haven't actually talked much about it in this channel, but it's something that I'm really passionate about and it's been around for many, many, many decades. And it comes from India. And Ayurvedic medicine is all about body, balancing your body. They talk about how your body can be divided into a range or spectrum of three basic states and they call them doshas. We have vata, pitta and kapha. And you can learn more by researching ayurvedic medicine doshas online and find information about that. And so when we think about Ayurvedic medicine, we think about pain balancing the body so that it can support itself. There's an Ayurvedic plant called triphala. Triphala is amazing. There's clinical research behind all of the different benefits that triphala has in its anti cavity. It's antioxidant, it's anti stress, it's anti carcinogenic, it's anti inflammatory, it's anti free radical, it's antioxidant, it balances your adrenals, it balances your liver. It like this plant combination, this Ayurvedic combination of herbs is absolutely amazing. But one of the things that is its superpower is its ability to help you to detox. And it can tell you if you need to detox and when you're done. And so I'm gonna teach you about that. Now, are you ready? So what you'll do is you'll get triphala. I have no affiliation with any triphala distributors, but I do like Bennion botanicals. And you want to get the triphala powder. And so the reason for that is because we're going to use the flavor of the powder to gauge how toxic we may be and how much detox we need to do. So when you try the triphala, you will notice that it tastes a little bit bitter. You'll notice if your toxicity is elevated, you'll notice the triphala is a little bit bitter. And so then what you're gonna do is you're gonna use about a teaspoon a day in water, and you're gonna drink the triphala. And then your body, over time, will slowly and gently detox. And then you'll notice over time that as the detoxification happens, that the bitterness goes down. And then you might notice it tastes a little bit more like sawdust. It's not a very pleasant taste. Right. But it means you're on the right track. And as you continue, continue doing the detoxification, when your body is ready and it's more balanced, it's more detoxified, the flavor of the trifala will be more sweet. And again, this is something that has been researched. I'll show you a PubMed article about that so you can read it on your own, talk to your doctor, and make sure that it's right for you. But when we think about brain health, we want to think about toxicity. We want to look at your symptoms, and we want to assess, do I have signs of brain toxicity? Have I done the why to dive into am I at risk for environmental toxicity? And then you want to start to eliminate possible sources of toxic exposure, like food heated up in plastic. We want to start to limit that and use glass instead. So starting to look and get educated on sources of toxicity, the environmental working group is a great place to start. And knowing that regular detox is good for the body and healthy. But you always want to talk with your doctor about how to detox and what's going to work best for you, especially if you're taking prescription medications, because prescription medications go through your liver. And if you're detoxing, that puts quite a lot of strain on your liver to promote that detox, which can change how you metabolize your meds. So if you're thinking about detox, always talk to your doctor first. So what I Want to make sure that we emphasize together is we talked about the signs that your brain needs a detox. We talked about five of them. We talked about why it's important to detox. And I shared with you an example of somebody whose symptoms looked like Parkinson's disease, but it was actually toxicity and how we detoxed him and what happened. And then we talked about your home Triphala test. And then you can get Triphala online. It's really inexpensive. I wrote down the prices for you. You can get a little spice jar for nine bucks. You can get a half pound bag online for $11.99. And again, I have no affiliation. Just make sure that you're getting it from a good company. Again, I like Banyan botanicals, which is B A N Y A N botanicals. And Trifala is T R I P H A L A. And again we talked about how to take it, how to use it, how to know your level of toxicity, more bitter, more toxic. And then it'll be time, just gentle detox. And then I also have a veggie cleanse on my website that I do, Corn Quarterly. It's really important to detox your body. So you can find that by going to the link in the bio. You go to my shop and then you can just simply search Veggie cleanse or Detox and I'll have that there for you. So if you want to detox with me, I use the triphala in that veggie cleanse. And then we talked about the benefits of Triphala. And I'll make sure to give you a link to that in the bio. And so if you have any other questions about signs that your brain may need a detox or, or how to detox, let us know, leave a comment or you can send a dm. I have a team of amazing, helpful people and we respond to every DM that we receive. And again, this has been. Dr. Nicole. Check out the link in the bio for all the free goodies. And today we've been talking about brain Detox. And I will see you next time. Thank you so much for being here. Bye. Loves.