Matt Kelly explains how mitochondrial dysfunction worsens anxiety, depression, and sleep problems by destabilizing brain chemistry, rather than causing localized damage to the mitochondria themselves.
When mitochondria are a reason for neuropsychiatric symptoms being more noticeable, the reason is not necessarily that, you know, those areas that create the brain chemistry to help me not be as anxious or whatever have specific mitochondrial damage. They might, but it's usually not that. It's more that the way I feel As a human, but then maybe expressed, or maybe I don't tell anybody, but I feel it as I'm more depressed or I'm more anxious or I have more sleep trouble or I have other things going on. The more my brain is stressed and the worse the mitochondria are performing, the more the balance of neurochemistry, which is very, very dynamic, gets imbalanced. And everybody has imbalances that are under their subthreshold. They're under the radar.
