The Order of Things
I know this blog is packed with information. It can feel overwhelming to try to figure out where to start! In my opinion, the best answer to that question is simply wherever you feel you can be successful. A perfect plan with poor execution will never beat an average plan with great execution!
What Is Most Important To You?
With this said, I think it’s important to start with what is most important to you. If the low energy of depression is keeping you from making any changes, we need to focus on that first. If anxiety and stress are making the perfect enemy of the good, let’s work on the stress response first. Once you decide what’s most important, the rest is just working to find the best way of doing it.
The Right Order
In general, I feel it’s important to address things in the right order. It usually starts with food, then moves on to healing the gut and optimizing nutrient status. Often these first interventions can create enough downstream changes that further steps are less necessary! For many continuing to balance hormones, support detoxification, and support energy metabolism is then necessary. Once you make one positive change and push your system towards more balance, the downstream effects of that one change can lead to other problems improving!
Everything Is Connected
The more I learn about the interconnectedness of the body, the less the term mental health seems appropriate. Our experience and perception colors our biology and our biology affects our perceptions. Every system in the body is involved. We are constantly learning about powerful ways we can shift our biology and the expression of our fixed genetic code. Functional medicine creates the operating system to push the leverage points of these interconnections and attempts to go deeper to correct the underlying problems. After spending the last 4 years getting deeper into the evidence and science behind the approach, I’m excited about it’s potential to create more meaningful improvement in the treatment of chronic disease, particularly those currently classified under the psychiatry umbrella!
