Episode Highlights

• The complex relationship between creativity and mental health
• How to become the most authentic version of yourself
• Eliminating the stigma of depression
• The life-saving work of Dr. Edison de Mello
• The cyclical nature of depression and anxiety
• Cultivating an awareness of your body’s stress language
• The danger of placing identity within work
• How you can take ownership of your wellness and rewrite your story
• The interpersonal importance of bodily care
• You can measure depression and anxiety no different than diabetes
• Depression’s physiological influences
• Fighting narratives of brokenness and weakness
• How to have a productive relationship with your practitioner
• Finding a doctor that gets to know you before he gets to know your symptoms
• Circadian rhythms and hormonal optimization

Useful Links

• The Akasha Center For Integrative Medicine
• Akasha Naturals Supplements Store

About Guest

Edison de Mello, MD, PhD, is a board certified Integrative Physician by the American Board of Integrative Medicine and a licensed psychotherapist by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. He practiced psychotherapy for 13 years before entering medical training and now practices and teaches evidenced- based integrative medicine.

Dr. de Mello’s PhD dissertation, entitled “Gut Feelings – A Psychosocial Approach to Gastrointestinal Illness,” inspired his conception of a center where psychology would be combined and fully integrated with Western and Eastern medicines. The de Mello Institute was formed in 1996 with the goal of employing safe and complementary approaches to healthcare while also addressing a person’s emotional and spiritual health. Fully committed to these goals, Dr. de Mello entered residency in 1999 at the prestigious Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center Urban Family Residency program in New York City, including training at the Manhattan-based Center for Health and Healing. His training utilized a biopsychosocial model and offered innovative experiences in the integration of complementary medicine into the practice of Family Medicine. Upon completing his medical training, Dr. de Mello expanded the de Mello Institute and founded the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine.

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Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Dr. Edison De Mello, who is the founder of the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine in Santa Monica, California, and this next part of the introduction I say with zero hyperbole whatsoever. He is the reason that I am still alive, the reason that my father is alive, my mother, my sister, and my niece. So, there isn’t a single word in the English language that expresses the amount of gratitude I have, not only for knowing you, but for you taking the time to be on the show today. So, thank you so much, Dr. D, for being on the show.

Dr. Edison de Mello: It is my pleasure, Zack, to be with you, and to have made whatever contribution I have made to make sure that you are here sharing your gifts with all of us.

Zack Arnold: Well, I appreciate that very much. What I want to talk about today, and for those that have come from my previous podcast, Fitness and Post, that were die-hard listeners. You probably recognize Dr. De Mello. I will put links to our previous episodes, in which we did a deep dive into supplements and kind of the, a lot of the scams in the supplement interest industry, and some of the ones you should be taking and be paying attention to. We also talked a little bit about the science of depression and the science of attention deficit issues, as well as just talking about what integrative medicine is. I will link to all those episodes. What I really want to talk about in depth today is the connection between people that do creative work that are quote unquote creatives and mental health issues, and the way we’re going to dive into that conversation is by me being very frank and candid with my own experiences, because you and I initially met, and I don’t even.. I think it’s been like 12 or 13 years, it’s kind of terrifying to think how long you and I have known each other, but I came to you basically on the brink in basically a mindset of suicidal depression, massive anxiety. I had no idea what was going on in my brain. I just had no clue what I was experiencing, and I was only 25 years old. It’s not like I felt this horrible exhaustion all the time, and it’s because I was. 50, and I was 100 pounds overweight, like I was a young kid at 25 and I could barely function, and that’s where you and I originally found each other, and that was kind of where my journey began. And I talk a little bit more about my journey, I’ll put a link to that as well in the beginner’s guide to optimizing yourself, so you guys can get to know me a little bit better if you’re new to the show, but what’s really important about this journey is a lot of people come up to me and say, “Hey, I heard your story about when you were younger and all these things that you experienced, that’s so great that you learned how to deal with them and get over them, and now you’re doing fantastic, and that always makes me feel a little bit guilty, because I don’t think people understand this is something that I fight every single day, and in fact, just a few months ago, I was at another one of my very, very low points of burnout, exhaustion, and major depression, sitting across the aisle from you, barely able to function. What, maybe five months ago, something like that? I honestly don’t remember. It’s all a blur to me.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yeah, it was about seven months ago,

Zack Arnold: Seven months, see, there you go. So I just, I basically filed two months and said those didn’t exist in my brain, and I don’t really want to go into too many of the details about what led me there, but it was basically pushing myself too hard. I’m very much a workaholic, I’ve been very open about that with my audience. I wasn’t sleeping well, basically all the things that I talk about on the show, I just started to put to the side because I got so focused on a project, and that’s what happens to people that are so highly creative, is they just compartmentalize, and I want to talk a little bit about your experience. We can use my past story as well, but really, your experience dealing with people that have depression, that deal with anxiety, that deal with attention disorders, that work in creative fields, because you’re doing this in Santa Monica, and I’m not going to name any names out of privacy reasons, but some of your patients are names that pretty much anybody in a first world country would recognize, so you’re dealing with some of the biggest names in this industry, so let’s just start by talking about how depression works and why it’s so linked to people that seem to be highly creative.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yeah, well, thank you again for the opportunity to talk about something that I’m very passionate about, which is how to help people come out of the depression, but also linked to the depression that they are having to a gift that they can carry with them for the rest of their life, and that gift is usually called awareness. Most of us walk into a depressive situation, or we get depressed, and we’re not aware of what the triggers are. We think that there’s something wrong with us. We think that we are somewhat defective, and most of the times we are not. Most of the times, depression, anxiety is your body’s way of telling you that something’s out of balance, and one of the things that I am very clear that I want to do with my patients is to remove the stigma that you know they need to be on medication for the rest of their lives, that there’s something in, you know, very wrong with them, that their lives are ruined, but but instead what I want them to do is to look at the depression or look at the anxiety that they are suffering as if they’re looking at a screen showing a movie and say, okay, what is happening here, and try to make connections. In your case, Zack, you came in because you were indeed anxious and depressed. There is a family history that you’re part of that is very prominent in your family of anxiety and depression, and those are histories that are beyond or medical conditions that’s beyond your control. This is a genetic thing. What was under your control is how you were relating to the stress triggers that were placed in front of you. You were, as you said very eloquently and very openly, a workaholic. So, for you, work became your identity. You didn’t know who you were when you’re not working, and so that, in and of itself, is a setup, because you are somebody like all of us who are a sum of our parts, you are somebody who has an incredible talent and who is a professional, and you’re somebody who is a man, and at that point you were engaged to be married, so you’re somebody who were thinking about having a family, you were a son, you are, you know, a human being dealing with the stresses of the world. So you are indeed a sum of all parts, and work becomes only one of those parts, but when we put all of our eggs on that basket, and when work is not happening, they. Way we want it to happen, then we feel that we are defective, then we feel inept, then we don’t know what to do with ourselves, and the issue, the interesting thing is that when we are in that state of mind, we look for situations that will reinforce that state of mind, so we look for business associates who are themselves workaholics, and this is all unconscious on a conscious level. We look for people who expect perfection from you, and God forbid you tell them you need a mental health day. We look for people who believe that without their particular craft or work or work schedule, life doesn’t matter, and again, this is not on a conscious level, it’s on a very unconscious level, and so the first step to get familiarized, or to get a deeper knowledge about the stress that one is feeling, is to understand that stress is a mechanism, it’s a way that your body is saying to you, look, what you’re doing is not working. This is in addition to the genetic predisposition. So, genetic predisposition will be turned on by environmental factors, by lifestyle. So, in the lifestyle, which was what we are addressing at this time, one needs to be aware that you know the body talks to you. The body has a language called symptoms, and for those of us who are parents, we know that when you have a baby at home and that baby is crying pre-language, our job is to interpret what their cry specific cry means, so is she crying because she’s hungry, is she’s crying because she has a stranger’s anxiety, is she crying because she’s wet, and in some situations each cry has a particular pitch to it, or a particular way that we can differentiate from, oh yeah, this is what she does when she’s hungry, or this is what she does when she is wet. The body does the same thing. You are, in essence, your body’s parent, your body’s father, so to speak. In your case, that is, without your body, without you, your body starves. Without you, your body gets hit by a carb without you. Your body doesn’t go to sleep when it needs to. You, without you, your body is dehydrated, and that is what we, as parents, do to our children. We give them their basic needs. When you fail to give your basic, your body, your child, your first born, so to speak, their basic needs. Then something very basically necessary for survival is missing, and that is that when you are overworked and when you are overly stressed, and when you cannot get off that treadmill of life, you are living a sanitary life, which means that your blood flow is stagnant. You’re not moving, and life is about moving. Everything on the planet moves, so your body needs to move. Your body needs to get up and exercise and stretch and be able to deal with gravity, and we deal with gravity by moving. You’re not sleeping, which means that your cortisol is high. You don’t sleep, your cortisol levels go up, your good hormones, your happy hormones go down, and you are not a happy camper. When you are overworked and not sleeping and living a sanitary life, you’re also lacking joy if you don’t have joy in your life, people around you are not going to get to know who you are when you’re not working. They’re going to get to see that even when you’re not working, you’re coming home, you’re still that person stuck in their work mode. So, lack of joy means lack of happiness means decrease ways of relating to people, relating to your loved ones, and of course, with when you are working too much, you’re not taking a break, you’re likely eating pretty badly, you’re not eating foods that are healthy to you, for you, you’re not conscious about the fact that you need to take a break to be able to eat, because the eating mechanism actually starts in your brain, actually starts with the ability to stop, to chew your food, to take a deep breath when you’re eating, to kind of really be in their mode where you’re feeding your body that way what it needs, and you’re not just feeding it on the go, so those are the first steps that I want my patients, and that I wanted to use that when you came in that 12 years ago to understand was that the body is trying to tell you through stress that your life is out of balance and unless you. Can get that understanding and not necessarily change right away. Sometimes you can’t, but at least understand what the body is trying to tell you. There will be no medication on the planet that you can take that will work 100% because the medication is dependent on receptors, and those receptors are in your gut. Those receptors can also come be even on your skin sometimes, and when you’re not connecting those two pieces, that in order for medication to work, you need to change your lifestyle. Then only half of the job, or more likely less than half of the potential for medication to work is actually going to be provided to you, so in a nutshell, after a long stretch here, awareness of what your body is trying to tell you is the first step to making sure that the depression is in your life in a way that you can control it, make sure that you have the depression, you have the anxiety, instead of it having you.

Zack Arnold: I can’t emphasize the word awareness enough. And when you said that, you know that’s the number one thing that that you get, that was the gift that I received. Because when I think back to the first time I ever experienced this, it was actually even way before I had met with you, but I didn’t know what was going on. I was actually in college at the time, and I had a massive panic attack on my job, and I worked at Blockbuster Video and customer service, which I think would cause just about anybody to have a panic attack, frankly. But anyway, I had this horrible panic attack, and was run to the emergency room, and we just thought it was quote unquote food poisoning. Nobody knew it was going on, so I really didn’t connect that to anything for years, and then when I started dealing with a suicidal depression at 25 it was once again like these – you lose all sense of perspective, and I think the biggest word that most people say, and I know I felt, is that I’m broken, there’s something broken about me, there’s something I’m doing wrong, this is all my fault, or you don’t even realize how bad it is, because you’ve been in it for so long. So, I didn’t have any awareness, and that was really where my journey began. And over the course of the last 10 or 12 years, as you know, being obsessed about learning as much as I can about this stuff, and then finally discovering, like, oh, I’m not the only one that’s fighting this. There are a lot of other people, especially in industries like mine. There are people that deal with this like I do. Let’s see if I can find a way to help them. That was kind of where my awareness journey really began, and I thought that I was quote unquote fixed. I was like, oh, I know exactly all the stuff that I’m doing, and it’s all working great, and depression’s in the rear view mirror, and I’m great. And then all of a sudden it was just this giant steel baseball bat that smacked me across the head. I was like, whoa, where did this come from? I hadn’t experienced it for years, but the awareness was the thing that kept me alive, because I was able to step away and say, all right, 80% of me is in absolute mental hell, like I just felt like my brain was in a prison, but the 20% of me that I learned about from you and through everything else I’ve done was like, all right, clearly there’s something going on here, but this isn’t you, this is just something biological, this is neurochemistry that’s gone haywire, don’t sweat it, we’re gonna figure out what it is, we’re gonna solve it, and we’re going to move forwards, and everything’s going to be fine. And it’s one thing to have that perspective, but it’s another to try and allow that perspective to fight the thoughts that are like, well, my family would be better off without me, and my industry doesn’t need me, and why am I even waking up in the morning? Like, those are the kind of thoughts that go through your head, and it’s this constant battle inside of you just telling yourself those are just thoughts, it’s just brain chemistry, it’s not you. But I think the other really important thing that you brought up is this word identity, and I hear this so much, and I’ve experienced it, where if you work, you know, a nine to five job doing data entry, you live for Fridays, you hate Mondays, and you go out and you find other things to do, whether it’s spending time with your family or rock climbing, or whatever it is. But when you choose a creative industry, it’s who you are, and when people judge your creative work, or you’re having trouble finding work, you take it very personally, and you think there’s something wrong with me. People don’t want my ideas, they don’t want my opinions, they don’t think that I can create good things, and I, in my opinion, like from a psychological level, that’s where a lot of the depression and creativity are linked. But I also discovered recently, maybe you could speak a little bit more to this, was something that was called the Mad Genius Paradox, and this was a recent discovery that everybody thinks, oh, well, if you’re creative, you must be crazy, like Beethoven and Picasso, and all these other people, but what they actually found is that those who have some level of creativity are actually statistically happier and are just, you know, more. Pleasant in their lives, and just feel more fulfilled. People that are highly creative and driven by that creativity, the numbers skyrocket with those that deal with mental health issues. So, I wanted to talk a little bit deeper about some of the neurochemistry that’s going on, so people that feel like they’re broken realize it’s no different than, oh, my blood sugar keeps plummeting, maybe I’ve got diabetes, like nobody’s going to question that, but when it’s your mental health, you lose that ability to have that perspective.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you couldn’t have said it more eloquently. There is indeed a stigma that people with depression and people with anxiety deal with every day, especially when you have a job, and especially when you are, you have a family that’s supportive, and people think that you can just snap out of it, and that is the energy that a lot of my patients, including you, have told me that you receive, have received from people, have felt from people, is you know, you have this great job, you’re 25 years old, you have this supportive family, you’re in Los Angeles, you’re getting your dream job. How, why, and why, why you’re not snapping out of it? Why are you still depressed? And sometimes the depression is beyond you. We talked about environmental factors being one of the triggers, and you are correct, Zack, is that neurotransmitter are also a huge trigger of why some of us have the depression and why some of us allow the depression to have us, and so there’s something called circumstantial depression, you know, you have your heart broken, or you lose your dream job, or you know the election goal doesn’t go your way, you are depressed, that’s called circumstantial depression. There’s a circumstance that led to it. There’s also the kind of depression where there’s not necessarily an identifiable trigger that you can find, and those are the ones that we have to look further into the neurophysiology of your brain, which is has a neuroplasticity that is amazing. We now know that the brain adjusts. We now know that the physiology of the brain is very elastic, it’s not set in stones as we thought, as early as 15 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, that the brain was what it was. Now we know that it changes, and in the brain, so many things happen, as you know, in terms of, you know, the synapses that are occurring, the neurotransmitter that needs to occur, so that we can have the happy hormones happening, so that we can have the energy hormones called dopamine happening, so that we can have the sleep hormone happening, but that is also dependent on how your body can take this hormones from what we refer to inactive form to inactive form. Everything in your brain, everything in your body has to be converted from inactive to active. Let me give you an example. If I gave you an apple, you stand in front of me and I gave you an apple, you look at the apple, most of the time it looks beautiful, it smells good, but that apple is inactive to your body until you take a bite. Once you take a bite of that apple, which starts in your brain, looking at the apple and realizing I’m hungry or I want to taste this, then a lot of physiology starts happening that will be able to get that apple into your body and convert it from a inactive substance to an active substance, so that you can enjoy not only the taste of it, but also the nutritious benefit of that apple. The same is true with your, with your brain and your body, you have a mechanism of conversion called the methylation pathway, and that methylation pathway is what the body uses to convert inactive hormones to active hormones. So, for example, tryptophan is very abundant in your gut, and in some, some of it also in your brain. Tryptophan needs to be converted to serotonin, which is the happy hormone, in order for it to be active, that conversion is dependent on many factors, including your genetic predisposition, whether or not your mastellation pathway that converts tryptophan to serotonin is actually working at 100% capacity, and in fact, 40% of the population have a mutation on this pathway, which means that it can sometimes work 100% sometimes it can work 60% 40% 30% and even 10% of the times, so these are p. People who come in and they take their projects and they do their the exercises and they eat healthy and they try their best to do everything that I asked them to do, but nothing is working, and so I need to step back and say, okay, is it not working, because you know the medication effectiveness suddenly stopped, which is possible, or is it not working because he is not able to metabolize the substance from an inactive substance out of the body to an active substance in the body in the same way that the Apple the Apple example that I gave you in that case, we need to go to a test, to a DNA test, to make sure that you indeed can make that conversion, because if you, you’re not converting, then we are actually missing the boat, you, we are actually asking your body to do something that it can’t, kind of asking somebody without legs to get up and run, and so in that case depression can also be associated with your DNA makeup, which can then be associated with how your body is able to metabolize substances from inactive to active, so that’s one mechanism of physiological breakdown of substances in the brain that we use to measure whether or not it’s being optimized, and what you said about the mad gene is that interesting enough, like you said, a lot of research have pointed out to the fact that the more creative you are, sometimes the more prone to depression one can be, we are not fully.. we don’t have 100% of understanding what that means, but the speculation is that the body, or the system, or your energy, or your whole mechanism of existence in the form of your system, sometimes compensate for that part which your body cannot do it 100% optimally, and so people who are highly creative, we have a degree of conversion of the creative genes or the creative hormones that will then compensate for the part of the bodies or the part of the brains that’s not able to convert the happy hormone at the same rate, and so what it’s been written. The book, some of the books out there, is amazing. Joseph Campbell wrote about it in The Hero’s Journey, where he talks about that people with creative minds are sometimes prone to this more of melancholy, sometimes that happens, sometimes of the melancholy, sometimes can take the form of anxiety and depression, and that what needs to be done in these cases is to allow the creative process to be what is going to take you into the next level of happiness. Look at it and say, okay, here I am writing this incredible script or painting this incredible painting, and I’m feeling sad and I’m feeling depressed. Instead of buying into the depression and the sadness is for you to buy into the process of that, allow you, your depression is part of the reason why, or your anxiety part of the reason why you can write the way you write, so in that way you’re looking at your anxiety, your depression, and sometimes even your stress as a gift to be able to get you to a level in your craft that you feel you need to get, it’s all about the balance. If one feels that they need stress to be able to perform a job at 100% capacity, then of course he is missing the boat. It’s not the that you have to have the high level of stress or the high level of anxiety or the high level of depression to be able to perform or to complete a beautiful craft that you have, but rather that you can use the amount that you have at a balanced way and be able to look at it as a gift, and then say, okay, I’ve used this amount of stress to be able to get from point a to point b, but what happens when I distress, I get to point a, and the stress is still there, you know? Or what happens when the stress, then once I finish the job, that I needed to have a little tiny stress to get there, that I needed to stay up a little late. What happens when I cannot get off the treadmill? You’re on a treadmill, right, running to get to the job. The job is done. Your job is to get off the treadmill. What happens when you cannot get off the treadmill? What happens when you get addicted to that stress? What happens when you get so comfortable with that anxiety? Anxiety or that depression that you need to perform a craft that you cannot not have that in your life, that’s when the question that I think is very important for everybody to ask oneself becomes very relevant, which is, Who am I without the stress, who am I without the anxiety, and who am I without the depression,

Zack Arnold: And those are questions that took me years to discover, as you know, because we’ve been working on helping me find the answers to those questions, but I think that, you know, it’s a lot of times for anybody that’s listening that is highly creative, in order to produce your best work, sometimes you just have to open yourself up emotionally to the world and be very sensitive to it, which can mean you’re going to be intensely sad or intensely anxious, or whatever it is, to allow you to create that, but you’re right, kind of allowing that revolving door to shut when it needs to, that can sometimes be the hardest part, is just understanding that, oh, you know what, I’m feeling this right now. I’m going to allow these emotions to drive me creatively, but then all of a sudden the rushing river just takes over, and you can’t shut the door. And then all of a sudden it just becomes this cascading mess of emotions and stress and blaming yourself, and what’s wrong with me, and what have I done? And then it just goes down and down, it’s just a snowball going down a hill until you just get to the point where it’s, it’s out of control, and I’ve been through that many, many times, and I know that I talked to other people that have as well, but one of the other things that I wanted to hit, just kind of make this point even clearer to people, that’s a huge revelation in the medical world, is this idea of measurement, because I remember when you and I first started, one of my very first questions, when I started to kind of, you know, get out of the worst of the fog, is I said, well, you know, if, if I had diabetes, you could just take a blood test, and you can figure out how much insulin I’m creating, so can you just tell me how much serotonin I have, or dopamine, or norepinephrine, you’re like, no, we really can’t do those things. There are other ways that we can kind of get around it and be pretty confident that you’re dealing with these problems, but there is no real way for me to show you hard numbers. That’s changed a lot since you and I started talking, and now it’s pretty definitive, where you can say, yep, this is what you’re dealing with, and I think the ability to be able to do that can change somebody’s entire outlook from I’m broken and I’m worthless to oh well these numbers explain why I feel this way,

Dr. Edison de Mello: That’s a very good way of putting it, again very eloquent way of explaining, because I think the worst thing that we doctors or healthcare practitioners can do to our patients second to not being present for them when they show up is to allow them to leave your office believing that they are broken and there is something deeply wrong with them. I say to anybody out there, Zack, who is dealing with depression, anxiety, and for that matter, any disease, find a practitioner that is really interested in meeting you before they meet your disease or your condition, because you are the person who happens to have the condition. It’s not the other way around, because when the condition has you, it imprisons you, and you start looking at life from behind the bars, from behind bars. You don’t have a picture of the whole world of the whole opportunity in front of you. So, it’s very important that your healthcare practitioner gets to know you, get to know who you are. Who is Zack Arnold when he’s not at work, who is like Arnot, when he’s not here. You know what makes what is his passion? What is this passion of this young man? You know, father of two children, a husband, who is he? And how the depression, the anxiety connect parts of him, because there is a gift in it. And I say this with a lot of respect, because some of people in your, some of your listener stack may have a lot of deep depression and anxiety, and for me to say it’s a gift, it’s kind of disrespectful. That’s not necessarily how I mean it. I mean there is a gift in you being able to look deeply into your experience, and the gift is that you will discover you is that you find you in the story. Your anxiety or depression is a story, and it’s part of your life, and you have to find yourself in that story, and you have to ask yourself, When I find me in this story. How will I be different? So, a lot has happened indeed since I saw you 12 years ago. It’s like I equate the brain physiology today, the studies in healthcare like computer science, and you go to sleep, and the next morning. You know, what was hard one day in computer technology, software, the next day is old news, because something else has come around, and we are in the 21st century, and we, as a human race, have never experienced the advancements that we have experienced in technologies in the last two decades, and so and that is also applicable to medicine, so measuring your mastulation pathway that I talked about a few minutes ago, making sure that your system is able to convert one hormone that is inactive to a hormone that is active, because that’s how the body works, like a key and a lock, you don’t key only has a function if you find a lock, otherwise it’s useless. The same tool, the same strain the body, those hormones that with the body is producing, that the brain is producing, that your gut is producing, will only be effective when they go from active, from inactive to active, so in doing that one can really see, oh, here’s where the problem is. So we start with a methylation pathway. It’s an enzyme in your body called the M T H F R, is the main component of this methylation pathway, and it’s called methyl tetra hydro folate reductase, and Zack can put a link of for that on on the website. I can provide you with a link of research on that, Zack, and that is extremely helpful, because that tells you people suffering from anxiety, from depression, if indeed is a part of your body that is not converting those very necessary hormones to active forms. The other way that we’ve are not, we are now able to do this, and it’s become more and more sophisticated is through salivary tests. Now the Western medicine medical community, unless they’ve taken the time to read about this, they will poo poo the whole thing, and people, some of my colleagues out there, who are also medical doctors, like I am MDS, but who have not taken the time to go outside the scope of their practices, or for what they used to, and learn a little bit more about what integrative medicine is. We don’t understand this, but your cells, your saliva is a great way for us to know whether or not you have sufficient hormones being converted into your body. So, do you have serotonin enough in the morning? Is that serotonin level at least optimal, somewhat optimal in the afternoon and in the evening. Why is that? Because we are hormonal beings, that means that we are circadian beings. We depend on the movement of the sun to be able to release this to release those hormones. So, when you wake up in the morning, your serotonin is not going to be the same that it is at 4o’clock in the afternoon, and that’s true of every hormones. So, we need to know, does Zack Arnott have enough serotonin in the morning so that he can wake up and be ready to engage in the day in somewhat a joyful way, as opposed to a dreadful way, does he have enough, enough dopamine that will be the energy hormone that will get him going, and does that dopamine, is a dopamine released at the specific optimal time, meaning morning and afternoon, and does it start going down at night when the sun is going down, because the body needs to prepare you to go to sleep, so remember the same cycle of the sun, which means that now the dopamine needs to be decreased, so that melatonin, the sleep hormones can be increased, so this circadian rhythm, circadian ways that the body has to release hormones are very important for us to understand how to treat you if you have a melatonin, if you have dopamine high at night. The answer is not to give you melatonin alone and expect that you’re going to go to bed. Melatonin, as you know, for some of you who don’t know, is the sleep hormone, so people come in and say, I can’t sleep. My other doctor told me to take melatonin. It’s not working well. It’s not, it’s not working, it’s that the dopamine levels at night have not been addressed, and so it’s a little bit more complex than that. So making sure that you have the methylation pathway tested, making sure that you have a salivary hormone test that sometimes different urine, you can do a 24 hour urine also to determine the levels of hormone is also important, but again I could not stress the fact that you need to meet with a practitioner who is really interested. It in your story, who is interested in who you are, who is interested in understanding that your particular condition, in this case depression, anxiety, it’s not the whole sum of you, it’s only a part of you.

Zack Arnold: I couldn’t have said it better about how important it is to find a practitioner who understands these things, but it’s easier said than done, especially with the way that the Western medical system is designed, and I really don’t want to jump into this giant black hole of how I feel about the standard medical system, but the very, very short version for somebody that is listening to this that has dealt with depression, anxiety, or maybe dealing with it right now, if you’re making an appointment and you’re going in, and they look at you, they ask a couple of questions, you’re in there for 15 minutes, and at the end of it, they’re like, well, I’m going to write you a prescription for Prozac or Lexapro, or whatever, and they don’t understand you as a person, you need to go somewhere else, because they’re giving you the McDonald’s version of medicine, and saying, well, here’s your Big Mac, like this is going to make you feel not so hungry because it’s food, but it may not be the nutrition that you actually need, and I think that it’s, it’s very hard for people to accept that, because you see somebody in a white coat and they have the medical degree, and like, oh, they’re going to be able to fix me, and people don’t understand there’s this gigantic spectrum of quality of medical care, and with the way that things are moving in our society right now, not to get political, but people are starting to open up their eyes a little bit and understand, oh, maybe what we have isn’t the perfect system, and maybe I do need to find somebody that understands me, and, like you said, my story, because especially for somebody that works in a creative field, we all call ourselves storytellers. We like to tell a story, and that doesn’t mean you have to be writing the story. It means you can be editing it. It means you can be drawing it. It means that you can be bringing color to a story to inflect emotion. It doesn’t matter what it is. We’re storytellers, and you have to start to learn how to tell your own story and understand it, so if there are parts of it that need revisions and need to be rewritten, that’s part of the process of overcoming depression and anxiety, not just 15 minutes with a guy in a lab coat that says, well, this should do it, if it doesn’t come back in a couple of weeks, and we’ll, we’ll mix it up, and maybe change the dosage, or try this other medication, well, we’ll get there, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out, so I just want to caution people that that’s not the way that it has to be done anymore, and I only wish that everybody had had the positive experiences that I’ve had over the last 12 years in the medical community, because I frankly refuse to just go to a bargain basement copay type doctor, because they’re not going to know who I am. For emergency medicine, totally different story when it comes to well-being and wellness. Medical doctors are taught how to prescribe medicine and cure disease, like that’s not my opinion, that’s well known and respected by many medical doctors, that they agree. And if you’re interested in being well, if you’re interested in optimizing yourself, there’s a lot more to it than just, let me find the pillow, so I don’t feel so crummy all the time, which brings me to the other mental state that I think is just as imperative to address, or maybe even more imperative than this idea that I’m broken, which is that I’m weak. I am not a strong person, because there are other people that are working in other offices right now, doing the same job, they’re working longer hours, and they’re getting more work done than I am, and they just seem to be fine. I’m a weak person. Why is it that I’m so weak and I can’t handle the things that they are? I’ve got to push through this by working harder. I’m going to assume that’s something that you’ve probably heard once or twice before.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yeah, yeah, all the time, and it’s very sad, and it happens with everybody, and it’s even more heartbreaking when it’s happening with somebody who is so accomplished, who have such incredible gifts up there, who can make such a difference, and they come in and they believe the story that he, that people have told them sometimes, and most of the times not directly, but again, the stigma that if you cannot snap out of your depression or snap out of your stress, that there must be something wrong with you, and that’s kind of like the consensus that people get up there, the energy, the unspoken message, especially in our country, especially in other industrialized nations, where we are supposed to be operating, we’re supposed to be producing, we’re supposed to be on the go, no matter what, because time is money, and, and that is so heartbreaking that to hear specifically young folks who do not have yet the support system or their tribal experiences, so to speak, of other people going through this, who sit across the desk from me, look at me sometimes, they don’t even look at me, looking down, tell me. That there’s something wrong with me, I’m weak, or I’m, you know, I’m not good enough. What I would tell them is, when you get yourself into a doctor’s office, hopefully a doctor’s office or practitioner, and talk about the fact that you need help, that in itself is an amazing sign of strength, that is the what Joseph Campbell and other writers refer to as the hero’s journey, because you’re taking control of the situation, not that you’re taking the situation and you go into my office or somebody’s office and you expect that tomorrow it all be roses, but that you are naming it, you’re speaking about what needs to happen. What, what is the hurdle on your way? It’s kind of, you know, you’re you’re walking around with a shadow now. This is incredible. Most of you have heard of him, Carl Jung, who is this incredible psychoanalyst, and who is also a very grounding spiritual man, who believes that we all have shadows, and our shadows are the voices, are the fears, are the societal kind of expectations that we’ve had, and we carry around the shadow, we walk around the shadow, but we don’t see them, because you only see a shadow when you turn a light on, and most of us are living in the dark, and so he says, naming it, speaking about it, it’s like flipping the light switch on, so now you can see the shadow, so the shadow no longer has you in the dark hidden, but now you can see it, and you can speak to it, and say, yeah, this is what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that I’m not going to be able to be productive. I’m afraid that I’m not going to be able to step out of this depression or anxiety. I’m afraid that my project that I’ve been working on for years suddenly is not going to be green lighted. When you speak about it, you take ownership of it. It no longer has you, and instead you have it. So, I, in my years of practice, and there have been many, I’ve been doing this for over a quarter of a century now, I have yet to meet somebody that I really believe that really believe that he or she is weak, or that I’ve seen the weakness, because the simple fact that they can say this is what’s happening puts them ahead of the game of so many of us who are fast asleep at the will, and saying it is in itself the first way towards being able to get it resolved, and we all have that experience, right? You are upset about something, you’re upset with a friend or partner, and you’re mulling over it, you’re carrying inside of you, and suddenly you find a window where you can tell the person how you feel, and suddenly the level of the anxiety about it or the anger or the sadness is diminished. Why is that? Because you’re released, because everything the body is an open vessel, that means everything that goes in has to go out, right? We know that you drink water, you go to the bathroom to pee, you eat, you go to the bathroom to have a bowel movement, you had your sweat, you said, you cry. What happens with feelings? Where do they go? They become this ease, that means you’re not at ease. And so taking ownership of that is to be able to look at somebody, even at you, and saying, I need help with this, or I need somebody to be able to walk me through this, because I don’t know how to do it, because that’s the warrior, that’s the hero in EU, and that’s exactly where you did, you did Zack at 25 you walked into the office, and I remember you sitting at my exam table there at one time, and feeling really scared, looking down and saying I don’t know how to do this. That was the beginning of your journey that has led you to where you are right now, that has led you to become an outspoken, eloquent person, professional about people in your community who are, by the nature of their work environment, working in the dark, which means no sunlight, which means no opportunity for them to flip the light on to look at the shadow. So you did it, and I’ve seen countless other people do it, and I encourage all of you listening to this, who happen to be dealing with this, to also know that you can too find somebody where you can really start the process of healing, of getting better by just telling them your story.

Zack Arnold: It’s funny because I don’t even remember. Having that conversation or saying that I’m sure that it happened, but I was really kind of a complete blubbering mess back then. But when I look back to our conversation six or seven months ago, when I really was back in the dark, the difference was that I never once said I can’t do this. The difference was I know what I need to do, but I also know that it’s going to be hard, but with that awareness, which is that ultimate gift that I’ve had, I knew what needed to be done, but I still needed help understanding it, packaging it, and I think that probably the most profound thing that I’ve ever learned through my own journey with depression and anxiety, which goes back to what you were saying about, and I love this analogy of you’re really angry at somebody for something they said, and it festers and it festers, and then all of a sudden you say it to them, you’re like, oh my god, I feel so much better. The most profound thing I’ve ever heard about depression, which most likely you told me, was that depression is just anger turned inwards, so you can’t just yell at somebody else because you’re angry with them, you’re angry at yourself, but it’s very hard to understand why, and to get through depression is not just five milligrams of Prozac in the morning and at night, and you should start feeling better. It’s a much deeper, more personal experience, and whether that means psychoanalysis or cognitive behavioral therapy, like there are a lot of different avenues that you can go down, but for people that are experiencing this now, either that have experienced it their whole lives and they’re still trying to figure it out, or they’re brand new to this and they just got hit with that giant tidal wave, there’s a lot more to it than well, I’m starting to feel better because I’m taking this medication. You really have to learn how to rewrite that story, but also change the way that you’re speaking to yourself,

Dr. Edison de Mello: That is so true, that is, yeah, I use that analogy a lot, Zack, about depression and sadness, or being anger turned inwards, and it’s true, even in gastroenterology, and I do a lot of work, as you know, with people with gut feelings, which is how I like to refer to it. In the old days of IBS, for instance, which is inflammatory bowel disease. Inflammatory bowel disease used to be referred to as the angry colon, because a lot of it is about not being satisfied, not feeling mad, not feeling that you have been discovered, that you have discovered who you are, and so we turn to anger. We turn to anger, because it’s easy to be angry sometimes than to be sad, and that’s what we do specifically. And you, out there, my fellow man. Forgive me for being blunt, but men usually have that hanging over them. We men are usually much more comfortable with anger than we are with sadness, and that becomes a problem, right? Because then, when you are angry, people don’t see anything else but your anger, because anger is scary when you are vulnerable, that’s where people are able to see the humanness in you, and so just look at that, see if that applies to you, it may or may not apply to you, but you know, I mean, the words that we use in the English language, when we take a step back and look at the word, it can really bring us an incredible gift into understanding what we’re feeling, right? So I was talking about the gut before, we all talk about gut feelings, right, because the gut is very connected to our brain, I mean, one doesn’t, doesn’t exist without the other. The brain and the gut are intrinsically connected, and when we are sad, we say, oh my god, I’m so sad, I feel like I got.. or when in pain, I’m so upset about this, I’m so angry, I feel like I got kicked in my stomach, right? Or when you are anxious, you feel I feel I have butterflies in my stomach, right? Or when you are lost and you need to find yourself and you’re having some energy of where you may need to go, you say, well, my gut feeling is, and so the gut has that connection, and the gut, incidentally, is where 80% of your happy hormone, again the serotonin, is converted. So interesting notes for you to take home. It’s how we connected the gut to our feelings. Is it because you know it’s the best organ that we found to denote how we’re feeling, or is it because there is a neurophysiology that explains emotions, and that the same is true with the word depressed. When you are depressed, if you think about this, everything is pressed down, everything squashed down, life is pushing down on you, your emotions are suppressing you, work is suppressing you, so the. Depressed in of itself can actually lead to healing, because you can say to yourself, okay, what is one thing that I can do today in the mix of your depression, and sometimes the worst you can ever feel, but even in those moments you can say, what is the one thing that I can do today to honor myself, one thing that I can do today, if I were my best friend, and I was telling him or her my story, what is the one thing that they would advise me to do for me today that would give me a little glimpse of who I am, and that may be anything, it may be going for a walk, or maybe you know, hugging your dog, it may be even taking yourself for an ice cream. One thing that you can do that reminds you that you are bigger than your depression, that you are the person who will have the depression but not allow it to have you, and so, yeah, they can be very powerful,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I’ve went through that myself, and through this whole journey of developing self-awareness, I had kind of really gotten to that point of just saying, all right, if, if I were looking at me from the other side of this conversation, what would I do, and the one thing that I did, and one of the many things that myself was telling me to do, was eat a lot of Oreos and watch a lot of television, and, like, obviously, a lot of the bad stuff, because the neurochemistry was all messed up, but the 20% that voice that was standing outside and had the perspective and awareness, he said, “You got to keep moving. Those are the one thing is that I couldn’t let myself just lay in the fetal possession in bed on the couch, whatever it was, like I had to keep moving, so my diet went completely to hell. My sleep was a total mess, as you know, which actually could lead to paranoid, you know, delusions and hallucinations, and like that was a whole nother fun part of my journey. We won’t even go into just because I was sleep deprived, but even though everything else fell apart, I always kept moving. I monitored my step count, I took walks, I didn’t exercise because I didn’t have the energy, and I felt too depressed to do any real exercise, but I never stopped moving, and I think that engine was just enough to keep the machine to allow it to just not be completely stagnant, and I slowly built off of that one habit, and then once I started to get a little bit more energy, with the help of obviously the medication that we were working with as well, to remove any question whatsoever. Yes, I have used medication to get out of this, and I’m currently using it now, but just felt a little bit better, then picked up one additional new habit. All right, let’s start working on sleep now that I’m moving a little bit more. Great, now let’s start working on diet now. Let’s introduce a little bit more exercise, very light exercise, nothing too crazy, just a little bit more. And then you start stacking these habits one upon another, and you get to the point where you went from being a blubbering mess that couldn’t even go to work and had to stay home and couldn’t be around people six months ago, to the fact that when, as of recording this tomorrow, I’m going to be running a Spartan race, and I feel fantastic, and it took patience, and it took one little tiny habit at a time, and awareness, and the process of learning how to rewrite the way that I was telling my own story in my head, but doing all those things have made a tremendous, tremendous difference, and I just want to make sure anybody that’s listening that has gone through this before or is going through it for the first time just really, really understands that you are not the only person working in a really stressful creative industry that is totally breaking down and can barely make it through the day. You’re the rule, not the exception, just nobody’s willing to admit it or talk about it. So, with that having been said, I want to thank you once again for being on the show, and I’ll make sure once again to put in the show notes for anybody that really wants to deep dive into the neuroscience and brain chemistry, and all that. We did talk about that in a previous episode, and I would link to it. But if you have any final words for somebody listening to this that lives the life of dealing with depression and anxiety, just one final first action step you could give, what would it be?

Dr. Edison de Mello: It’s really never lose respect for yourself, no matter how hard it is, no matter what the world is telling you, mostly subliminal messages, never lose the respect that for yourself, and always believe that you can do this. It’s not easy. It requires a lot of commitment, it requires, you know, a lot of changes, most of it dietary, most of it getting away from the sanitary lifestyle that we all are so accustomed to living, making the baby steps that Zack has alluded to, these are all. All extremely important, but without the awareness of what’s happening, without the respect for yourself, none of it will be as quickly able to make a change in your lives as you can. So, remember this: the respect for yourself is what’s going to lead you to make a lot of decisions that will lead you to come out of whatever space you may be in, and always to realize that there’s 7.8 billion of us on this planet, and still counting, and I can tell you that what you are maybe feeling at this particular moment is similar to 1000s and 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s, of other people feeling the same thing. The difference is that you can talk about it, you can embrace it, you can go towards the hero’s journey and say I need help, versus some people who sadly cannot go there and who will continue to be in the space of the dark space will never be able to turn the light on because they don’t have the support necessary to do that, so find support, find people like Zack Arnold, who is doing this incredible podcast, go on the YouTube, listen to people’s stories you know, and never forget that sometimes going to watch a comedy, sitting down and watching a comedy on TV or other movies will actually help you produce more serotonin, because laughter can lead you, your body to respond differently to this hormonal conversion, so in the midst of all these things, respect for yourself, knowing that you’re not alone, and doing all you can, even if you have to force yourself to do something good for you, including going to watch a comedy, maybe the best thing that you can do for yourself at that moment,

Zack Arnold: In the spirit of reaching out to find inspirational stories and inspirational people. How can people find you?

Dr. Edison de Mello: Thank you. Well, you can find me through the website, our website. Thank you, Zack. It’s a Akasha Center, and it’s A K A S H A, Akasha center.com center.com is the best way for people to get a hold of me of the clinic. I’ve also written some articles, and you can also Google me, and it’s out there. There’s some articles on the Huffton Post, and some other, some other websites, including another one called Activated You, which is a new one. There’s also a great other ways that people who cannot afford a particular private doctor at this point that they can find to help themselves, and that is through, you know, a lot of self-help organizations groups that can actually help you find physicians that are on your particular network that can be more integrative. There is an association that I absolutely respect deeply. It’s called the Academy for Integrative Health and Medicine, and it’s the acronym is A I, so Academy of Integrative Medicine, M Health, so A I M Health, M h.com There’s also the Board of Integrative Medicine that also has physicians that can give you referrals, and some physicians will be on your particular insurance panel, just know again that even though you know there are a lot of people out there who have your best interest in mind and who wants to help you, I’m happy to know that there’s so many. I’ve encountered those who are really passionate about communicating with you, helping you get better, but it always starts with you making sure that you find the person who can meet you, and so look for reviews, call the office, inquire about what the person is, see if there’s any publication that this person has read, and keep in mind that the physician, the practitioner that you’re looking for, is there to work for you. You are hiring that person, it’s not the other way around.

Zack Arnold: Well, I couldn’t have given better advice than that myself. I would advise everybody to go look at those links, all of which will be in the show notes. But on that note, I want to be respectful of your Friday evening, and the fact that you have many other lives to save. So, on that note, I want to thank you once again, and show my greatest gratitude and appreciation for everything you’ve done for me, for my family, and now for everybody that’s listening. So, thank you so much.

Dr. Edison de Mello: My pleasure speaking to you and your audience at any time, Zack. Have a good evening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Jakin Rintelman. Special thanks to Krystle Penhall and Sarah Furie for helping to spread the love!

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).