Dealing With Depression - One of the Little Known Benefits of Fish Oil
I wish I knew in high school about the benefits of fish oil in helping to cope with depression.
I'm not an extremely depressed person but I have battled with small bouts of it for my entire life.
Now it's much easier for me to get through them and stay productive.
For most of my teen years and all through my twenties I found myself getting depressed and eventually sought out professional help.
I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed some drugs.
But coming from a natural health background I've always been very skeptical of mood altering medications.
So I started doing some of my own research.
We all know that diet and exercise play a huge role in the way that we feel and I've always been an active person; whether it was playing competitive sports like hockey or baseball or just trying to stay in shape by running and cycling.
But that exercise alone wasn't enough to keep my spirits up.
I started looking at different herbal supplements that could help me and found things like gingko biloba and ginseng.
But they were more of an overall health and circulation support and didn't exactly work wonders on my depression issues.
But I remembered reading somewhere that the brain needs a lot of essential fatty acids to help keep it healthy and that most of us don't get enough Omega 3 in our diets.
So I started wondering if there might be a connection between my ability to cope with depressive cycles and my dietary intake of Omega 3.
That's when I stumbled across fish oil.
Good quality fish oil supplements contain well balanced levels of all the essential fatty acids and they work together in your body to help support brain function; along with a whole litany of other things.
But what I wondered was what was the best way to get the fish oil.
Was it best to just eat a whole lot of fresh fish and hope for the best? Or find a cheap supplement that I could take lots of and load up when I felt the ominous depression starting to set in? Turns out, that for me, the best thing I could do was find a high quality fish oil supplement that I could take on a daily basis to help support my brain functioning.
It seemed to help me level out my moods.
Now, of course, fish oil isn't the only tool I use to cope with depression; but, in combination with physical and mental exercise, it is definitely a key tool that helps me negotiate my way through depressive cycles and stay productive.
I'm not an extremely depressed person but I have battled with small bouts of it for my entire life.
Now it's much easier for me to get through them and stay productive.
For most of my teen years and all through my twenties I found myself getting depressed and eventually sought out professional help.
I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed some drugs.
But coming from a natural health background I've always been very skeptical of mood altering medications.
So I started doing some of my own research.
We all know that diet and exercise play a huge role in the way that we feel and I've always been an active person; whether it was playing competitive sports like hockey or baseball or just trying to stay in shape by running and cycling.
But that exercise alone wasn't enough to keep my spirits up.
I started looking at different herbal supplements that could help me and found things like gingko biloba and ginseng.
But they were more of an overall health and circulation support and didn't exactly work wonders on my depression issues.
But I remembered reading somewhere that the brain needs a lot of essential fatty acids to help keep it healthy and that most of us don't get enough Omega 3 in our diets.
So I started wondering if there might be a connection between my ability to cope with depressive cycles and my dietary intake of Omega 3.
That's when I stumbled across fish oil.
Good quality fish oil supplements contain well balanced levels of all the essential fatty acids and they work together in your body to help support brain function; along with a whole litany of other things.
But what I wondered was what was the best way to get the fish oil.
Was it best to just eat a whole lot of fresh fish and hope for the best? Or find a cheap supplement that I could take lots of and load up when I felt the ominous depression starting to set in? Turns out, that for me, the best thing I could do was find a high quality fish oil supplement that I could take on a daily basis to help support my brain functioning.
It seemed to help me level out my moods.
Now, of course, fish oil isn't the only tool I use to cope with depression; but, in combination with physical and mental exercise, it is definitely a key tool that helps me negotiate my way through depressive cycles and stay productive.