We spoke to Dr. Robin Berzin about how tweaking certain “core actions” can radically improve our mental health.
Before Robin Berzin, MD, became a physician and founded Parsley Health, an innovative holistic medicine startup, she was just another 20-something in New York City subsisting on a “rinse-and-repeat combination of caffeine, red wine, and calorie restriction,” Dr. Berzin writes in a new book. She was excelling in her prestigious office job, unbothered by the perma-hangover and brain fog she and all her peers seemed to be living with. But she wasn’t happy.
“I didn’t feel good. I was anxious, stressed, and lost,” Dr. Berzin writes.
Things changed when she revamped her diet, reduced her red-wine intake, and started practicing yoga. She felt more energized, more clear-headed, leading her to change career paths, enroll in medical school at Columbia University and ultimately found the medical startup Parsley Health. What she experienced — a “metamorphosis” of her mental and emotional health triggered by a change in her physical state — Dr. Berzin calls a “state change.”
In her new book State Change, Dr. Berzin argues that the modern American lifestyle (often too sedentary, too boozy, with too much time spent staring at screens) is taking a huge toll on our mental health. These behaviors are keeping many of us at a baseline of low-grade anxiety, sluggishness, and feeling burned out. Dr. Berzin’s book examines how our physical health can impact our sense of overall wellbeing, and provides a practical 30-day program to help readers initiate their own “state change.”
We spoke to the author and CEO about how tweaking certain “core actions” can radically improve our mental health, the mood-boosting supplements she has in her medicine cabinet, and more.
Katie Couric Media: In your new book, State Change, you discuss how our physical health is really tied to how we feel mentally and emotionally. Can you break down that connection for us?
Dr. Robin Berzin: In so many of my patients, I’ve seen that people have physical barriers to reaching their peak mental health and emotional wellbeing that we don’t even realize. It’s things like chronic conditions, which 60 percent of American adults experience, things like high blood sugar and inflammatory diseases that are worsening our mental health, it’s nutrient deficiencies, and food allergies. In some cases, some of the behaviors that we take every single day — the way we eat, the way we move, our relationship to technology — all of these things impact our physical health.
Over and over again, I’ve seen that when we address these behaviors, we get an “unlock” in our mental health. And that’s really what the book is about.
You write about how so many of your patients are dealing with burnout and anxiety, and how these conditions are really on the rise in the U.S. Why is that?
We are set up for poor mental health. We sit 11 hours a day, we eat on average 17 teaspoons of sugar a day. (It should be less than six teaspoons.) We are staring at screens for often more than 11 hours a day. For many people, alcohol and the way we’re eating is also contributing to poor mental health. If you add all those things together, and you throw in a global pandemic and just the stressors of modern life, you have a recipe for depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, insomnia, burnout.
What are the five core actions you identify affecting our emotional wellbeing and how should we shift them to improve our mood and mental health?
Food: We are eating an incredible amount of sugar and processed food. Something like 75 percent of the American diet is ultra-refined. These foods lead to blood sugar problems, which in turn lead to neuroinflammation. We’re also not getting some of the antioxidants and phytonutrients that are critical for our bodies to combat inflammation, to make neurotransmitters, and to have healthy immunity.
Exercise: Our bodies are designed to process emotions through movement — but we’re not moving. Research shows that in certain trials, people with anxiety and depression showed improvement, 95 percent of the time through exercising every day, and only 40 to 60 percent of the time by taking an antidepressant.
Technology: Social media and news platforms are highly addictive. They trigger the same reward systems in the brain as sugar and even cocaine. That’s depleting the gray matter in our brains, it’s disrupting our sleep. It’s even been proven that social platforms are depleting our sense of emotional wellbeing.
Sleep: We need eight to nine hours of sleep, at minimum. And we really need to go to sleep by 10 p.m. As we sleep, our brains are taking out the metabolic trash we’ve accumulated throughout the day. That is critical for ultimate cognitive function, as well as for mental health.
Alcohol: Alcohol is disrupting our sleep, keeping our bodies from reaching the lower body temperature and lower heart rate at night you need to achieve that deep sleep. It’s also in and of itself a depressant and a toxin.
Watch this video for more on the five core actions:
There’s an interesting section in the book about supplements. Can you tell us about your approach to supplements and how we can start incorporating them in our diets?
Proven supplements that are safe, tested, and professional-grade can be very valuable tools in our mental and emotional wellbeing. Now, that doesn’t mean you should go to your nearest grocery store and fill your cart with the random stuff on the shelves, because all supplements aren’t created equal. A lot of them just aren’t effective, because they don’t have enough of the active ingredient. I highly recommend working with a practitioner who’s licensed and certified and understands what they’re doing with supplements.
In the book, I walk you through some of the supplements that people can pretty much universally take safely and that are critical for mental health. Things like Vitamin D3. The majority of Americans have a Vitamin D deficiency, which is associated with depression. I also recommend Omega-3s because they’re associated with improved mood and are the building blocks for a healthy brain. And methylated B vitamins, which support our bodies in making neurotransmitters like dopamine serotonin, or epinephrine.
You also discuss how certain supplements can improve specific mood issues. Can you tell us about supplements that can help with anxiety?
For anxiety, I would recommend Magnesium glycinate, which can really gently and non-addictively help with sleep. I also love L-theanine and GABA, and then there’s an herbal supplement called Ashwagandha, which can give you a calm form of energy.
It’s really important with all of these things to check with your doctor to make sure you’re not on any medication that could interact with these supplements.
Finally, can you give us an overview of your 30-day program for helping readers reset?
The first thing I recommend is testing, and in the book I give the specific blood tests you should go to your primary care doctor for every year, if not twice a year. This is basic, but you wouldn’t believe how many people don’t get these tests on an annual basis. That’s the starting point.
From there, we recommend an eating program that begins with an elimination diet. So for 30 days, you slowly eliminate some of the trigger foods that are the worst for our mental health, like sugar, processed foods, wheat, and dairy. No one’s taking those foods away from you forever — it’s just about getting a better understanding of how your body functions without some of these extremely common food allergens. I walk you through the supplement starter kit, which we discussed earlier, and give some guidelines for how to reduce your reliance on technology. We also have a very specific movement program that’s six days a week, 20 minutes a day of weight training or aerobic activity.
