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One particular area where people get stuck in endless “I’m not good enough” loops is when they define their problems in mental or emotional terms when the real cause is physical. You can’t easily solve a problem by treating it at the level of mind if the cause is in your body or brain.
A great example of this is toxicity. Our world is filled with chemicals that didn’t exist a few hundred years ago. Every day we drink polluted water, eat polluted food, and breathe polluted air. We can’t help it because these pollutants are everywhere now. They build up in our tissues year after year, causing a slow degradation over time. These toxins can fog up our minds, destroy our emotional well-being, and cause all sorts of behavioral problems.
Your liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, and skin do an amazing job of neutralizing toxins, but these organs are struggling to keep up with today’s assignments. If we rely solely upon our internal detoxification systems to process toxic loads that are orders of magnitude beyond what was encountered during the entire evolutionary history of these systems, we’re going to fall behind and lose this battle little by little, year after year. It’s a recipe for slow decline. People are showing the symptoms of this decline on an unprecedented scale today. We’re having to invent scores of new terms just to label the mental and emotional disorders caused by toxicity.
How can we possibly solve all these mental and emotional problems that are caused by our physical reality? We’re not going to fix these problems at a software level when the root problem is in the hardware.
We know that most depression has a physical cause, and if you address the physical cause, it usually goes away. But if you always treat depression as a mental, emotional, or psychological problem, you can get stuck in an endless loop treating the symptoms with no cure. If the root cause is physical, then we ought to solve the problem physically. Don’t just treat it. Cure it.
When I went to a multi-day raw food conference with about 3000 people several years ago, the place was just overflowing with love, warmth, instant connection, happiness, and sexiness, regardless of age. It was a powerful example of what normal is supposed to look like when our underlying hardware is running properly. It’s much harder to get depressed when you eat raw because your toxic intake is much lower. It’s so much easier to get depressed when you consume a little poison each day. It’s tough to find a depressed raw foodist. I’m not saying it’s impossible… just very uncommon.
In fact, if you want a simple way to test your own mental hardware, eat 100% raw vegan for 30 days. That will give you a glimpse of what you’re missing out on due to toxicity. I often get emails from people who’ve done this challenge, and almost everyone reports marked improvements in their mood, motivation, energy, and mental clarity. Then it becomes undeniable that by eating more toxic foods, you really are slowing yourself down. Just be aware that if you try this, you’ll probably feel like crap for the first few days as the most accessible toxins start flooding out of your tissues. For most people it feels like having the cold or the flu.
When my mental performance was weak and I blamed my own thinking, mindset, or personal standards, I got nowhere. But when I felt sluggish or foggy and started blaming the people who were actively poisoning me, I finally made some progress and began to see meaningful improvements in my mental clarity, emotions, motivation, productivity, and confidence. That’s because when I blamed others, I saw that I could actually compensate for their attempts to poison me. I didn’t have to let them toxify my brain as much as they’d been doing in the past.
In terms of action steps, improving my diet certainly helped, but that wasn’t where I saw the greatest gains. It was a good starting point though. If you’re consuming poison every day, it makes sense to start doing less of that, but you also have to deal with the effects of the poison you’ve already consumed, especially toxins like heavy metals that can remain stuck in your tissues for life if you don’t address them. The people in Flint, Michigan have to deal with this in a big way due to massive lead poisoning, but all of us have been poisoned to one degree or another, and ignoring this just isn’t a good idea, especially if you want your brain to function well.
I’d rather not join the ranks of all the depressed and scatterbrained people out there who seem to be in deep denial about the long-term effects of a high toxicity diet. Even if you’re concerned about the effects of pesticides and herbicides, it’s still better to eat plants that have been sprayed directly as opposed to eating animals who’ve eaten such plants. Those toxins build up in animal tissues just like they do in our human tissues.
Eating animal products is like eating a used water filter. Being a human that eats animal products is like being a used water filter that eats used water filters – not a recipe for optimal functioning.
What if you’re into the paleo diet? Then you must be a hunter with a time machine. The animal products people consume today are nothing like they were a hundred years ago. No amount of labeling games will change that. Today’s paleo diet is just another name for the used water filter diet.
If you care about the health of your brain, the one thing you should avoid consuming at all costs is fish. Whether they come from the ocean, a lake, a stream, or a fish farm, all of the water areas where fish live are polluted, and fish soak up those pollutants like sponges. When fish eat other fish, the toxins become even more concentrated. You might as well sprinkle mercury on your meals if you think eating a dirty sponge is a good idea.
Despite all the marketing dollars the animal products industry invests in convincing you otherwise, being one of their customers is not an intelligent decision when it comes to the health of your brain. And if you’re already suffering from weak motivation, chronic self-doubt, procrastination, anxiety, fear, depression, and other issues, then please switch to a low toxicity diet for a while, if only to give your brain a chance to show you how it’s actually supposed to function.
I actually got much bigger gains not from dietary or lifestyle changes but from exploring more intensive detoxification protocols. Over the years I’ve done many different cleanses – liver cleanses, kidney cleanses, salt water flushes, hydrocolonics, a green smoothie cleanse, and a bunch of cleanses I’ve forgotten. These cleansing rituals helped. I gained an especially nice boost in mental and emotional clarity after doing a 15-day juice feast several years ago.
I also tried dozens of different detoxifiers. That helped too. The boosts were relatively small, but there were noticeable differences. The downside was that it often took a lot of time and experimentation to reap the benefits.
The funny thing is that all of this progress stemmed from defining the problem externally. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, What if I’m having problems motivating myself and staying focused on my goals because people are poisoning my brain with toxic chemicals?
---especially if you’re new to detox and have yet to personally experience how powerful it can be. And if you accept that the problem is external, it puts a huge ton of work on your plate. And it sucks to acknowledge that people are poisoning the planet. But what if this is the key to unlocking a huge amount of progress that you could never access when you framed this as an internal mental or emotional problem?
If you’ve been working on your personal growth for years like I have, isn’t it possible that your brain already grasps the importance of mindset, motivation, focus, and being in the flow? What if it totally gets this already, and it’s simply not able to run the positive programming you’ve internalized because the hardware of your brain is constantly misfiring due to a long-term buildup of toxins like heavy metals?
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"Republished from StevePavlina.com"
