Top Highlights

• depression is a profound learning experience, offering us the opportunity to reconsider the choices we’ve made and strike out for new goals. But in order to be enlarged rather than diminished by the experience, we need a spiritual perspective.
• Getting regular, vigorous exercise is the best possible way that you can alter your own brain chemistry and improve your mood.
• Our daily clock is set by the pineal gland, which releases a hormone known as melatonin—ideally at the same time each evening, preparing us for sleep. Likewise, our adrenal hormones, including the stimulating hormones of cortisol and adrenaline, are released at particular times throughout the day. Ideally, as night turns into morning, the adrenal g...
• Eat a bedtime snack. A healthy carb snack an hour before bedtime can ease the strain of fasting overnight, while high-serotonin food can help you sleep. Try a tryptophan-rich food such as milk, fruit (banana or pineapple), nuts (almonds or walnuts), a little cereal, whole-grain bread, or brown rice.
• When you agree that your inner state determines how the environment affects you, you’re assuming responsibility for maintaining your own health—and taking on the power to do so. From this point of view, your goal is not so much to relieve specific symptoms, or even to treat a certain disease, but rather to restore your natural state of inner harmon...