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Happiness Foods – Eating Your Way to Better Default Moods

How many times have you heard the phrase “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” without giving much second thought as to what might have been the cause for your bad mood? Sure, you might have had a bad dream that kind of sets things into motion, but then that leads to another common reference about the quality of sleep that’s available to us, which is that you shouldn’t eat a heavy meal just before you sleep, otherwise you will have nightmares. Have you actually experienced nightmares as a result of taking a heavy meal just before bed-time?

On the other hand, when you’re super-sleepy and you’re hungry at the same time, common life experience knowledge dictates that you should at least eat something for it might give you that last bit of energy you very well need at worst, and at best it’ll help you avoid waking up feeling like you’ve been fasting for weeks and weeks.

To go a little deeper down the path that should be becoming quite evident by now – how many people do you know, perhaps in addition to yourself, who get all grumpy when they’re hungry? There are many factors at play which contribute to our moods – our default moods, but they all essentially come back down to our stomachs.

At the most basic of levels, it’s simply a matter of thinking about it this way – can you do anything on an empty stomach, including exploring some of those things which make you happy in life? Certainly not, so a good base-mood if you like comes back down to what’s inside your stomach, but it goes way beyond just filling up, although that’s where it all starts. It’s more about what you put inside your body.

So-called “happiness foods” are often associated with those which can’t really be obtained in a more natural state, such as ice-cream to help heal a broken heart, pork ribs with a greasy secret sauce to help with depression, and generally something sweet, containing refined sugars, to lift up your mood. These so-called comfort foods obviously have some effect, but in addition to the fact that they’re just unhealthy by their mere make-up, these are deployed as reactions to a problem that already exists.

A better approach to eating your way to happiness is by being proactive about what you feed yourself, choosing foods that boost and enhance all the factors that come together to affect your mood and consuming them at the right time. Supplementation in the form of something like Andrographis is definitely encouraged as well, since it’s really quite challenging to get all the nutrition your body needs out of a regular diet of food that you prepare from scratch – never mind convenience foods which are already prepared for you. The herb is available in the form of liquid extract, dry powder, capsules or tablets, while other proactive “comfort-and-happiness foods” like sugar should perhaps be consumed in the most natural form you can find them.

Sam Roberts