The vitamin your brain is lacking

Modern health advice has been preventing us from getting enough of this vital nutrient for too long.

We all have a feeling of what ‘concrete’ health interventions are. Usually, we assume some physical substance needs to be added to the body. We take pills, supplements, eat ‘superfoods’ and get injections. All to get a compound within that thing to interact with our biochemistry and make us feel better. Of course that’s how it works.

However, there are certain ‘fuzzy’ things that improve our health but don’t follow this script of ‘put thing in body, body get stronger.’ Like socializing. As psychiatrist Robert Waldinger revealed in his TED talk with 26 million views, one of the greatest predictors of longevity is the strength of your social connections. In this case, we might visualize that something about the social interaction is causing the body to make compounds that make us feel better (oxytocin et cetera).

What other fuzzy things are there?

A 2004 study titled From mental power to muscle power--gaining strength by using the mind took 30 young, healthy volunteers and had 8 of them do “mental contractions” of their finger - basically visualize themselves training the finger but not actually do anything. Another 8 of them did mental contractions of the elbow. The other 8 were not given any instructions but they showed up and got their strength measured like the other groups. Finally, the remaining 6 volunteers actually physically trained their finger strength. At the end of the training, they found that:

・Actually training the finger increased strength by 53%.
・Mentally training the finger increased strength by 35%
・Mentally training the elbow increased strength by 13.5%
・The guys who only got measured experienced a 0% increase in strength.

“We conclude that the mental training employed by this study enhances the cortical output signal, which drives the muscles to a higher activation level and increases strength.”

What other fuzzy things provide health benefits?

Well, the thing that helped my massive headache after getting a concussion was somewhat fuzzy.

During a boxing match, my opponent hit me with a solid right straight. The worst part was it happened right as I was stepping in, and this amplified the force. I didn’t go down, but I had a huge headache the next day. It felt more or less like a terrible hangover.

I didn’t mind the physical pain as much as I minded the way it crushed my mood. I was trying to get work done but felt like everything I was writing was stupid and boring and everyone was going to think I was an idiot. I felt genuinely sad and would take the most negative interpretation of anything and everything.

The main thing that helped was the thing that people have been worshipping for thousands of years.

The day after the fight, it was nice and sunny and there was a very noticeable difference in how good I felt while in direct sunlight versus while being inside. It wasn’t quite as immediate, but it didn’t take long to have an improvement in my mood that was as clear as the shift you feel when you walk into an air conditioned building on a hot day. My headache would almost entirely disappear and my mood would improve dramatically. I’d even laugh at myself for having been torn up over innocuous things not but 30 minutes ago. I was back to feeling confident about my writing as usual, excited about all the things I had planned out for the week and just generally happy.

I actually talked at length about the extensive benefits that red and near infrared light confer to the brain in a video from 2021.

A 2009 study in the journal Behavioral and Brain Functions took 10 people with major depression, 9 of which had anxiety, and did various interviews to get an idea of just how bad their depression was. Then, they administered ‘treatment’ which was four 4-minute sessions of near infrared light shined on the forehead. They only did one session of this light treatment.

2-weeks later, 6 of the 10 depression patients had achieved remission according to their score on the depression severity scoring method HAMD. 7 out of 10 of the patients achieved remission on the scoring method HAM-A. They observed no side effects.

So, not even 20 minutes of near infrared light shined on the forehand was sufficient to dramatically improve their depression.

While researching for that video from 2021, I became aware of the astonishing healing properties of red and near infrared light on the brain. I spoke about how retired football players with CTE were experiencing dramatic benefits from merely shining the right light on their heads. CTE is basically long lasting brain damage from repeated head trauma. This was a surprising illustration of the power of getting the right wavelengths of light.

Back to nursing my huge headache: Later that day, it started raining and I had to go inside to work. My mood very quickly felt that. I was back to being grumpy and unfocused. Luckily, I have one of those red/near infrared light emitting devices - similar to the ones used in the studies I mentioned. Perhaps shining it directly on the forehead would have been better, but again I felt significantly better just placing the light behind me and having it shine on the back of my head while I was working. By the next day my head and mood were already about 70% back to normal.

In a paper titled Is It Time to Consider Photobiomodulation As a Drug Equivalent?, PhD Tiina Karu lists the various substantial benefits of this red light, near infrared light therapy.

She mentioned that specific wavelengths of light shined on the head seemed to have the ability to reverse depression, but some other notable effects were:

・Treating spinal cord injuries.
・Reducing the negative effects of Parkinson’s disease.
・Improving functional outcome after surgical intervention to repair injured nerves.

Sun seems to be something like a vitamin that we need to sufficiently “dose” ourselves with.

Now, you don’t need an expensive red/near infrared light therapy device that emits specific wavelengths at a powerful intensity. You can easily get these wavelengths by getting direct exposure to the sun.

A 2023 study found that:

“an average of 1.5 h/day spent in outdoor light was associated with a lower depression risk whatever the degree of depression genetic predisposition.”

A paper published just this April (2024) in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology points out the issue with the ‘avoid sun at all costs lest get cancer’ narrative:

“Although well-intentioned, the current dermatology approach to sunlight only considers skin health, in particular, risks of skin cancers and photoaging, and fails to take into account systemic health benefits and modern research on mechanisms through which sunlight affects overall health. I hope that this paper will help colleagues reconsider.”

In their visual abstract, they present tons of ways sunlight is beneficial that can’t just be chalked up to vitamin D.

Considering there’s been so much push against the sun: it makes you older, it gives you skin cancer et cetera, this is a much longer story. We’ll have to cover that side of the story another time, but we need a lot more focused on the unexpected and powerful benefits of the sun.