Think This, Not That: Depression & Anxiety Solutions

If you eat the perfect diet, if you don't address the spiritual component and the mental and psychological component, you're not fully healing. And that's true, especially more so than anything else with depression, anxiety, loneliness, any of those mental health disorders. But it's also true. With thyroid issues and hormonal imbalances and low testosterone and manic. This is Dr. Talks.

Dr. Josh Axe, what a pleasure to see you. It's always so wonderful talking to you. We've been friends for years, done so much stuff together, back and forth on our podcasts and seminars and presentations, and you have an absolute wealth of wisdom.

Well, I'm going to let my audience, you're going to tell the audience about what you do, but you've just released another book recently and you've moved from not just doing functional medicine, the physical side, but you've really started understanding the impact of mind on body. Very excited to talk to you today about mindsets and mental health. So welcome. And please just share a little bit with the viewers and listeners about who you are, what you do.

Yeah, so I'm, again, Dr. Josh Axe. I'm the founder of DrAxe.com, Ancient Nutrition, and the Health Institute. I used to have a functional medicine practice. And now I actually do see a lot of patients virtually at the Dr. Axe Clinic at the Health Institute. We take care of a lot of people with... depression, anxiety, hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease, and a number of conditions. And I just have a passion of teaching people how to use food and mindset medicine.

And we both share that. I think we both really believe that health is holistic. It's body, mind, spirit. And if someone is truly going to heal, we need to focus on healing them in all of those areas. Absolutely. And that's just, it's vital. The mind drives the brain and the body. It's not the other way around. And you experienced this very dramatically in something that happened to you over the last couple of years. And I'd love you to share your story and then...

I'd love us to dive a little deeper into the lessons that you've learned and how this can help people with anxiety and depression and just getting their mental health, which all of us battle with, back on track.

Yeah, so I had, this was about two years ago, I had the biggest health crisis of my life. I went in for a really simple medical procedure using stem cells, it's a natural, my own cells, to heal a low back injury I had. When that got done, something went wrong. And I ended up getting an infection in my spine. And so I was sitting down with a doctor. This is almost maybe a year and nine months ago now.

And I sat down with him and he said, Josh, listen, I'm going to be straight with you. He said, this infection is really severe. There's a really good chance you could die. There's the most likely thing, though, is that you're going to be permanently disabled from this. And so Dr. Killian, and I have been teaching people, I've done exercise and fitness videos. I've spent my entire career teaching people how to be healthy and fit with food.

and lifestyle practices and all of this. And just a few months before, I was throwing my two-year-old daughter up in the air in the pool. I was squatting and deadlifting. I could do triathlons. I mean, I was in great shape outside of my back injury. So to be sitting down with a doctor... Him telling me I would likely be disabled physically, it was incredibly hard to hear. And so I had about 48 hours of this mental, and I'll say it's mental, but it was spiritual. It was physical. It felt like...

There were emotions I had never experienced before that I experienced for the first time. I had never, I think, truly felt what despair felt like or hopelessness. I'd never truly felt, because I'm a positive person. Yeah. Generally, I'm very positive. But to think, okay, so this doctor who's one of the leading doctors in the entire world in infectious disease is telling me the most likely outcome for me is to be permanently disabled, to be able to have rods put in my spine, like that.

That was what he told me. And so I had to go and sort of reset and really tap into God and also spending some time in prayer and saying, God, you know what? I believe that you're bigger than my diagnosis. And I decided. Also, and you know this research even better than I do, but I've spent thousands of hours reading medical journals and studying neurology. But we also know that the placebo effect is very powerful and real.

And I was writing a book at the time where I was just starting to write about some of this information about how, you know, back in World War II, there's a name, Dr. Beecher, and he found with these. soldiers had these debilitating injuries and they ran out of morphine during world war ii yeah and rather than treating them with morphine they gave them saline injections so just salt water yeah yeah and

30 to 40% of those soldiers experienced the same amount of pain relief as if they were taking morphine. And that blows my mind. It does. Our body can create those sort of chemicals. So I realized that. I said, you know what? My best chance of healing. is believing that I'm going to be completely healed and get back to where I was. And so I just decided that I was going to do my best to create a plan in order to do that, you know, doing exercises in the pool.

getting in a hyperbaric chamber, doing vitamin IVs, doing everything I could to heal. And I went through that process and it took me 10 months before I could walk. Actually, I didn't walk on my own without a walker for an entire year. Wow. Josh, I can't imagine you like that. I mean, as you said, I know you as this constant on the go. fitness guru and health guru and always moving. So to imagine you stuck like that is really inconceivable. Yeah, it was crazy.

My wife took a picture and I don't have it here. So I can't, I've got it on my phone, but she took a picture of me and you would have thought that I was, you know, this malnourished. I mean, I lost about 40. It went from 180 to down to about 130. I just, because I literally, the pain was so bad, I couldn't walk. I couldn't, I didn't, it was, but going back to the, you know, I struggled with some depression.

I struggled with some anxiety. And again, I never had anxiety before at all. Never. Until even as I was rehabbing, I was so conscious about if I did something wrong, I had so much pain. that I started getting this physical response to where if I thought that something like, I just would start sweating and getting nervous. And like, I just, and I wouldn't call them full on panic attacks, but having this constant anxiety around.

Did I re-injure myself? Did something go wrong? And what I had to do was start really focusing back on and realizing that God was for me, not against me. Again, for me, it was a very spiritual thing.

And also saying, okay, this is where I'm going to be in the future. And so I really started picturing myself in the future, throwing my two-year-old daughter in the pool again. I started picturing myself out running. I started picturing myself lifting weights. I started picturing myself doing those things. And I said, okay. I can only control what I can control. So now I'm going to create the plan in order to make that a reality.

So I knew I had to heal my disc. And so I started doing hyperbaric chamber. And there's some studies around that for helping that. I started going out and getting in the pool and doing those exercises. I started following an anti-inflammatory diet and I was already pretty anti-inflammatory.

But I just took it up to the highest level possible. I drank mostly bone broth, eating wild-caught salmon, lots of vegetables, lots of fruits, omega-3 fats, boswell, turmeric, all of those sort of superfoods. And I just said, okay. All I can do is follow the plan and play. And I did that. And now I'm actually proud to say I just got back from playing around a pickleball. I started running a few weeks ago.

I'm already way better than the doctor said the absolute best I could be. He said at the very least, I would have chronic pain every day, and I don't. I don't. So anyways, I think for me, the big thing is you get a... You get what you focus on. You need to focus on the best possible outcome. Create a plan in order to make that your reality. And outside of that, not worry about the actual outcome. Just do your best to, you know.

get to that point you want to be wow that's quite something you're going for a simple procedure stem cells which is you know pretty getting pretty advanced day by day and you land up with literally being told that you're going to be disabled for the rest of your life and It's taken you 19, well, that was a 19-month process and you're back playing pickleball and back doing, throwing your little daughter up in the air and picking up your baby.

And so what's interesting there is that you went through a process. It wasn't overnight. It was very agonizing. I know because you and I have talked about this in more detail. And it was a long, hard process where it wasn't just one day you were depressed and the next day you were happy.

It was days and days on end of not being able to get out of bed and really feeling that heavy depression. And then you sort of make some major shifts when you said you set that goal. And that's very much related to your mindset. First question I have for you is... People set goals and they have those visions and you got there and you got beyond there. Did you have a plan B? So we have probabilities that can happen and we have a possible goal. Was it one or did you have?

If that didn't work, then there's something similar. Did you have anything like that sort of a range in case you didn't hit the actual goal or was it broad enough? Do you know what I'm saying? Well, absolutely. So this happened in... August. So it's actually almost 24 months now. Now that I'm actually the exact timeline. So about 24 months. And I said, okay, I know I've got this going on now, but I want to be walking again by Christmas.

I wasn't even close to walking by Christmas. In fact, even after a couple weeks of treatment, I had felt worse. And so around Thanksgiving, Christmas is when I started actually feeling a little better. I started reaching a turning point. But I didn't walk for six months after that. So listen, I kept having to push my goals back further, back further, back further. And so that was a pretty constant thing. But I didn't get discouraged because...

I started focusing a little less on my goals and more on the progress I was making. Love that. So the daily process of the healing journey, which is up and down, because as you said, you set that goal for December, but then... It didn't happen. And so things, you actually felt a little worse when you started some of the exercises. And that's so much part of the healing journey. And that's a lot of the work that I've done is these 63-day cycles. And there are these ups and downs.

Sometimes we think the down, we think, oh, I'm going backwards. And I'm so glad you brought up the point that you didn't get discouraged. You shifted. So you had this goal, but you shifted and adjusted your goals. And that's beautiful. Adjusting goals is a massive thing, isn't it, Josh? Yes. And what I essentially did was I had to ask myself the question, because here's the thing, I would only feel 1% better every couple of weeks probably. So I would look back and say, okay.

am I better now than I was three months ago? And most of the time I could say, oh yes, okay, I'm better now than I was three months ago. And that was really, that started becoming sort of my main gauge of how I was doing. That's incredible because that's from the research I've done, the psychoneurobiological research and habit formation and change and neuroplasticity to rewind networks. It takes these cycles of about nine weeks, which is about three months.

And then you start seeing those changes and there's all the ups and downs in that change and then you have to adjust your goal. So you talk a lot in your new book about things that's not that and you talk a lot about mindsets and you've mentioned in reference that.

How would you define a mindset in general and then in the context of what you went through, how did you apply that? Well, the way that I think about mindset is it's a number of the beliefs you have about maybe a specific topic or area or thing within your life. And so, for instance, you may have a mindset about money.

Maybe it's a scarcity mindset and there are different things you have around that, like money doesn't grow in trees and you have to fight for every last thing you get. And, you know, I'll never have money. So you might have this mindset about money. that is made up of several beliefs that you have. You know, I had my mindset about my health and that has changed and shifted over time. I think from, and you'll appreciate this, you know, being in my mid forties now, I.

When I was younger, I felt like health was, I was invincible. I don't know how else to say it. Just come out and say I was invincible. And I just, you know, if I was staying active and eating healthy, then everything else was just going to work out. And I think right now. my mindset around health is very much around longevity. Like when I exercise now, I don't exercise to like...

You know, I'm not like just getting done playing pickleball. There was at one point where I could have dove and maybe got a shot. I didn't because I'll be playing in my 60s, 70s and 80s. And so I am really focused on. longevity right now how do we promote cellular longevity how do we promote neurological longevity i mean how do we do that and so my point there is is that if you have a mindset and by the way i think some people have

they might have a great mindset about relationships, but a terrible mindset about their health. And so that's how I think about mindset. I also think mindset is perspective. And so... You know, you and I could be standing in the exact same room right next to each other and see something going on and have a completely different perspective about it. Completely different. And so I think that right now.

My mindset about life in general is, I believe I'm called to love God, love people, make earth a heavenly place. How do I do those things? Like that's one of my primary mindsets right now. And then also you have mindsets that might be submissive or tiered in terms of what maybe trumps, you know, one or the other. And so all that being said, I think that.

Let me tell you just a few mindsets that I think are important for healing. Absolutely, go for it. One of them was, God is for me, not against me. Because if you believe that ultimately the world or God or... These things are against you. Well, man, God's big. So if he's against you or doesn't care about you, you know, it would be hard to believe in your healing. And here's the other thing I would say is.

I think that people should decide to believe not what they currently believe or not what someone else believes. You should try and believe what's going to lead you to the best result. I love that. And so here's an example with finances. I think Warren Buffett is an incredible investor. So is Ray Dalio. So is Cathie Wood. So these are some of the most brilliant people in terms of finance. I don't try and think what I want to think. I try and think the way that they think.

Okay. And so when I look at the people that have the best health, I should think about my how I want to try and adopt their type of thinking and model their type of thinking. And so that's one of the mindsets I have is that I want to, like, I don't feel like being positive all the time. I have a dad, like my mom was really positive. My dad is really negative. And I, but I decide to be positive.

Because I know that's going to lead to my best outcome. Again, you know the placebo effect. I just did a whole episode, a podcast episode on my show about the placebo effect. And it's amazing. I mean, one of the things that they were showing with the placebo effect is that a lot of... If somebody had a big red pill versus if somebody took a little white pill, the placebo effect is way more powerful if you take a big red pill. Isn't that fascinating?

Just because you think, oh, this one, you know, it's bigger. It's bigger. You feel like the result's going to be bigger for you. So, I mean, or... Oh, you know, it's so fascinating to think about how much our mindset matters for our own healing. I mean, I don't think people think about this enough. I take care of a lot of patients with hypothyroidism, diabetes, autoimmune disease.

And when they typically come to my virtual practice, they almost never think that we're going to talk about mindset or that we're going to talk about psychology or any of these things. But we do because...

It's a big, big part of healing. And so it's so important. That's why I love what you do, Josh, because it's not just, okay, let's take all these measurements, which we need to do, blood work and all these things, because that's representing what you're... what your body's doing and then putting something in it's actually that's the one part and it's very important but the bigger part is you're alive and your aliveness is your mind your spirit your soul working through your body

And you're going to keep your body healthy so that your spirit of mind can work through that.

But if you don't deal with your mind, and we've really got to point 50 years into this very neuro reductionistic approach that the physical is more important than the mind. And the mind is just that, oh, do a little bit of stress work or do a little bit of... I've been fighting this, as you know, this battle for nearly 40 years now, trying to help people understand. I'm not saying don't work on the physical. It's so important. Go to the experts to get that support.

But you can get all the advice from you. Your patients can come to you and get all the advice in terms of an anti-inflammatory diet or as you're famous for eating dirt and all these kinds of things which are really important. You're now telling us so much more, and this has always been kind of part of your message, that in order for that to work, your mind's going to drive it.

And that's why it's so important. I cannot agree with you more and why I wanted to interview you for this because you really have developed a very deep understanding from your own personal experience plus with your patients. So based on that, could you maybe think of an example? of, you don't have to mention names, but maybe of two patients, one that was just coming to you for the physical and they just give me the medicine, give me the supplements, give me the protocol.

And I'm not working on that mind stuff, you know, that's for whatever. And they didn't do as well as someone who was actually worse off, but they listened and did the mind work alongside the physical. Well, Dr. Caroline, first I want to say, you know, I could tell very early on, typically, now listen, sometimes people surprise us, but with 90% accuracy,

If somebody came in and I would sit down with a patient, I could tell pretty early on if they were probably going to see really good results. And I'll just give you an example of this. On my first visit, when somebody came in, we might do... You know, I would have them fill out the patient history form. Sometimes we do blood work, sometimes we don't, just depending on the person. And when I would...

Typically, at the end of the first visit, I'd say, okay, well, next time you come in, we're going to go through recommended eating plans, supplement plan, all the recommendations.

between now and then, before when I see you next time, I want you to do this for me. Just change your breakfast, okay? So I'm going to have you do a berry smoothie with coconut milk and berries and some of these other things. And I would get one or two responses. One was like, oh well can i still do my cereal can i still do cream cheese can i still do and it was sort of this thing like they kept focusing on all that that they were going to be deprived and those

Yeah, those people didn't, they had a hard time getting good results, much harder. Versus I had another group who would say, great, let's go. Hey, you know, is this brand okay? Do I do this? Okay, that sounds pretty good. I mean, it was a big difference. And I remember having one patient come in and I was able to really, I think, help her with her mindset. She came in and she had an MS diagnosis. She was in a wheelchair. Her name was Cheryl. And she'd been in a wheelchair for several years.

And after working with her a little bit, on her second visit, I told her, I said, Cheryl, I don't know that you definitely have MS. I said, I actually think there's a chance because... You're telling me that you have, you lived in a moldy home. A lot of the symptoms started then. I think you might have mold toxicity. And I said, I think if we can make some subtle changes, we can get you out of that wheelchair by...

doing ozone therapy and some of these different things. But here's the crazy part. I didn't even really fully start her treatment. After her, the next time she came in, this was only two weeks later, she was completely out of her wheelchair. Oh my gosh, that's phenomenal. You hadn't even started all the treatments yet.

Right. And I knew that, you know what, again, part of that had to be psychological. And so there's no doubt that there's a lot of people who are getting diagnoses. This is why I have such a problem with oftentimes people going to their doctor. And cancer is a really good example of this, but MS is another one, and there's several. And immediately you can just see a decline in their attitude, fear, anxiety over what's going on.

And I think that's actually breaking the Hippocratic Oath because a lot of doctors are doing harm the first visit to the patient because we know how important hope is to healing, even in terms of what we talked about, placebo, neuroplasticity, and everything else. I mean, I have so many examples of this, of where people saw amazing changes in their body, sometimes before they even made the changes, just because they had a different outlook, a more positive outlook about...

the potential for them healing in the future. That's phenomenal. That's such a good example and so true in terms of, because that's one of the questions I wanted to ask you was in terms of conventional medicine. There's just, it's so defined that this is the problem and this is the only way to heal it. I'm not saying we don't need conventional medicine or for every type of medicine, but you've hit on the point of...

How a doctor in using conventional medicine alone presents the issue to the patient is so important because it shifts it into that mindset and the placebo kicks in and we know that the mind actually then drives. basically drives the brain and the body. So we can literally create down functioning in our brain and our body by the incorrect mindset. And so it's a matter of balancing that out. Maybe that is the best treatment, but if your mindset's in fear, you're just not going to...

really benefit as much from that treatment as what you could. Could you talk a little bit about just that kind of thing? Well, you've started, but continue a little bit in terms of conventional medicine, balancing it with a more holistic approach.

So, you know, and what I'm going to share goes back thousands of years. Now, the Bible is clear on this. I mean, we have Jesus saying your faith is healed or your belief. And so we know that that's, he focused on really that sort of the root of the biggest issues.

And I think this is true with every condition, but even more so as we talk about mental health. But when you look at Chinese medicine, there's something in Chinese medicine called the three treasures, okay? And by the way, when I say these terms, they might sound kind of strange to you, but they're just... I'll then interpret it. But yeah, it's Shen, Chi, and Jing. And basically what Shen is, is your spirit. Chi is your, it's really your cellular health.

and your mitochondria, but it's also your mental health. And then you have your Jing, that's physical health. Okay, so it's spirit, mind, body. And they would always say if you want to heal, you always have to address all three, but start at the top with the spirit. And that's really tied to things like your identity and your purpose.

And these are things that we really get ingrained to us oftentimes in childhood. I mean, that's why they're, I mean, it's incredibly important. And so really your spiritual life, your identity, your purpose in life. If you don't know those, you can manipulate and do things both nutritionally or with medications, but you're actually still not getting to the root of the issue until...

You fix your identity and purpose issues and know why you're here and figure out that spiritual part of your life. So that's very, very important. That's sort of the upstream. And when we look at that, that's also very tied to epigenetics. We actually see this today. And so, yeah, we'll see that epigenetics is tied up there. Even things like methylation, if we're going to get nutritional with that, that's tied in there. And then being in tune with the earth.

So our circadian rhythm. So that's kind of live in that Shen area. But really the greatest thing you can do to fix those areas is build a relationship with God, have deep intimate relationship with others, develop, go deep spiritually. And then the next thing, and that also is tied to what you worship. If you worship the right things in your life and you spend time pursuing the right things, that's going to lead to better health.

Now, the next one there is that chi, which is really tied to our mental neurological health, our cellular health. And that's where we get into cellularly creating ATP, how you create energy. And in order to take care of that... there are certain actually nutrients. So kind of at top where we talked about Shen, that's prayer, that's meditation, that's getting to the roots, you know, psychologically of what was going on. There's nutrients for that as well, probably connected more to...

the spirit, like reishi mushroom and some other things that are more nourishing for that, things that are tied more to the emotions. And then as we get into more of the mitochondrial health... it's going to be tied to a lot of B vitamins and things that support, again, we talked about methylation there. And so the methylation cycle for your body, increasing ATP synthesis. So it's vitamin B12, vitamin B2, folate.

B6, zinc, magnesium, and vitamin D. Those are really crucial for us creating the right neurochemicals in order to heal. And then Jing is really more tied to the physical. and exercise. I mean, doing, you know, just doing the things we were created to do movement-wise. And I think that the great, you know, and just sharing this for everybody, if anybody's wondering, what are the best supplements to take? You know, omega-3 fatty acids.

Vitamin D are going to be at the very top of the list. And then I think getting methylated B vitamins. Those are very important for neurotransmitters, very important for cellular health. Again, zinc and magnesium. I think those are probably the biggest nutritional deficiencies I see with people.

supporting mental health. But even if you do all of those supplements and you eat the perfect diet that's rich in healthy fats and amino acids and probably low to mid carbs and most of those from fruit and sweet potatoes and those sort of things. Even if you eat the perfect diet, if you don't address the spiritual component and the mental and psychological component,

you're not fully healing. And that's true, especially more so than anything else with depression, anxiety, loneliness, any of those mental health disorders. But it's also true. With thyroid issues and hormonal imbalances and low testosterone in men, I mean, it's important for all of those conditions as well.

beautifully answered that's incredible thank you for that and it's you speaking I'm nodding my head here as you can see because it's just I totally agree you don't if you don't address that spiritual level the rest we have to address but it's just that is the main thing and then that filters down and we can then apply the rest of it so importantly. Josh, last question and then I want people to tell people how they can get hold of you.

Just quickly define for the audience epigenetics, our environment is so important, our cellular environment is so important, so if you wouldn't mind just explaining that. Yeah. So epigenetics essentially are, think about it like this, if I use a metaphor, you have switches in your body that can be turned on and off, okay? And we have switches that actually promote longevity and some that...

can take years off your life. And so we see a lot of epigenetic talk or we did years ago with breast cancer genes like BRCA getting turned on. But it's important to remember that they have to be turned on or off. Okay, we all have genetics, but you can actually flip them on or off. And so one of the greatest examples of this, and this is mind-blowing, I think. is when a mother is pregnant, the studies show that the foods that the mom liked, the child will like.

What they eat during they're pregnant, or the health of the gut microbiome is another good example of this, greatly impacts the immunity of their children. I want to say it's by like 300%. I mean, it has a dramatic impact. It's huge. And they've also showed in studies, this probably goes, it probably will impact three to four generations. I mean, that long of when you're turning genes on. Exactly. Think about that. Okay, if you're pregnant and you're eating.

You know, eating healthy versus non-healthy, does that matter much? Yeah. It matters immensely. It matters. Three to four generations for your kids' kids and their kids and their kids. And so epigenetics are really turning on and off genes, good or bad, that really impact a lot of the disease process and aging process.

Beautiful. And that's also trauma is the other one that passes through the generations. And that's why it's so important to deal with our stuff. We go to the top route, the spiritual level and sort those out because that also passes through the generations. And that's a very established scientific fact.

Josh, this has been amazing. As usual, there's like so many more things we can talk, but people can always watch my podcast, your podcast, because we'll both be interviewing each other a lot more in the future about these amazing things. Where can people learn more from you and get help from you? And you've written amazing books and you've got a podcast, you've got Instagram.

Because people can't get help from you. I'd say a couple places. One is my podcast. It's the Dr. Josh Axe Show. And maybe there's something specific you want to learn about. So you could also go on YouTube or Apple and search Dr. Axe Depression or Dr. Axe Methylation. and watch one of those episodes. They're also Instagram, very active on social media, at Dr. Josh Pax. And I have a book out called Think This, Not That, really taps into mindset medicine.

there as well. But Dr. Caroline, thanks so much for having me on. It's an honor. I love what you're doing here and helping people heal with the power of the mind. So thank you. Thank you. It's been wonderful. Thanks, Josh. Thank you for tuning in to Dr. Talks.

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