I'm isolating a couple of different schools of thought here
1) Metabolic health determines mental health, work to fix your physical health issues and your perceived personality flaws such as anxiety, depression, irritability, lack of self-confidence and self-absorption/narcissism will resolve themselves. A physically healthy person will automatically have strong, positive and pleasant personality
2) Mental health determines metabolic health, unresolved childhood trauma and insecure attachment leads to the development of chronic stress and muscular tensions due to your inability to set healthy boundaries, develop healthy relationships and fully deal with and resolve emotional stress, this stress and tension ultimately gives rise to physical disease. A person with a strong and positive personality based on a solid foundation of inner emotional security is very resilient to environmental stress of any kind
3) Certain personality flaws, such as narcissism, intimacy issues, and phobias, are independent of physical health, and no matter how physically healthy you become, such issues still need to be worked on with some manner of cognitive behaviour therapy.
For many years I believed pretty much entirely in #2, thought that many health issues were mental in origin and tried to resolve them through psychoanalysis, CBT, and meditation/spirituality. I'm now not so sure that any of that, except some CBT stuff, has really accomplished anything, in fact psychoanalysing my perceived mental issues only seemed to magnify them and make them worse.
Lately, I've been reading up on how certain entirely physical factors like Vitamin A poisoning and liver dysfunction can profoundly affect cognition, even produce alterations in consciousness, suicidal thoughts and frank psychosis, and now I'm leaning more towards the #1 camp here - that if you are metabolically healthy you will generally not feel any need to "work" on yourself but will just feel good and energetic and be too busy living life to focus on your mental health. I used to think my hypertension and muscular tension was due to chronic hidden emotional stress, but since I'm now finding them going away with just nutritional therapy it seems to not be the case.
Nevertheless maybe there is also something to #3, that even a person in perfect physical health can still have substantial mental issues that don't manifest in physical disease but only in unsatisfying relationships and general dissatisfaction with life. My impression is that there are plenty of (especially young) people who appear to be in good physical health yet are very unhappy due to their narcissism. In this case good physical health would still however greatly facilitate a persons efforts towards psychological growth by giving him the mental clarity to recognise his issues and the physical energy to do what he needs to do to resolve them.
1) Metabolic health determines mental health, work to fix your physical health issues and your perceived personality flaws such as anxiety, depression, irritability, lack of self-confidence and self-absorption/narcissism will resolve themselves. A physically healthy person will automatically have strong, positive and pleasant personality
2) Mental health determines metabolic health, unresolved childhood trauma and insecure attachment leads to the development of chronic stress and muscular tensions due to your inability to set healthy boundaries, develop healthy relationships and fully deal with and resolve emotional stress, this stress and tension ultimately gives rise to physical disease. A person with a strong and positive personality based on a solid foundation of inner emotional security is very resilient to environmental stress of any kind
3) Certain personality flaws, such as narcissism, intimacy issues, and phobias, are independent of physical health, and no matter how physically healthy you become, such issues still need to be worked on with some manner of cognitive behaviour therapy.
For many years I believed pretty much entirely in #2, thought that many health issues were mental in origin and tried to resolve them through psychoanalysis, CBT, and meditation/spirituality. I'm now not so sure that any of that, except some CBT stuff, has really accomplished anything, in fact psychoanalysing my perceived mental issues only seemed to magnify them and make them worse.
Lately, I've been reading up on how certain entirely physical factors like Vitamin A poisoning and liver dysfunction can profoundly affect cognition, even produce alterations in consciousness, suicidal thoughts and frank psychosis, and now I'm leaning more towards the #1 camp here - that if you are metabolically healthy you will generally not feel any need to "work" on yourself but will just feel good and energetic and be too busy living life to focus on your mental health. I used to think my hypertension and muscular tension was due to chronic hidden emotional stress, but since I'm now finding them going away with just nutritional therapy it seems to not be the case.
Nevertheless maybe there is also something to #3, that even a person in perfect physical health can still have substantial mental issues that don't manifest in physical disease but only in unsatisfying relationships and general dissatisfaction with life. My impression is that there are plenty of (especially young) people who appear to be in good physical health yet are very unhappy due to their narcissism. In this case good physical health would still however greatly facilitate a persons efforts towards psychological growth by giving him the mental clarity to recognise his issues and the physical energy to do what he needs to do to resolve them.