The Good Mood Podcast

My friend Joseph Simone is a teacher by trade and musician. He's also fascinated by the human mind: how do our individual brains work? Are we all born with unique personality traits that, if understood, can help us relate more optimally to ourselves, our dreams and our goals, while having more compassion for others?  Joseph and I talk about the Enneagram of Personality, an ancient personality syst...

I talk to my friend and colleague, Dr. Katie Thomson Aitken, a naturopathic doctor practicing in Guelph, Ontario with a special focus in anxiety and men's mental health.  Dr. Katie and I talk about the unique issues men experience with their mental health, including some hormonal underpinnings that drive mental health issues in this population.   We also talk about how to manage anxiety and stress...

In this solo episode I geek out on my top 5 supplements for mental health conditions. While every patient is different, these 5 nutrients play a major role in our mental health and mood. Most have been shown to decrease symptoms of depression.  I introduce you to these 5 nutrients, talk about issues around testing and supplementation and describe how they fare in the latest research.  Studies and...

In this episode, Dr. Anne Hussain, naturopathic doctor, menstruation guru, PCOS-solver, and period literacy advocate, and I go back-to-back with two interviews. First I talk to Dr. Anne about how hormones affect our mood, then she interviews me.  As you know I'm super interested in the intersection between our mental health and hormones. Hormones are really cool (as we discuss in these two intervi...

I'm so excited for this interview I had with my friend and colleague Ayan Mukherjee, Registered Psychotherapist and Certified EMDR Therapist.  In this episode, we talk trauma (both with a capital T and lower case t). We talk about how trauma forms in the brain and how that can affect our mental and emotional states, how EMDR works as an evidence-based form or rewiring the traumatized brain, and ho...

I talk to Victor Cirone, Certified Herbalist and scholar of Steiner, Jung, Freud, Hillman and other psychoanalytic characters.   We talk about society's search of "the perfect image" and how this leads to a breakdown in mental and physical health, and society.  We talks herbs and dreaming, how Jung and Freud's theories of dreaming differ, and how to connect more deeply with the "fascinating and th...

I discuss why a label may be helpful in terms of accessing research, community and specialists with a specific focus, but isn't particularly helpful for accessing the root cause of our concerns.   Unlike insulin for type I diabetes, mental health conditions aren't caused by one single factor that a proper diagnosis can help us uncover.   Instead, they're complicated phenomena that are likely the r...