Herbal & Nutritional Supplements for Anxiety & Depression

I don't want to sound like a commercial, but I've found some herbal and nutritional supplements that are helping me with anxiety and depression.

First off, everything I've tried from the company WishGarden Herbs is fantastic. The stuff I use to help me relax for sleep is called Serious Relaxer. It has wood betony, valerian, hops, wild lettuce (a weed many of us have growing in our yards-aka lettuce opium-I saw some growing there today), and some other herbs. This stuff is amazing. It works for muscle stiffness as well as mental relaxation. I can't say enough for this product. The one I use in the daytime (2 or 3 droppers, twice a day) is called Emotional Ally. I've found it to be very effective. I also purchased the one called Deep Stress - the ingredients look very promising, so I'll soon find out how this one works for me also.

I take 8 fish oil capsules a day, which is reputed to aid with depression, although I started taking it for arthritis pain. It seems to be good for my hair and skin too.

Magnesium and calcium seem to be helping as well.

I take liquid B-12 when I need an energy boost.

My naturopath prescribed a supplement called Deproloft, an herbal/nutraceutical antidepressant. It's made by Thorne Research. It seems to be getting the job done during most of the day and evening. My worst symptoms happen when I first wake up, so recently I've tried to eat something right away, and then take the supplements ASAP. This morning I took the Emotional Ally liquid immediately upon awakening. The second most challenging time of the day is late evening, when I become something of an insomniac. That's when I do the Serious Relaxer.

I haven't had much luck with pharmaceutical antidepressants (most of them made me feel worse instead of better) and I am usually not particularly comfortable dealing with mainstream medicine, so I have gone the naturopathic route. I am fortunate to live near a major naturopathic college which offers excellent medical services at low fees.

I Want to be Happy in the Morning

Sometimes I am, shall we say, less than perceptive about the manifestations of my anxiety and depression. Like, after I left my last real job eight years ago, my life got much better. I started volunteering at the Emergency Food Program. I turned their weedy yard into a highly productive vegetable garden full of lettuce, cilantro, collard greens, kale, tomatoes, beans, corns, and squash. I was having the time of my life.
My relationship was great, my home life was good, I felt excited about what I was doing.

But I would still have constant bad dreams about the workplaces where I had been so miserable. And I would still wake up every morning with a sense of dread and impending doom.

I kind of shrugged it off, saying I'm just not a morning person. True enough. I like to stay up till about midnight every night, and I pretty much always have.

It has finally dawned on me that I shouldn't be waking up every morning with a sense of imminent disaster. And I have just now realized that perhaps the reason I feel this way every single morning is that maybe somewhere in my subconscious mind I think I'm getting up to get ready to go to Work (capital W "Work", as in Job, as in Office, as in Corporation), not work in the garden, or work around the house, or work on an art project, or volunteering. Work, that bad place where I used to have to go. Even though I haven't been there in eight years now!

So this could be the reason that I am more likely to be deeply depressed first thing in the morning than at any other time of the day. It's because my conscious mind takes a while to catch up to the fact that I'm not going anywhere bad that day, not if I can help it anyway.