Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy podcast. The podcast to help you in your journey

towards becoming a wise, empathic, genuine, and connected mental health professional.

I'm your host, Dr. David Pewter, a psychiatrist who splits his time practicing psychopharmacology,

individual and group psychotherapy, medical director of a day treatment program,

medical education research, and teaching residents and medical students.

Okay, and welcome back to the podcast. This is your host, Dr. David Pewter.

And today, I'm going to be talking about how to optimize total brain function,

something I call sensorium. This is part two in this series. And basically,

sensorium is total brain capacity, which is used for focusing, processing, interpreting,

it's, you know, how you feel sort of bright and chipper in the morning. And then as the day goes on,

you may feel more sluggish. That's your sensorium decreasing. It can be influenced by

sleep, food, stress, exercise, drugs, medications. Long-term, it can be, your genetics can change.

It's called epigenetics, so you can down-regulate or up-regulate different genes. And that will

all influence sensorium. So in the first session on sensorium, I went through some stories of

some different patients I've had and kind of painted the global picture of sensorium. I talked

about severe sensorium issues called delirium. And in this episode, I'm just going to remind you of

a study that I talked about on stress. And then I'm going to launch into how to optimize

diet for increasing sensorium. This is a topic I'm passionate about. It's something that, you know,

I don't get drug reps coming to my office, telling me about the benefits of healthy eating

for my mood and for my brain function. So there's not a lot of advertisements on television for

this, you know, or there's just not the money behind it. And so in psychiatry, it's so important

to focus on the things that may not get the sort of limelight. They may not be, you know,

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