Your Bad Mood Might Be Inflammation
About this episode
Dr. Pedram Shojai discusses how inflammation may be the root cause of bad moods and its connection to mental health.
🎙️ Your bad mood might not be psychological. It might be inflammation. Dr. Pedram Shojai unpacks psychoneuroimmunology, the decades-old field showing the brain and immune system are in constant two-way communication, and explains how chronic low-grade inflammation produces sickness behavior: a state that looks and feels exactly like depression, fatigue, and social withdrawal but is actually the brain doing precisely what it's wired to do. He introduces his three fires framework and closes with a guided cooling breath practice to begin addressing all three simultaneously. 🎯 What You'll Learn: How pro-inflammatory cytokines like IL-6 and TNF-alpha hijack tryptophan away from serotonin production and flood the brain with neurotoxic byproducts, physically shrinking the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus over time Why a subset of depression patients don't respond to antidepressants because their root cause is inflammation, not serotonin, and why Ed Bullmore argues the neurotransmitter focus was a fifty-year detour The three fires driving chronic neuroinflammation: the gut fire (intestinal permeability letting LPS into circulation), the signal fire (chronic stress and unresolved…
More episodes of The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai
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- The Noise Pollution Crisis
- How to Stop Living Outside the Present Moment
- Money Stress Is a Body Problem
- The Pain Body & The Somatic Witness Practice
- How Sensory Starvation Is Dimming Your Emotional Life
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