How Biohacking Healed my Brain

6 minute read

Five years ago I decided enough was enough. Going back in time, I’d had a bit of a meltdown when I was 21, taking a year out of university to recover. Since then my life had been a merry-go-round of meds, therapy, deep depression and anxiety and I wanted to get off.

Five years ago I decided something had to give, and I was convinced there must be a solution somewhere. I’d just come out of a chronic burnout (again) and I‘d run out of energy in the playground of poor mental health. I knew something was off-kilter and I wanted to know what. People bandied about the words serotonin and dopamine but I wanted to go deeper. What were they, how do they work and why mine seemed to be all over the shop when everyone else’s seemed to be firing away no bother. Then, a friend in London asked me to housesit for two weeks and I saw it as an ideal opportunity to begin my mission to find the fix. So I locked myself in a house in Walthamstow with six books on neuroscience and I allowed myself this time to deep dive into the unknown realms of my mind.

So, typically, you go to a doctor and you say “I’m low’ or “I’ve chronic anxiety” and they write a prescription, you take a tablet and you’re all better - except the tablets never seemed to work that well for me and they left me feeling sluggish and lacklustre. As a yoga teacher, I’ve found there’s this stigma around meds in the world of wellness - ‘you don’t need them’, ‘the answers lie within’, ‘do Ayahuasca’ – like you’re ‘less than’ if you decide to take them. This is judgement, and honestly, I’ve had phases where I genuinely don’t think I’d still be here if it wasn’t for them. They carried me through difficult periods but never really got to the root of the issue and at this point five years ago I just wanted answers.

I love brains, I think they’re cool and endlessly fascinating. Like galaxies far away there’s something exciting about them. Neuroscience was a venture into the unknown in search of a place where I might find some answers not available in my immediate world of reiki and yoga. I think my interest in self-solving started with British author Patrick Holford who ‘treats’ a host of issues through diet and nutrition in support of balanced neurotransmitters. I felt there was something in it but with a full ‘screening’ costing £3K, this felt like taking advantage of people in need. It felt like a hard sell and I’m not into self-proclaimed ‘guru’ types. What he did do was spark an interest that I would go on to explore in greater detail in that house in Walthamstow.

I didn’t know it at the time – because it wasn’t even a thing back then – but what I was embarking on is now commonly known as bio-hacking.

Biohacking is essentially self-guinea-pig biology consisting of making small, incremental diet or lifestyle changes to make improvements in health and wellbeing.

You might have heard the word thrown around in Silicon Valley with the tech bros obsessed with optimising their physical and mental performance through ‘nootropics’ - supplements to optimise brain performance. I felt like the hard drive in my head was low on RAM and I was all for an upgrade in the form of supplements, vitamins and dietary changes. If brain optimisation was working for some of the smartest minds in the world, then surely there was something in it?

Full disclaimer - I am not a trained professional and I have full respect for the medical profession, but I also believe that knowledge is out there to be found and that it’s important to do your own research based on what you feel your body needs. You see, for me, this was a personal exploration: anti-depressants didn’t feel enough for me. We all have different biochemical makeups, and it makes sense to me that we require different kinds of support; not a one-size-fits-all approach.

The gamechanger was a book called ‘Nutrient Power’ by William J. Walsh PhD. It unlocked the door to a path that would lead me to the happy and balanced person I am today. It presents a science-based nutrient therapy approach to managing neurotransmitter excesses and deficiencies across a number of conditions from ADHD and depression, to schizophrenia and Alzheimers. The book made a lot of sense with clinical trials in support of the science. The appendix listed the experts in the field, one of whom was an 85-year-old GP Edmund O’Flaherty in Blackrock. He was the kind of doctor your Dad might visit, no wind chimes or incense, just science and intellect in a humble converted garage surgery. In a world of woo-woo that hadn’t provided answers, there was something homely about this.

Edmund is an amazing man who’s simply passionate about getting people well. He has consulted to the NHS’s Maudsley Hospital and written papers for Harvard. His fee is €500 for all tests and support until you’re better, including visits and tweaks whenever you need. He took a load of samples and sent them off for a full screening. The results showed that I had something called Pyroluria (which, it turns out, a lot of people of Celtic origin have) meaning my body had an inability to absorb B vitamins and Zinc which are the building blocks of serotonin, the happiness molecule. Things were starting to make sense. I started on a course that saw him prescribe me 14 vitamins per day. I was on the right track, but I would soon discover that I had more hacking to do.

During this time I was diagnosed with PTSD due to several traumatic life experiences in a row, so it had all just become fairly chronic and out of control. I was seeing a therapist, and I was in a highly traumatised state where everything felt too bright and too loud and as though I was watching something outside of my body - which is known as disassociation.

The breaking point happened when I had a major panic attack driving back from Mayo and had to pull in a stay overnight in a B&B. I’d been in therapy for six months and the incident made me realise something had to give and I thought I’d return to a low dose SSRI. My therapist urged me to stay off them but also to trust my instinct. My instinct said I was doing well and I needed stabilisers and I was right or as we say in wellness ‘the answers were within’. The SSRI’s course brought me back into my body and allowed me to listen because I wasn’t in a high state of alert. I’d feared them dulling my creativity but in fact, they allowed it to blossom because I still had anxiety but wasn’t getting depressed about it. They just took the edge off and allowed me to heal in tandem with the support of the nutrient programme.

Continuing to refine, I started tracking my moods related to my cycle and discovered that literally for the second half of my cycle, my anxiety, energy and sleep were all over the place. I simply could not BELIEVE that in the history of my experience of mental health, not one doctor, therapist or consultant had asked me to track it – in fact, it was my mother who’d noticed how I would change. This led to me making dietary tweaks and changes in support of healthier periods and hormone balance and adding a supplement called DIM which helps the body excrete excess oestrogen. And it literally changed my life.

Every day I now take Vitamin B6, Iron with B vitamin support, magnesium, ashwagandha, DIM and a low dose SSRI. Because I’m now supporting my brain with the nutrients it needs, I plan to taper off the SSRI but I’m also prepared that, like someone with high blood pressure, that may just be the support I need on a basic level to function, and I have no shame in saying that.

We need to remove the stigma and judgement around mental health so I think it’s important for creative leaders to be open and honest.

I put a lot of effort into my healthy brain. I still have to be careful with sugar and booze because booze strips B vitamins, the serotonin building blocks. I treat my brain like an athlete would treat their body - if I’m in production I go extra to ensure I sleep properly, eat well and use yoga to ground. I also take herbal supplements on days where I need peak performance. I feel strong, capable and calm with my new world taking shape into a very, very nice place indeed.

I can now say that my self-discovered combination of sense and science has worked, and I am a creative, calm, organised and efficient person. I now have the toolkit to manage my brain with the boundaries required to keep it in tip-top shape. Today I am depression free but not dulled - I still experience pressure on big deadlines but it’s not a constant state of anxiety that previously made my life impossible, and I still get SUPER excited and passionate (as well as exhausted) but it’s a more ‘normal’ range of highs and lows.

I’m not sure that visits to the doctor alone would have got me to where I am, so there is truth in ‘the answers lie within’ credo. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and it took a lot of commitment and tweaks to the bio-hack to get it right but I am now in the best mental shape I’ve ever been in and I’m loving life.

When I started out on this journey, I hated my mind. I genuinely wished I wasn’t creative because it was such a struggle having a ‘creative brain’. Throughout the ages, some of our greatest creators have been people with poor mental health and it’s just been written off as ‘part of the package’. I hope this piece proves that it doesn’t have to be.

Marion Bergin, May 2021