Firstly, can you please share with us a little bit about who you are? My name is Natalie Hayden. I have two kids (Reid, age 3 and Sophia, age 1.5). My husband and I live in Missouri. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at age 21, in July 2005. I spent a decade working in television news at ABC stations in MN, WI, and IL. When I left the news desk in November 2014, I started thinking about sharing my patient journey publicly in hopes of being the voice I desperately needed to hear upon diagnosis. I launched my blog, Lights, Camera, Crohn’s: An Unobstructed View in July 2016 and have shared fre ..read more

Anxiety is often caused by the fear of the unknown. It makes you question your own truth and can discourage you from believing in yourself, or having the confidence to proceed with clarity. A huge step in overcoming anxiety is to find and use pattern/feelings of familiarity to create some normalcy into difficult or overwhelming situations. When anxiety enters our lives, our reactions can cause overwhelming pain to our bodies. Instead, we need to welcome and explore the reasons why we’re feeling anxious and whether those feelings are similar, or can relate to a previous situation we’ve experien ..read more

Hey Sarah, let’s kick off by sharing a little bit about who you are?  Hi! My name is Sarah. I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Mental NYC, a mental health-focused wellness practice. I am also a meditation guide and a reiki practitioner.   I currently live in Williamsburg with my partner and fellow Mental NYC Co-Founder Brendan and my dog Lady.  What has been your biggest challenge in 2020, and what tools have you used to help heal from it? I think it has been incredibly challenging to go from a world where we are so used to having physical boundaries such as different places to ..read more

Finding good quality friends can take time. As adults, there are less social structures to support the idea of finding and developing great friendships, which sometimes lead us down the broken path of hanging out with ‘what’s her face’ just to avoid Friday night loneliness. Although situations like this help void the temporary feels of not having close friends, it’s important to understand that quality friendships are extremely valuable to our mental health. Our friendships are among the most valuable relationships that we have. Friendships in a more ‘subtle’ term are a transactional agreement ..read more

Firstly, we’re not going to drill you if you’re a meat-eater. We’re not about that. We would rather discuss our opinion with you, based on recent studies that continue to surface. And for years, registered dietitians and food scientists have toyed with the perks of eating plants while cutting back on meat, but people are only starting to clue onto it now. So what are the studies? A study published in the summer of 2016 noted that plant-based diets have gone mainstream – partly because the advantages have been well researched and healthcare practitioners recommend that this type of lifestyle h ..read more

Firstly, can you please introduce who you are to our community? (not what you do) Hi, I’m Dina! I live in NYC under non-pandemic circumstances. I’m 100% gluten-free (not by choice) and dabble in the vegan world. Lover of matcha, browsing the aisles of health stores, studying menus, learning about the dimensions of wellness, and helping people achieve feeling optimal, not a settled state of well-being! What makes you present, or at the moment? We live in an age of distraction – there is no shortage of news, social media, past thoughts and future thoughts that inundate our minds. Being mindful ..read more

You may have heard, or at least experienced your body react to a bee or mosquito bite, right? Or maybe you’ve been a victim to allergy season, dealing with itchy eyes, a runny nose and/or hives. Well, all of these ‘fun’ responses to mother nature actually has a name. This reaction is also coined as a ‘histamine response’ which is a natural substance that our immune cells produce as a part of the stress response. Now that we’ve clarified what histamines are, and how the body responds to them it’s also important to know that histamines although are naturally produced in the body, they can also b ..read more

The ‘FODMAP’ diet has probably made its way into your vocabulary while discussing diets, or health trends and other funky facts about wellness. And to be fair, this conversation is totally backed by a bunch of serious studies (thanks to Monash University, Melbourne AUS) – so the topic isn’t messing around! When people mention ‘FODMAP’ diet they usually are referring to a diet low in FODMAP, as it is designed to help people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Small Bacterial Overgrowth and Inflammatory Bowel Disease, as it can help determine foods that a (temporarily) problematic to the digestive sy ..read more

The ongoing conversation about gut health is forever changing as science continue to produce new studies that suggest a whole new and fascinating fact about how we should eat. Although fads have come and gone, fermented foods welcomed themselves to the party a very long time ago, and never really left. Truth be told, we really want these guys to stick around for as long as possible as they continue to prove their healing benefits are incredibly rewarding. So when did fermented foods introduce themselves into the world? Fermented foods have been circulating for thousands of years and were origi ..read more

There’s no doubt that our digestive health and the wellbeing of bacteria go hand in hand. The quality and how much sleep we’re getting impacts the way in which our gut microbiome actually works and vice versa. We can easily disrupt our ‘circadian rhythm’, an internal clock that regulates our body’s functions and we can do it through various ways, from sleep deprivation, shift work, to poor quality sleep. All of these contributing factors can change the community of microbes living in our digestive system. A study was released back in 2016 that explained that the shift between day and night doe ..read more