Dr. Romie Mushtaq Brings an Integrative Mindset in 'The Busy Brain Cure'

In The Busy Brain Cure: The Eight-Week Plan to Find Focus, Tame Anxiety, and Sleep Again, board-certified physician and award-winning wellness speaker, Dr. Romie Mushtaq, writes a comprehensive wellness guide to healing your “Busy Brain” with an easy-to-follow, eight-week protocol. Coined by Dr. Mushtaq herself, the “Busy Brain” is a term she uses to describe adults whose minds are so filled with chronic stress that it leads to serious health issues, such as adult-onset ADD or ADHD, anxiety, and insomnia. Dr. Mushtaq explains, “The Busy Brain is not the fact that we have busy lives… The research I’ve been doing of when we live as chronically stressed-out individuals, especially here in the west, that nobody really wants to be told to eat berries and breathe or take an emotional resilience class. Those things don’t work. Something else is happening in our brain, and I did the research on 17,000 people, and [they] took the busy brain test that we include in the book for free… we found that high-achieving, highly intelligent individuals… when you’re chronically stressed out and it goes unchecked, you develop three key symptoms of the pattern of neuroinflammation: difficulty focusing, or adult-onset ADD with a reduced attention span, feeling anxious, and having difficulty falling and staying asleep. So that is the Busy Brain.”

As readers will notice when following the protocol, while Dr. Mushtaq does recommend certain supplements to include in one’s diet, such as Vitamin D3 and Omega-3 fish oil, she doesn’t limit the foods you already eat. “For the Busy Brain Cure, I didn’t want to put people on a diet. I wanted us to honor the foods we all grew up eating… I really believe that in order to be healthy we have to eat the foods that used to bring us joy, but eat it mindfully. When we have a busy brain, you could eat the whole bag of cookies and it’s mind-numbing and we don’t want that.” For those readers who are unsure whether the Busy Brain Cure is right for them, Dr. Mushtaq explained why this treatment is different and more effective than others they may have tried. “One is, this is up-to-date research. Number two, it’s one of the only books that gets to the root cause of what’s actually going on with the Busy Brain. We talk about a particular pattern of neuroinflammation that happens in the hypothalamus and resets the circadian rhythm and we need to fix that, and that is affecting not only your ability to focus and potential ADHD and insomnia and sleep, but it can also affect your hunger mechanisms, your hormone cycles, everything else… The third thing is, not only did I give the protocol that I had used in clinic, we tested and refined the protocol in over 1,000 high-functioning, high-achieving adults… and so that’s why I feel like this book is different. It gives you a researched roadmap.”