For more than 17 years, I suffered from depression. I’ve been on all types of medication. Most recently, a combination of three: Wellbutrin, escitalopram, and Xanax. Medication had become part of my life, and I made peace with needing it. I understood there was a chemical imbalance in my brain, one I was likely born with, and accepted the reality of needing medication—quite possibly for the rest of my life. It wasn’t until after I stopped drinking, and my anxiety and depression began to ease, that I sought to understand the connection....

As board-certified sleep specialist Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., explains to mbg, the circadian rhythm is a roughly 24-hour cycle that your body repeats over and over. “It basically ‘runs’ your sleep—starting it and stopping it—by sending out neurochemical signals telling each area, organ, or receptor site what to produce, what to receive, and what to do,” he explains. And according to naturopathic sleep doctor Catherine Darley, N.D., “There are also clock genes in each cell, which makes the cell do more or less of its function at different times of the day....

Aristotle first raised the concept of lucid dreaming in his treatise On Dreams in the fourth century BCE, but the practice wasn’t studied scientifically until the 1970s1. Since then, it has been validated as a “hybrid state of consciousness2 with definable and measurable differences from waking and from REM sleep,” the sleep stage in which we dream. As you can imagine, lucid dreaming opens the door to quite a lot of fun, author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self Robert Waggoner tells mbg....

Why? It all has to do with that hormone called cortisol. You may know it as one of our “stress hormones.” While cortisol has crucial roles in the body, too much can wreak havoc on your health—and the wrong workout could push you into unhealthy cortisol territory. But now, our “tigers” are things like demanding bosses, a leaky roof, stop-and-go traffic, or even our children. They can also be memories of traumatic experiences or situations like divorce....

I’d woken up in a mood, but aside from a few too many glasses of Christmas Champagne the night prior, there was little I could point to as to why. The holidays had been surprisingly enjoyable. I was leaving the next day for a girls’ trip to a secluded beach in Jamaica. January was filled with work projects I was excited about. And just prior to the holiday, a friend had introduced me to someone who I really liked....

As far as tightening the fragile neck skin, it’s a similar story you’ll hear with pretty much all skin-aging woes: The best approach is actually delaying early onset in the first place and keeping the skin as healthy as you can. That’s not to say you can’t improve it naturally once the issue crops up—you can, it’s just important to be realistic here. As board-certified dermatologist Flora Kim, M.D., FAAD, notes, “Wrinkled and sagging skin will require more involved solutions as the problem runs deep....

While it is not yet a widely recognized medical condition, integrative and functional medicine doctors are at the forefront of diagnosis and treatment, while more research is starting to emerge to explain what it is and how to heal it. In a healthy gut, when you digest food, your intestines break it down, allowing tiny healthy nutrients to pass through the walls into the bloodstream. But, “when the permeability of the gut lining has been altered, this allows toxins, bacteria, and foreign substances like undigested food particles to enter the blood stream along with the nutrients,” explains family medicine physician Bindiya Gandhi, M....