Seva Living
Where longevity meets lifestyle. Where science meets soul. Seva Living is a free, biweekly newsletter from Angel V. Shannon—Board Certified Nurse Practitioner (AGPCNP-BC), lifestyle medicine clinician, speaker, author, and Blue Zone retreat host. Inside every issue: brain science made simple, food-as-medicine recipes, root cause medicine insights, and dispatches from the world's longest-lived communities. . Build a Better Brain. Design the Life You Deserve.
Science that changes everything—your best brain starts here.
90% of your serotonin is made in your gut. Here's why that changes everything.
01 · From Me To You There is a moment in the garden that I have come to think of as the real lesson. It happens every summer, usually in July, when everything is at its most extravagant and its most demanding at once. The tomatoes are heavy on the vine. My Swiss Chard has gone full and deep. The herbs are spilling over their beds with the abundance that only a midsummer warmth produces. And underneath all of it — invisible, unglamorous, and doing the work no one sees — the soil is alive with...
READ POSTI forgot to drink water on Friday. My brain reminded me why that matters.
01 · From Me to You Hello Reader, Last Friday I hit my endpoint. It was a full clinical week with back-to-back patient visits, complex decisions, and the kind of mental weight that comes from holding other people's health in your mind for hours at a time. By Friday evening my body was simply done. Not just physically tired but drained in a way that went bone-deep. The July heat and humidity had taken whatever was left. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized I had barely touched...
READ POSTThe meal plan that cut Alzheimer's risk by 53% — and what to eat this summer
01 · From Me To You Hello Reader, There is a particular kind of intelligence that happens at a farmers market in July. Not the kind you find in a textbook or a clinical guideline — though what you find there is, as it turns out, extraordinarily well-supported by both. I mean the intelligence of abundance. The moment you stand in front of a table piled with blueberries still cool from the morning, bundles of kale so dark green they're almost black, tomatoes that smell the way tomatoes are...
READ POSTMove to Remember: Exercise, BDNF, and the Brain You're Building This Summer
01 · From Me To You Hello Reader, I love sharing success stories about my patients and this is one of my favorites from just last week. She was not a patient who came to me in crisis. She came in for a routine follow-up — a 52-year-old project manager who, by her own admission, has been sitting too much and too long for the past three years. Like most of us, the pandemic made her life far too sedentary. Her schedule has made it easy to stay that way. She felt dull, she said. Not depressed...
READ POSTDwelling in The Between
01 · FROM ME TO YOU Hello Reader, Last week I delivered a lecture on brain health, and at the end a woman in the audience raised her hand with a question I have heard a hundred times and still love being asked. She wanted to know what I thought was the single best exercise for healthy aging. She had been faithfully following the mantra we have all heard: move more, sit less. But standing inside her gym, staring at the schedule — yoga, Pilates, swimming, weight-bearing exercises for bone...
READ POSTYour Brain on Stress: The HPA Axis, Cortisol, and the Science of Coming Back
01 · From Me To You Hello Reader, In medicine, we believe every patient tells a story and holds a lesson. This one has stayed with me. I'll call her Anne. She came in asking for a thyroid panel first then 'well, maybe I'm anemic,' she said. Anne was in her mid-fifties with impeccable credentials but a schedule that was unrelenting. She'd spent three of her twenty-five years in higher education steering a university through a leadership overhaul during a global pandemic. When she sat down that...
READ POSTYour labs came back normal. So why don't you feel normal?
01 · From Me To You Hello Reader, Have you ever had this experience? You sit across from your doctor. You've been tired for months — the kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. Your thinking felt slower than usual. Maybe you gained weight, more than what seems reasonable. You weren't depressed exactly, but you weren't quite yourself either. The lab results came in. Your doctor glanced at the screen and said the words you have heard before: Everything looks normal. And you drove home wondering...
READ POSTWhat have you been carrying alone that you don't have to?
What have you been carrying alone that you don't have to? 01 · FROM ME TO YOU Hello Reader, This past weekend I went outside and found a sweet surprise: my peonies are pushing their way through the ground! We've had some really warm days here in Maryland and these peonies are coming in fast! As I stood there looking at those tight little burgundy-tipped buds reaching up to the sky, I realized I wasn't going to make the same mistake again: I always forget to stake them. Every year I forget....
READ POSTYour brain cleans itself while you sleep. Here's what happens when it can't.
01 · From Me To You Hello Reader, A patient came to see me recently convinced she was in perimenopause. Weight gain. Chronic fatigue. Depression. Anxiety. All of it. And honestly, on the surface, it made sense. She was in her late 40s and all of the symptoms fit. But something made me slow down and ask a few more questions. She had taken a new job as a middle school teacher. She was working late evenings and weekends. She was eating well but had stopped working out because she said she had no...
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