How Nutrition Can Improve Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptoms can disrupt a person’s life. They can make it challenging to complete necessary daily activities with intense mood swings, seeing things in extremes, and impulsivity. Many types of treatment and lifestyle changes can help improve symptoms of BPD, including improving nutrition. By making simple changes to nutrition, mental health symptoms can decrease. For those struggling with BPD, this can make a significant difference in daily life, including relationships, jobs, and completing necessary tests. BPD treatment at Corner Canyon Health Centers incorporates these lifestyle changes as one part of a holistic treatment plan that can make a significant and lasting difference.

Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), BPD “is a mental illness that severely impacts a person’s ability to manage their emotions. This loss of emotional control can increase impulsivity, affect how a person feels about themselves, and negatively impact their relationships with others.”

Individuals with BPD are severely impaired in their ability to manage their emotions. Due to the loss of emotional control, they often struggle with a variety of symptoms. These include:

• High impulsivity
• Viewing things as good or bad with no in between
• Quickly changing views, beliefs, or interests
• Efforts to avoid abandonment
• Intense and unstable relationships
• Self-harm
• Variable and quickly hanging moods
• Consistently feeling empty
• Dissociation or separateness from reality

BPD symptoms will vary for each person. The severity of symptoms also is unique to each individual. For some, these symptoms will be long-lasting. However, for others, symptoms are more persistent.

Disordered Eating

Individuals struggling with BPD struggle to recognize, discuss, and regulate their emotions. However, these traits are also found in individuals struggling with disordered eating. This is because recognizing, discussing, and controlling emotions is important in maintaining a healthy diet.

As a result, many individuals with BPD struggle with eating disorders and maintaining healthy dietary habits. The challenges are unique to each individual. However, the connection between disordered eating and BPD means that improving nutrition can have additional benefits for those with BPD.

Nutritional Psychiatry

What a person eats makes a significant difference in how they feel. While this is well-known in terms of improving physical wellness, it is also true that nutrition can improve a person’s mental well-being. Nutritional psychiatry is an emerging field that takes advantage of the mental health benefits of nutrition.

The gut, stomach, intestines, and general digestive tract, is often called the second brain. This is because the stomach produces a significant amount of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. These neurotransmitters impact a person’s mood, emotions, emotional regulation, and overall mental health. 

At Corner Canyon Health Centers, nutritional psychiatry is available. Whole foods that help improve mental health are served in all programs, which in conjunction with other treatments, makes a significant difference.

Nutrition and Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms

While nutrition cannot cure BPD symptoms, it can make a significant difference. By improving nutrition, especially with nutritional psychiatry, individuals can decrease mood swings and decrease both anxiety and depressive symptoms.

When a person eats a diet that is high in sugar and processed food, their blood sugar levels are often unstable. This is similar to a kid who eats a whole pile of Halloween candy, is extremely hyper for an hour or so, and then crashes. However, for those struggling with BPD, the swings in blood sugar can intensify mood swings that already exist. Improving nutrition and stabilizing energy from the digestive tract can help.

What an individual eats also impacts the release of important neurotransmitters from the gut. These neurotransmitters have a significant impact on overall mental health. This includes depression and anxiety symptoms. Not all individuals with BPD experience depression or anxiety. However, many do. By improving the overall diet, individuals can control co-occurring issues with BPD while feeling better all around.

Improving Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms at Corner Canyon

Every individual struggling with BPD experiences unique symptoms. Treatment at Corner Canyon Health Centers addresses each client based on their symptom, history, and preferences. Therefore, it helps to improve symptoms while helping individuals to heal from the root causes.

BPD is a mental health disorder that usually spans a person’s life. However, treatment can make a difference in individuals’ quality of life. By getting treatment, clients can learn to manage symptoms and improve overall. Treatment at Corner Canyon Health Centers combines holistic modalities like nutritional psychiatry with psychotherapy and medication.

BPD treatment is often a combination of medication, psychotherapy, and holistic modalities. This includes improving overall nutrition. By addressing BPD symptoms through multiple modalities, an individual can learn tools that help them to manage symptoms. However, they also make improvements on the overall challenges of BPD. This includes improving emotional regulation, identification, and communication. While these improvements generally do not come from nutritional changes, the mental health benefits of nutrition can help individuals make bigger strides toward learning new skills that help improve their overall quality of life.

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) can make lifestyle changes that make a significant difference in their symptoms, including nutrition. However, learning how to improve nutrition alone can be difficult. At Corner Canyon Health Centers, nutritional psychiatry is utilized with a combination of other treatments that help individuals with BPD heal. If you or someone you love is struggling with symptoms of BPD and needs help, treatment at Corner Canyon can help. We offer multiple levels of care to suit your needs, including residential care to partial hospitalization. Additionally, our staff is both caring and qualified to help you heal. To learn more or ask any questions, call us today at (877) 717-6237.