Ben was 28 years old when he started feeling lethargic and depressed, despite no significant negative events in his life that might have explained his symptoms.
After graduating from college six years prior, he had focused intensely on his career as a software engineer, often working 80 hours per week, but had somehow still found time to eat a relatively healthy diet, exercise regularly, and hang out with friends.
He liked his job, which made the long hours easier, and it seemed like his attempt at work-life balance, though lopsided, was working for him.
But when he started feeling an inexplicable melancholy, seemingly out of nowhere, he wondered whether his extreme work schedule was finally catching up to him.
Serotonin deficiency
“You probably have a serotonin deficiency,” his primary care doctor suggested, as he wrote Ben a prescription for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a medication commonly prescribed to treat depression.
“It might take a month to kick in, but you’ll start to feel better when it does,” he added.
A self-described “data nerd,” Ben was curious to learn more about serotonin—the neurotransmitter responsible for promoting a good mood—and to what extent his job might have contributed to his deficiency, but the hurried, 15-minute appointment was over before he had the chance to ask his doctor any questions.
He wasn’t thrilled about starting a medication that would artificially modulate his neurotransmitters without running any tests to determine that this was the best approach, but Ben was desperate for something that might work, so he decided to start taking the medication anyway.
As an experiment, he would take the SSRI for at least a month, to see if it actually helped him to feel better, as his doctor had suggested it would.
Debunked science
Within a week of starting the medication, however, Ben knew something was off.
He felt dull.
Emotionless.
Disconnected.
He didn’t feel any happier, but he also didn’t feel any sadder.
He just felt like he was going through life with a numbness to everything around him.
That nothing really mattered, and that life was just about going through the motions on repeat.
If he did actually have a serotonin deficiency, and the SSRI was designed to increase available serotonin in his brain, then why was he feeling so terrible?
Suspicious of his presumed serotonin deficiency that was never tested for, Ben decided to do some research on his own, and soon ended up on PubMed—the world’s largest library of peer-reviewed biomedical research—reading articles on depression and its causes.
And, in just a few days, he learned that the serotonin deficiency theory of depression had long since been debunked, and that, perhaps not surprisingly, depression is actually much more complicated than a deficiency of a single neurotransmitter.
Shocked that he was prescribed a medication to treat a neurotransmitter imbalance that he likely didn’t have, he ultimately threw in the towel on the SSRI, explaining to his doctor that he couldn’t take the medication anymore, and that he was going to try a different approach.
Enter Quantify
While Ben wasn’t sure what the specific approach would be, he knew that he needed data, and that he was done playing the guessing game that was apparently so common in mental health treatment.
Thinking over his various options, he remembered that a colleague had mentioned a company, Quantify, that made it easy to test for basically everything that you could possibly test for.
He checked out the website, and saw that other members had resolved their depression with diet, supplements, and lifestyle, after not getting anywhere with medication, so he was excited to get started.
After getting matched with a certified health coach specialized in cognitive function, completing a health questionnaire, and meeting with his health coach over video chat, a hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress profile was ordered for Ben, to evaluate the health of his HPA axis, the system that regulates the body’s response to acute and chronic stress.
HPA axis dysregulation
A few weeks later, he received his test results, and his health coach explained that his HPA stress profile showed an abnormally shallow diurnal cortisol pattern, indicating HPA axis dysregulation, which commonly causes depression and other mood disorders.
To address HPA axis dysregulation, his health coach continued, Ben would need to eliminate processed foods, grains, and dairy from his diet, take certain supplements, such as magnesium malate, glycine, and Rhodiola rosea, exercise every day, and optimize his circadian rhythm, by minimizing exposure to blue light and consistently getting to bed before midnight.
His health coach added that the primary cause of his HPA axis dysregulation was likely the extreme physical and mental stress that he had been under for years, so his recovery would also require significantly dialing back his work hours.
Recovery
To learn that his 80-hour workweeks had likely caused his HPA axis dysregulation wasn’t surprising to Ben, but that didn’t necessarily make it easy to hear.
Given the intense work culture of the company he worked for, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to negotiate his way into working fewer hours, so he started reaching out to recruiters, letting them know that he was looking for new work, stipulating that he was specifically interested in working at a company with a more normal work schedule.
Within a month, he had landed a remote job at a company that clearly prioritized the health of their employees, rarely requiring them to work more than 40 hours.
Six months into the new job, having acclimated to the more relaxed work culture, a follow-up HPA stress profile showed a completely normal diurnal cortisol pattern, indicating normal HPA axis regulation.
More importantly, Ben was feeling great.
His depression had lifted, and he felt a lightness that he hadn’t felt in years, now on the other side of an intensely stressful experience that was unknowingly compromising his health.