An English teacher recommended I apply to study at Oxford University. I didn’t, because I was frightened I wouldn’t fit in. I regret not trying. By enrolling on this masterclass, you’re helping to support the Guardian, and this allows us to keep our quality reporting open to all. How Emotions are Made by Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. As professionals who proclaim to help people understand their emotional worlds it is incumbent upon us to have up-to-date knowledge, even if it challenges our personal beliefs and training… Which work of fiction amazed you with its psychological insight?

There is, though, good news for coffee drinkers. Moderate coffee consumption (two to four cups per day) has been linked to better brain health and reduced risk of cognitive decline, in part because caffeine regulates a neuroprotective brain enzyme.Wilson: Sometimes. Yes and no. [ laughs] So last week, I was furiously angry, [ laughs] stomping around London at lunchtime over something that I knew, even at the time, even within the cloud of my rage, was just a minor inconvenience. And I was trying to work it out; I’d managed to hold onto enough of my thinking apparatus to be like, this seems like an outsized response to a minor inconvenience; what’s going on? And I realized it was simply that I was very hungry and that I needed to have some lunch. And then my cortisol dropped, and I felt better. So I still get caught out by this thing.

Kalliopeia Foundation, dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality, supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia.org; Unprocessed: How the food we eat is fuelling our mental health crisis by Kimberley Wilson is published by WH Allen. For dinner, try to incorporate more vegetables and a portion of oily fish: Wilson recommends aiming for two to three portions per week. One of her favourites is pasta with a homemade sauce, a tin of sardines (an excellent source of protein and polyunsaturated fats) and a green salad. Your weekly intake of meat products and red meat shouldn’t exceed 500g, she says.One of the more challenging yet important aspects of Wilson’s book is her long-term perspective around health. This is challenging due to our tendency to default to short-term perspectives around behaviours that can affect our health (such as “go on, then, just one more…” when offered another biscuit) which can distract us from and obscure the long-term implications of such behaviours. She speculates that this short-term approach is particularly relevant to diet since food is so ordinary and every day for many of us. The brain continues its rapid growth and development during infancy and childhood. Omega-3 fatty acids, particularly one called DHA, make up a significant proportion of the membrane of brain cells. DHA is considered irreplaceable for brain development and evidence shows it may be especially important to ensure that children are getting sufficient amounts through regularly eating oily fish. A recent survey found that less than 5% of UK children are meeting the fish consumption recommendations. So all of these things come together. We cannot think of them separately from the body. If you’re saying the thing that’s causing you depression is the quality of your relationship, that’s not outside of you, it’s the way in which your body is permeable to the environment; that the environment is affecting you on a cellular level and that that is affecting your mood and how you feel and how you perceive the world, because the way you look at the world changes when your mood changes. For readers who may be more politically engaged, ‘Unprocessed’ also throws down a challenge to hold those in power accountable for their role in safeguarding public health in an area of life that is frequently overlooked. Wilson clearly wants her readers to take action in response to her arguments. The question is: will you? 6am Book Club discussion questions:

The high-profile SMILEs trial (“supporting the modification of lifestyle in lowered emotional states”) published in 2017 found that, among a group of 67 people with depression and a poor diet, those who switched to a Mediterranean-style diet were four times more likely to recover and also experienced reduced anxiety symptoms. So — I mean, I’ve also seen you say that you knew you wanted to be a psychologist, when you were 16, which makes sense to me, with that sentence in mind.

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On the other hand, children in the UK are eating more than the recommended levels of added sugar. The UK government advises that free sugars – sugars added to food or drinks and found naturally in honey, syrups and unsweetened fruit and vegetable juices, smoothies and purees – should not make up more than 5% of the energy (calories) you get from food and drink each day. But what seems to underlie all of these things is the stress system-modulated activation of the immune system, right? All of those factors switch on your stress hormones, your immune cells have receptors for your stress hormones, your immune cells get activated, and with chronic activation of your immune system, that can lead to — to get a bit technical — the loosening of the tight junctions in the blood-brain barrier, cytokines cross over, and you’ve got neuroinflammation and depression. Kimberley Wilson: There’s a way in which I feel like none of us really owns, entirely, our trajectories. You know, there’s no such thing as a self-made person. And if I had grown up in a family of musicians, I’m sure that I would be a concert pianist. Or if I’d grown up in a family of artists, I’m sure that it would’ve had an impact on my relationship to art, and I’d visit galleries more often, or something like that. But I grew up with this intimate awareness of brains that don’t work, I guess, or brains that aren’t working well, so that when I got into school and we were doing biology lessons, I understood things like myelination and neurodegeneration and motor neurons and this sort of stuff. And in a strange way, it gave me a bit of a leg up, in terms of understanding aspects of biology and aspects of psychology. So these were subjects that kind of made sense to me quite early on. That was the path that I was on. The chapter exploring the influence of alcohol caught my attention. Apart from making me reconsider my weekend bottle of wine, the focus of this chapter was around Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). Wilson walks a difficult line between outlining healthy alcohol consumption choices for women whilst not shaming them for decisions that may unwittingly have implications for the future health of their child. I suspect that the things that make me love a book have less to do with the book and more to do with where and who I am at the time that I encounter it. Which book changed the way you think?