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.
A new month, a new year, and my book is here
What areas of your life need the most care and compassion right now? 01 · FROM ME TO YOU Hello Reader, This is a very special week for me. Today is my birthday, and my book, Be Good to Yourself: 100 Days of Radical Self-Compassion, is out in the world. But first, I want to tell you how it began. In the heart of the pandemic, I saw a familiar pattern emerging. Doctors working double shifts. Nurses working short-staffed. Equipment in short supply. It was 2020, but it felt very much like 2009,...
READ POSTWhen Stress Hits Different
01 · From Me to You Hello Reader, Something shifted for me this September. I've been watching my social media feeds fill with women entrepreneurs, clinicians, caregivers, mothers — all expressing a particular kind of exhaustion that they say is hard to name. Not tired from doing too much but tired from giving everything and feeling like nothing is moving. Effort without traction. Energy spent and still no arrival. I recognized what they are talking about immediately, because I have lived...
READ POSTNo one told me estrogen was a brain hormone. Here's what I had to learn the hard way.
01 · From Me to You Hello Reader, There's a quote that I love by the late Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. It reads: "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." The year 2018 was both, filled with questions I could not answer and answers I'd never thought I'd have to go in search of. It was my son's high school graduation year. It should have been one of the most celebratory seasons of my life. Instead, I was quietly terrified. I had developed...
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 POST90% 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 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...
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