6 Daily Habits to boost your mood and mental health

The Big Six of Self-Care and Mental Health

So I'm going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the six pillars, or what I also refer to as the "Big Six" of self-care and mental health.

1. Sleep

It's safe to say that most people need between 6 to 8 hours of sleep per night. Some people can get away with five. Some people need as much as 9 or 10. Certainly, growing kids, babies, teenagers, and those that are suffering from some sort of illness are going to need more — as much as 9, 10, maybe even 12 hours of sleep per night. However, most people do well to get somewhere between 6 and 8 hours of sleep per night. You're just going to have to experiment and figure out what's best for you.

Now one thing I heard recently — so I can't claim this as an original idea — but that I think is a really good way to think about sleep is that sleep, much like physical fitness, is something that we have to constantly be working on. I do believe that we should strive to get enough quality sleep as many of the nights of our life as possible. And if you can't do that, hopefully it's for good reasons — but of course, things happen in life. But we should all strive to get the best quality sleep that we can and as much of it most nights of our lives. So it's important to look at sleep as a process that you're going to be working on for the rest of your life.

The other thing that's not often discussed — and I really haven't talked about terribly much on this podcast — is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine. I realize that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and wake up at the exact same time each morning. And frankly, that's not practical. I certainly don't do that.

However, what we know from the circadian health literature is that everybody should strive — again, that’s strive — nobody's perfect, but strive to get to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up at more or less the same time each morning. This turns out to be really important for regulating mood and mental health, and indeed for improving your overall levels of sleep — getting the optimal amounts of slow-wave sleep (aka deep sleep) and rapid eye movement sleep.

And what we know is that trying to wake up at more or less the same time each morning — plus or minus 1 hour — that's really going to help you anchor your overall sleep schedule and it's really going to help lead to predictability of your overall levels of energy, mood, and focus throughout the day.

2. Light

And I used to refer to this as sunlight. Try to view sunlight — that is, with your eyes — view sunlight as early as possible after waking. Whenever I say that, the most common question I get is:

"What do I do if I wake up before the sun comes out?"

Well, unless you have superpowers that I'm not aware of, you can't make the sun come out any earlier. So just flip on artificial lights as needed until the sun comes out, and then get outside, face east in the morning, take off those sunglasses.

It's perfectly safe to look at low solar angle sunlight without sunglasses. Definitely blink to protect your eyes as needed. This has myriad positive effects on mood, focus, alertness, and nighttime sleep.

And you want to do this for about 10 minutes on non-overcast days and as long as 20 or 30 minutes on overcast days.

And that highlights the second most common question I get which is:

"What do I do if there's no sun where I live? I live in an area where there's no sunlight."

If you live on planet Earth, there's always sunlight. There might not be very much of it. It might be very overcast where you live. It might seem very dark, but trust me — there's far more photons (light energy) coming through that cloud cover even in the darkest mornings of winter in those dark winters.

3. Movement

And when I say movement, I mean exercise. As you all know, we should all strive to get anywhere from 180 to 220 minutes of zone 2 cardio per week. That's movement that allows you to hold a conversation. But were you to do it more intensely — or even a bit more intensely — you wouldn't be able to hold that conversation.

In addition, we should do some V2 max work. We should get our heart rate very high at least once a week doing some sort of movement that's safe for you. So that could be running or cycling or swimming or Pilates — whatever it is for you. Getting your heart rate way, way up is also important and to do that at least once a week.

But daily movement — either cardiovascular training or resistance training — and it's very, very clear that we need both. Maybe not on the same days. In fact, I split them to separate days.

Resistance training done for anywhere from six to 10 sets per muscle group, either close to or to failure. This could be with weights, it could be with bands, it could be with machines.

4. Nutrition

And nutrition is a big topic. It's a very barbed-wire topic. Everybody needs to consume sufficient amounts — but not excess amounts — of quality calories per day. Now you may do that by intermittent fasting. You may do that by a more traditional meal scheduling. But everybody's going to need to do that because your body and brain — and indeed the parts of your body and brain that translate to mood and mental health — require macronutrients (proteins, fats, and carbohydrates) as well as micronutrients.

So the key takeaway with nutrition is to make it quality nutrition. And that means getting most of your food sources from either nonprocessed or minimally processed foods.

5. Social Connection

Let's just be very brief and specific about this. We all need to strive to limit the number of social interactions that we feel tax or even vex us — that cause us stress. We are, as a species, interacting with other nervous systems — both of our own species (other humans) as well as non-human species (dogs and cats, and if you have them, horses and other animals).

So we need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside — through our own actions and choices and thoughts — but also through interaction with other nervous systems. And while we don't always have as much control over which social interactions or work interactions we have to engage in, we should really strive to understand and indeed pay some serious attention to whether or not certain types of social interactions are net savings, neutral, or taxing.

Certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people just make us feel taxed. It makes us feel stressed. It leads to negative affect — that is, not good feelings or emotions — and often elevated levels of autonomic arousal that leave us ruminating and leave us having challenges with sleep. We really should all strive to limit those interactions to the extent that we can.

6. Stress Control

And the reason it's included is that stress is going to happen. Life is filled with so-called stressors. I'm not here to tell you that stress is good for you. I'm not here to tell you that stress is bad for you.

What I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time. And these fall into two categories.

The first category are real-time tools — tools that you can use to reduce your level of stress in real time. And the best way that I'm aware of — that's grounded in excellent physiology and neuroscience — to reduce your stress in real time is the so-called physiological sigh.

And the physiological sigh, as many of you know, is very simple and straightforward. Anyone can do this:

Simply do a big inhale through your nose

Try and maximize the inflation of your lungs

Before you exhale, sneak in another brief inhalation — even if it’s just a tiny micro inhalation

Then do a long, extended exhale through the mouth

Typically just one physiological sigh is effective in bringing down one’s level of stress significantly enough that you don’t need to do it again. It’s a very safe and very effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time — maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you feel you need to calm down in real time.

So it’s like this...