Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health

The most common question I get is what do I do if I wake up before the sun comes out? ... Just flip on artificial lights as needed until the sun comes out, and then get outside ... Get outside, look at the sunlight. Definitely blink to protect your eyes as needed, but get that sunlight in your eyes early in the day.

If you need to get more light in your eyes because, indeed, there's just not enough sunlight or you don't have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning for whatever reason, you might invest in getting a bright light source that you can plug in. You probably want one that's as bright as 10,000 lux ... Those fall under the category of so-called SAD lamps, seasonal affective disorder lamps.

Everybody should 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 ... Ideally, you're going to get to sleep within plus or minus 1 hour of your regular sleep time.

The second most common question I get is what do I do if there's no sun where I live? I live in an area where there's no sunlight. Look, if you live on planet Earth, there's always sunlight...

The physiological sigh... You simply do a big inhale through your nose; try and maximize the inflation of your lungs. And then before you exhale, sneak in another brief inhalation, even if it's just a tiny micro inhalation, to maximally inflate the lungs... And then you're going to do a long extended exhale through the mouth. And typically just one, although sometimes it requires two or three, but 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.

Making sure that you're in very dim to completely dark environments for a continuous 6 to 8 hours within every 24 hours circadian cycle is correlated with much better mental health outcomes.

People who stay in very dim to dark environments for 8 hours every 24 hours... they benefit from improved mood and mental health outcomes in a way that's independent of how much light they're getting and independent of how much sleep they are getting.

Heart rate variability is simply the distance between your heartbeats, or rather the time between your heartbeats ... If those timings between your heartbeats are somewhat variable, that is correlated with positive physical and mental health outcomes. One of the ways that you can increase heart rate variability is to get regular cardiovascular exercise as well as doing resistance exercise and, no surprise, getting sufficient amounts of quality sleep...

It's important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood given our life circumstances and to have the best possible mental health given our life circumstances and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time that we have to pay attention to what I'm referring to here as the big six, or the six pillars of mental health.

Most people need between 6 to 8 hours of sleep per night. Some people can get away with 5. 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.

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.

This whole process of viewing morning sunlight and afternoon light does... not work through a window or windshield because windows and windshields filter out the relevant wavelengths of light that you want to get directly onto your retina.

Even having a small amount of light in the room, which isn't even that bright, while you're sleeping with eyes closed can disrupt morning glucose levels.

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.

There are several ways that you can self-induce elevations of noradrenaline and adrenaline, and then to learn to anchor your mind and your thinking to stay calm in those elevated adrenaline states as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world and your adrenaline and noradrenaline spike. Now, one of the best ways to do this... is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment.

The more specificity that we can put to labeling our emotions, the better off we're going to be in terms of our overall mental health ... The more specific language that we can put to our own internal emotions, even if that language is just to ourselves and our own internal narrative, we don't even have to speak out what those labels are—the better that we're going to feel over time. And indeed, this effect can be quite rapid.

There are several studies showing that when people place more descriptive granularity on their emotions, that is correlated with... improvements in respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which we know correlate with improvements in heart rate variability—indeed, it's one of the major bases for heart rate variability—which we know is correlated with not just positive physical health outcomes but positive mental health outcomes.

We all need to strive to limit the number of social interactions that we feel tax or even vex us, that cause us stress.

One way to explore the unconscious mind and begin to get a better understanding about how it might be influencing our waking states and behaviors is to actually record and think about one's dreams.