Could this be the hammer in your Mental Health Toolkit?
Last week we discussed the final part of environmental toxicity: social relationships and community. We have now covered Building Block 1: nutrition and bodily ingestion, Block 2: the physical environment trilogy of i): toxicology, ii): work / home and iii): social environment including relationships and community.
This week we will start the mammoth topic of our third Building Block for Good Mental Health: Toolkit and Skills. By this, we mean the tools and skills you can reach for to improve your mental health, both in the short and longer term. They are your resources to turn to when things get tough.
We won’t be covering all of our Toolkit and Skills here; you’ll have to come on our Mental Health Getaway for that 😜 but we will cover some of them briefly in these newsletters.
The first and most fundamental tool in our box is sleep. Due to its fundamental importance, we debated putting this as the next building block after nutrition, and it still may get shifted about, but it is absolutely something you can use to bolster your mental (and physical) health. What I love about this one is that it is both a longer term fix, and short-term one; more on this later.
Why we sleep
Let’s briefly discuss why we sleep. Sleep is a fundamental need for all human beings and we cannot function properly without it. It is necessary for:
the brain to process the activities of the day
memory processing
making and breaking neural connections
to manage our emotions, including anger, aggression and irritability
to help us learn and memorise
to help us evaluate using logic
cleaning out the toxins that accumulate in the brain, which can lead to brain fog and other problems
to allow the body to repair from damage and also from good stress, like exercise
for growth, repair and renewing. We produce growth hormone in its largest quantities within the first few hours of sleep. Growth hormone does more than just help our bodies grow, it also facilitates repair and protein synthesis.
to manage our metabolism (in which growth hormone has a function)
to allow our guts to rest and repair. It is especially beneficial to go to sleep on an empty stomach, or having allowed at least 2-3 hours after finishing eating.
As a result, good sleep has wide-spread benefits throughout the body including supporting the immune system, cardiovascular system, metabolism, brain and mood.
Mental health
Sleep deprivation affects our mental health, and also our physical health. In a vicious cycle, those with mental health concerns, like anxiety, depression and ADHD, are more likely to have problems sleeping, which again, affect their mental health. For example, people with insomnia have been shown to have double the risk of developing depression (1).
As mentioned, sleep is vital in good mental health because it helps us to manage our emotions and memories and repair our bodies, including our guts, where serotonin is made. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in feeling happy, focussed and calm. A reduction in serotonin is associated with depression and anxiety. Many anti-depressants modulate the levels of serotonin in our bodies. Serotonin is required to make melatonin, the neurotransmitter that helps to regulate our sleep-wake cycle and therefore a deficiency in serotonin may lead to a reduction in melatonin.
How much?
So now we understand the significance of sleep, how much do we need? Ideally adults would get between 7.5-9 hours of good-quality sleep a night. A recent YouGov poll in the UK showed that 35% of people get less than 7 hours of sleep a night (2).
Break the cycle
How can we break the vicious cycle of:
- sleep deprivation causing poor mental health and
- poor mental health leading to more problems with sleeping?
There are many ways to improve sleep including addressing Building Block 1: nutrition and bodily ingestion. As we mentioned, serotonin is important for sleep.
90-95% of our serotonin levels are produced in our intestines; the remainder being produced in a gland in our brain. Tryptophan is the amino acid (protein building block) that is required to make serotonin. We must obtain tryptophan from our diets as our bodies cannot make this specific amino acid. Foods containing tryptophan include turkey, chicken, eggs, cheese, fish, bananas, dates, peanuts and some seeds and therefore we can boost the intake of these foods to help us to make serotonin and also melatonin.
We can also improve Building Block 2: the physical environment trilogy of i): toxicology, ii): work / home and iii): social environment. In doing this, we will be calmer and happier and therefore able to sleep more peacefully, without ruminating.
There are many other ways to improve sleep, some of which are also in the Toolkit, such as exercise, which we will discuss next week. We share many tips on how to improve sleep on our Getaways. Three of them are as follows:
Forming a healthy wind-down routine, at least an hour before bed, and this may include meditation, reading, yoga or taking a bath.
Exposure to sunlight first thing in the morning will help regulate your circadian rhythm of melatonin production, which will help you sleep at night. It can also help improve sleep inertia, that groggy feeling after a poor night of sleep.
Exercise helps with sleep, and also specifically helps to improve brain fog, as it triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which supports growth and maintenance of neural and brain connections.
Quick fix
As we mentioned, the great thing about sleep is that it’s not just a foundation block for good mental health. It can also be a quick fix if you’re feeling low. It forms one of our COMMONSENSES approaches to good mental health, as a way to quickly improve our mood. We go into the remainder of the acronym on the Getaways. A quick nap can do wonders for your mental and physical resilience. Just make sure it is the right length for you, so that you wake up feeling refreshed. The SleepFoundation.org recommend nap intervals of between 20-30 minutes. Napping any longer can allow your body to slip into deep sleep, which will leave you feeling groggy when you wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle. Why not try it and see what works best for you?
More reading
If you found this useful and would like to learn more, I can thoroughly recommend a book by Matthew Walker called ‘Why We Sleep.’ It goes deeper into the role of sleep, its importance and how we can help ourselves to sleep more soundly.
Coming up
Next week we will discuss the next important tool in our Toolkit: Exercise.
Until then, well wishes,
Andie. x
(1) Insomnia as a predictor of depression: A meta-analytic evaluation of longitudinal epidemiological studies, Baglioni et al, Journal of Affective Disorders, Vol. 135, Issues 1–3, Dec 2011, Pages 10-19
(2) https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/2022/06/29/yougov-sleep-study-part-one-sleeping-patterns, YouGov Sleep Study of 2,512 British adults (16 years old plus), Feb 22