Fit for Life: Bodily Health for Mental Health
How to take care of our bodies to take care of our minds
May is mental health awareness month, and while it’s easy to only think of mental health as being this abstract thing, it is interconnected with our physical health. While you might see articles, news stories or social media posts regarding open discussions about mental health, coping mechanisms and medications, I think a great service we can provide ourselves is to think about how the health of our bodies affects the health of our minds, and what things we already know to help our bodies can help our minds.
As always, your health is unique to you, and sometimes generally accepted ideas of health won’t apply to individuals; this means you should always consult either your doctor or a nutritionist before making major lifestyle changes to your activity or diet.
Exercise can help improve your mental health. The goal would be about 150 minutes a week, and this can be spread out in 10-15 minute batches of walking, or it could be in 30-45 minute batches of exercise. Exercising this frequently each week will help boost your mood and reduce anxiety. Is there a best exercise for mental health? It all is good, but generally aerobic exercises such as walking and running will give you the biggest mental health boost.
Diet is another part of how the physical affects the mental. It is so hard for our minds to function when our bodies are hurting, so it’s important to maintain a diet filled with protein and fiber, as well as one low in sugar and processed foods, to help reduce inflammation, maintain blood sugar and blood pressure, and stop potential health issues from flaring up.
And, of course, sleep is so important to mental health, because not only can sleeping enough improve mental health, sleeping too little can actively harm your mental health. Sleep helps our brains regulate our emotions, helps us maintain memories and a sense of clarity (as opposed to brain fog), and in relation to the other subjects in this article, sleep can help us regulate our digestive feelings of satiety and hunger. Everyone has different sleep needs, but the general range is 7-9 hours, leaning toward that higher amount.
To get the benefits of sleep, consistency and quality are key. You can’t just get good sleep on the weekends and expect to see results, and you can’t have restless sleep and expect to see good results.
Our mental health is so important to the quality of our lives, and when we are suffering, it can feel impossible to find solutions sometimes. This is so important to make sure we’re taking care of our bodies. Sometimes, when we’re having issues with our moods or dispositions, it’s valuable to pause and think about ways we might be neglecting our bodies. It might not make our issues go away entirely, but it can help us get to a spot where the problems affecting our mind are far easier to manage.
