Hey, welcome back. All right, resilience. The whole idea of resilience is trying to keep yourself strong, maybe even before the stress hits. What are things you can do to just make yourself more ready to deal with the negative things that life throws at you? I want to continue on that theme a little bit, adding some of the psychology perspective to what Heather has said. But as you'll see, it all comes together and makes perfect sense altogether. Foundations of mental health, that's what I want to talk about here, and I want to be clear. This is just what I'm going to talk about are some lifestyle things that if you get into these certain habits, you are going to be insulated. You are going to have a certain resilience, a certain ability to cope with negative events in your life that will be more than the average person will have. Let's just get right into it. I mean, the first thing to realize is that we are machines, we are electrochemical machines. Literally, the food we eat comes in and fuels our body. That is used to support all of the sending of messages through biological and electrical signals all through the body. Like every machine, if you have a car, and you want it tuned up, you want to make sure the oil levels are right and everything is great. When you do service your car and maintain it well, everything runs smoothly, and that car is ready to handle a challenge. But if you allow your car to get a little decrepit, the repairs aren't perfectly done, then it's more susceptible to damage, especially if you say take that car on a bumpy road. It's more likely to show cracks, so to speak. It's the same idea with our machine, our body, that if we do some basic things, we can have it running smoothly. If our body is running smoothly and our mind is running smoothly, our brain, then we're better able to take on the challenges of life. I'm going to stay at that level in this lecture, and just talk about what we're going to call the basics. What are the basics? This is the foundations of mental health. The first basic is the fuel. If you think of a car, you have different grades of fuel you can put in your car. What they don't give you at the gas station is a really bad grade of fuel that's going to cause trouble for your cars. But we do that in grocery stores. We have high fat, high sugar, there are all of these foods in grocery stores that will work against your physical and mental health. Unlike a gas station where there's not really a wrong choice, in a grocery store, there is a wrong choice. If you can learn a little bit about the right and the wrong choices, the foods that really help our body stay strong, slow down aging effects, keep us at a weight that's healthy, those foods, and I've got fruits and vegetables, and stuff shown here. But those foods, if we can start bringing them into our diet, and I'm going to talk about a little principle in a little while about focusing on the positive instead of the negative. Sometimes you want to say, "Oh, I got to stop eating this, stop eating that, stop eating that." One of the things I would suggest is rather than that mindset, start bringing things in, add things. I'm going to include more avocados, I'm going to include more. Find those healthy foods and buy those, and eat those. As long as you make a commitment to eat those, there's going to be less room in your stomach for the other stuff. Focus on making sure you're eating good things, and you'll probably naturally find that you'll eat less bad things when that happens. But put the focus on your health, on the positive. Yeah, find out what those good foods are and eat more of them. That's a good start. The other really important thing is aerobic exercise. Typically it's defined as getting your heart rate above resting level for at least twenty minutes, and doing that at least three times a week. We don't completely understand why exercise is beneficial as it is, but there are a lot of studies now showing that aerobic exercise leads to obviously a healthier body, but also mental health, mental well-being. People who engage in regular exercise are less prone to mental issues and generally are resilient. They're ready to handle the challenges a little bit more. Then the last one I got to mention and talk about a little bit more is good sleep. I'm going to talk about this from two angles. But these are very important things to talk about. First of all, let's just talk about what can you do to get good sleep or what should you not do? What you should not do too close to bedtime is have coffee or tea, or alcohol, or cigarettes. In fact, you should try not to drink too much in the couple hours before bedtime, because for one thing, that makes you have to get up in the middle of the night. If you drink less, you're less likely to get up, which means you're more likely to sleep through the night, which is great. Don't eat too much, don't watch horror movies or action movies, don't play with your gadgets. You should have no TVs, no technology in the bedroom at all. Bedroom should be a place where you're going to relax. Then the bottom says hard training. You shouldn't do some heavy workout just before bed because I keep your body upright and you want your body to relax a little bit. The things you could do or think about doing to enhance your night's sleep is to take a walk, be in a cooler temperature, have your room a little bit cooler temperature. People sleep better at a cooler temperature, 16-19 degrees Celsius. For those of you still using Fahrenheit, that would be maybe 65 degrees, imagine something like that. Do a little bit of light reading, have air in your room, if possible. Regimen of the day. I'm going to get to that one. Meditation, I'm going to talk about something called guided relaxation. It's the same idea in a slightly different form. But I'm going to talk about those a lot. Why is sleep so important? It's not so much that sleep gives you mental health as it is, that lack of sleep makes everything worse. Okay? If you have problems in your life, things that are coming up, if you haven't slept well, you're just not ready to handle those well. A good night's sleep has you at your best, anything less has you less, and so that's why we really want a good night's sleep. Some of these things can help, but the most important thing you can do to have a good night's sleep well, remember our schedule, live by a schedule at least Monday through Friday, wake up at the same time every day, try to eat your meals at the same time throughout the day and go to bed at the same time every day. This is the thing, by the way, that comes natural to dog owners because dogs make us fit their schedule right when they want to go for a walk, when they want to eat, dogs are very regimented, very routine, that's how they like to live, and dog owners tend to get pushed that way by their dogs. You know what? Dog owners also tend to be happier and they tend to be more mentally resilient, and so we can take that piece of that from dog ownership, that idea of living according to a schedule. What that does is it sinks up your your biology, what we call your circadian rhythms, it sinks that up with your life. If you go to bed at the same time, let's say you go to bed at 11:00PM every night, your body starts to know that and it starts to prepare your body for sleep ahead of time, releasing melatonin and things like that, so that when you do go to sleep, your body is expecting you to go to sleep and is ready for it, so if you allow your body to predict when you want to wake up and when you want to go to sleep, it will work with you and make that all easier, but if you start doing random things, waking up at different times, going to bed at different times, now your body doesn't know what you're going to do and now you're working against your body, and so your body might be alert when you want to go to sleep, etc, so this structure is really important, that's where I'm imagining the schedule both to give you that good night's sleep, and also, of course, we can come back to this notion of scheduling in these positive medicinal sorts of behaviors. Right, and so I really recommend you take this seriously. If you can live according to this sort of structure, then that's great. Notice something, by the way, I threw in here concert night. This is something my wife and I do on Friday nights. We choose a live concert from YouTube or Quello or something like that, and we pick a band, but you know what? We pick that band on Monday and from Monday through Friday, we look forward to that event, we actually get silly, we push our chairs back and we stand up like we're at a real concert, we try to make it as much like a real concert as we can, and so we look forward to that event, that's the anticipation. This is just an example of how you can now bring together some of the things we've talked about in order to have a really structured approach to keeping yourself resilient and mentally healthy. Cool. All right. I may take off from that the next. Actually, not quite done yet. I just thought that, I always like to talk about these things, both on the personal level, things you can do as an individual to help yourself, but also to think about it at an institutional level. What could an institution do? I think some of what I talked about in this video could be a challenge for institutions. I've heard, I'm not part of the health care business myself, but I've heard that often people are working long shifts, certain days, no shifts, other days, and that the shift they're working may vary across the week, that thing is really working against everything I just described, it's making it hard for those people in the system to synchronize according to some sort of schedule, so, what would I recommend to an institution? Well, to the extent it's possible, if you can give people regular shifts of a regular amount of time, I have no idea how crazy of an ask that is, but this is just the psychology geek saying if I were designing a health care system, I would try to let people have very regular shifts that were the same period of time every day and a reasonable period of time, like an eight hour shift, and that allows them to build their life around that. I would also, you know, other things to note, have some healthy foods around. If you have a respite center or something, try to have some healthy foods around there. If you can give opportunities for aerobic activity, if it's possible to have access to a gym or something like that, and maybe if you can make that available to your to the people that are working within the hospital, anything you can do to support a healthier lifestyle on the part of your employees, the more resilient they will be. I just wanted to add that at the end, get that institutional perspective and give you that to think about as well. Okay. Thank you.
