Health: Body and Mind

We cannot reach our highest potential without good health, both in the body and mind. This is true at a societal and individual level, for when people are not in good physical or mental shape, happiness, productivity, and innovation suffer.

The discouraging yet exciting piece of this is that our knowledge of how our bodies, and especially our minds, actually work is still extremely nascent. Discouraging since so many people suffer every day due to misunderstood diseases. Exciting since there is so much left to be discovered and a much more interesting understanding of ourselves is yet to come.

Despite our lack of understanding, there are some things we do have a firm grasp of. With the focus of this series being about humanity’s goals — specifically happiness — I will highlight a few ways in which health can help us in that pursuit.

The Body-Mind Balance

Few people appreciate the importance of the body-mind balance. Whatsmore, the body-mind balance is one of the most significant factors in human well-being and happiness.

Now, the “body-mind balance” isn’t an official term, but it embodies the idea of what experts would call psychosomatic medicine. At its core, it is the study of how mental states and emotions affect physical health, and how physical health affects mental states and emotions. It is a system of give and take, a constant feedback loop between the body and mind, hence the term body-mind balance.

When we are in a good mental state, filled with optimism, confidence, and contentment, our bodies take notice. Happier individuals have been shown to have less nerve pain, healthy blood pressure, balanced hormone levels, and less plack buildup in the arteries. You might be thinking that the reason those people are happy is because they didn’t have those health issues in the first place, but that is actually not the case.

Great evidence of this came from an experiment conducted by scientists in 1978. The researchers wanted to see how cholesterol and blood pressure in rabbits were affected by different diets. The researchers ran a rigorous experiment with good controls and an ample sample size but saw some unexplainable results: One group of rabbits were statistically healthier on all factors, despite having had the same mix of diet types.

After searching high and low for a cause, they eventually came to find what could be the only explanation. The group of rabbits that performed so well were fed by a researcher who was particularly kind and loving to the rabbits. She would feed them but also spend a moment petting them and giving them words of love. In turn, this increased happiness and reduced the stress on the rabbits, leading to much better health outcomes. This experiment has been repeated many times with similar results.

This extends to humans as well, with many experiments showing the benefits of healthy mental activities (yoga, meditation, socialization, etc.) on the rest of the body. Unfortunately, this relationship goes the other way as well, with isolation, stress at work, and lack of mental self-care leading to some very poor physical health outcomes.

Thus far, I have only talked about how the mind can affect the body, but there is a myriad of ways the body also affects the mind, including nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Thus, if you strive to operate at top mental capacity, tending to each of these aspects of health is vital. Let’s dive in.

Nutrition

As it relates to the effects of nutrition on mental health, nothing is more important than the brain-gut connection. This is the term used to describe the enteric nervous system (ENS), a bunch of nerves that sit within your gut to help you regulate swallowing, digestion, and bowel movements. It has long been thought that anxiety and depression are the cause of many bowel issues. However, scientists are finding more and more that it is the opposite: bowel issues are causing anxiety and depression.

The vagus nerve, in particular, is the communicator for the gut and ENS back up to the brain. When something is awry in our gut, the vagus nerve can quickly send signals back up to our brain that, in turn, affects our mood. That is why avoiding upsetting foods, eating probiotic foods, getting enough electrolytes, and getting rid of toxins through regular bowel movements have such a big effect on mental health. I am also a big believer in regular fasts for these reasons, but I will write more about that later.

Beyond avoiding foods that upset our gut, we also have to eat foods that sustain our brains. You have to understand that the brain is a big energy consumer in your body. While the brain represents just 2% of a person’s total body weight, it accounts for 20% of the body’s energy use (credit). This makes it paramount to eat foods that provide sustained energy releases so that we don’t go through peaks and troughs of mental energy.

Have you ever had a heavy meal and felt sluggish afterward? Not just in your body, but in your mind? That is because foods high in fats, sugars, and salts might feel good temporarily, but they quickly cause us to go into hibernation mode, crashing after a temporary burn of cheap calories that don’t sustain the brain. Contrast this with a healthy, balanced meal of proteins, carbs, healthy fats, and vegetables, and you’ll get what I mean.

Sleep

Sleep should be an obvious one in terms of its effects on mental health. Every person, and especially new parents, can tell you how a bad night of rest can make you grumpy, groggy, and stressed.

But why do we need sleep? Why couldn’t we just eat more food, get more energy, and keep on running as normal?

The simple answer is that we aren’t sure, but we have a few good guesses. As it relates to its effects on mental health, sleep is the time where we drain out bad emotions from the previous day. Especially during REM sleep, our mind clears the negative emotions held in our limbic system from the prior day, allowing us to start fresh.

The thing about REM sleep though is that it occurs towards the later hours of the night, about 5 to 6 hours into a sleep cycle. This means that teenagers who have to be at school by 7:30am are missing out on critical REM sleep that is vital for brain development. For new parents, it means that REM sleep isn’t reached due to the inability to get deep enough in sleep cycles.

It seems clear that evolution pushed us to sleep as a mechanism to clear emotions and not end up killing each other.

As you likely know, sleep is also critical for memory. Though the mechanics of memory storage are still unclear, scientists have mapped the brain during sleep and seen massive amounts of movement from the short term to the long term memory centers of the brain (as well as many other places). Whether it is memorizing for a test or building muscle memory in sports, sleep is there to rewire and reinforce the brain in the newly trained pattern.

As an interesting aside, it is being found that a lack of sleep over long periods of time is a potential cause, rather than a symptom, of Alzheimer's. Though you may feel fine getting less than 7 hours of sleep each night, the long term effects on mental health and other physical ailments is very concerning.

(For more on this subject, I highly recommend the book “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker)

Exercise

Though health and food trends come and fall out of fashion overnight, the importance of exercise has never changed. As it relates to mental health, exercise releases endorphins. Endorphins interact with the pain receptors in our brains, reducing the perception of pain. They also help to reduce stress, make us more optimistic, and give us a thirst for life. “Runner’s high” is these feelings at their apex.

A further physiological benefit of exercise is building “grit”. By grit I mean the ability to persevere through strenuous or boring activities when in the pursuit of a valuable, long-term goal. By pushing ourselves physically, we build the fortitude needed to push through mentally taxing activities, giving us greater patience and endurance.

Aside from the mental health benefits of exercise, there are the clear physical benefits of lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, better functioning immune systems, and less joint pain (if exercising properly). And of course, all these things feed back into mental health because when we are healthy and feel good, we are happier.

When thinking of human development, you have to realize that we were designed to do physical labor. We weren’t designed to sit between four walls of drywall and type hunched over a keyboard! Through 200,000 years of natural selection, we were built to walk long distances, sprint after prey, and carry large objects. Thus, we operate and feel best with regular physical activity, especially when done outside in nature.

Mental Health

Luckily for those with unavoidable physical ailments, mental health can be addressed separately from physical health. This is done through the assistance of a therapist, social interaction with others, meditation, self-care, and medication.

Despite what some may think, mental health is not as easy as just “cheering up” and “smiling a little”. There a number of things with mental health that are out of our control, including genetics, trauma, and just the stress of life. Luckily, the stigma around mental health issues is going away, and more and more people are starting to get the help they need. Rather than viewing mental health issues as a fundamental character flaw, people are seeing it the same way you would a broken wrist: it requires the proper medical treatment.

Psychedelics is another area of medicine where the stigma is being lifted. Rather than demonizing it, some researchers are seeing the powerful effects it has at helping us rewire our brain in productive ways. In the case of PTSD patients, psychedelics have been shown to rewire the brain to disassociate the pain of a traumatic event and even change the memory itself. Those are powerful and life changing effects that need to be studied more in depth. I am excited to see what comes out of it.

Health as a Goal

If we recognize happiness as a key goal for humanity, we need to acknowledge the role of healthy bodies and minds towards that goal. Poor health has held back too many people from reaching their full potential. And on the flip side, there are many untapped resources of the human body left to be discovered that will give us greater abilities than we ever knew we had access to. Thus, continued medical research and unbiased attitudes towards mental health are crucial in us reaching our goals as a species.

But who knows, perhaps in the near future we will be able to upload our minds into the cloud and we won’t care about our biological forms anymore? More on this in a future article!