6 Ways to Support Mental Health During a Chronic Disease Journey
When living with chronic disease, it’s natural for your mental health and overall mood to suffer as a result. During such a challenging and confronting time, it can take an immense amount of strength to find your sense of optimism. To naturally support mental health during times like these, we must pay attention to the ‘The Big Six’, otherwise known as the six basic pillars of mental health. By making a conscious effort to support yourself in this way, you will notice a huge difference to your quality of life, mood and mental wellbeing. Improved mental health lays the groundwork to remove stressors from your internal environment and welcome healing in.
Sleep & Sleep Routine
Deep sleep is vitally restorative for the body. The body performs a ‘clean up and repair’ of our cells during sleep. This encourages tissue growth, which allows healing and restoration to occur. An average human requires between 6-8 hours per night. Those suffering with illness are going to need more, ideally between 9-10 hours… even as much as 12 hours of sleep per night depending on individual circumstances.
Be intentional with striving to create a consistent sleep routine and wind-down environment that supports a quality night’s sleep. To support our circadian rhythm, we should strive to get to sleep at more or less the same time each night, and rise more or less the same time each morning. This nightly health investment is critical for regulating mood and to support mental health, which improves sleep levels and ultimately boosts energy, mood and focus throughout the day.
Light, Sunlight
Receive sunlight in the eyes as early as possible after waking. Morning sunlight exposure plays a crucial role in regulating our sleep-wake cycle and has a profound impact on our circadian rhythm, influencing hormone production and an improved sleep cycle. It also provides essential vitamin D, strengthens the immune system, reduces stress, and supports mental health.
For those living in countries where sunlight first thing is not always accessible, you can still receive its benefits through cloud cover. SAD lamps or light therapy boxes are also incredibly popular in the northern hemisphere, as it mimics the natural cycle of outdoor light.
Movement
Daily movement is another integral factor for mood enhancement and positive wellbeing. It’s also shown to be helpful in dis-ease reversal and healing. Even those who have limited motion because of injury or illness can still do some exercise to improve health and vitality. The muscles and joints need gentle movement and various pressures to help the cells function and allow a smoother flow of nutrients into the cells and conversely, the removal of toxins from the cells to maintain homeostasis. Exercising benefits the heart and lungs which improves blood circulation and oxygen utilisation.
Something as simple as taking a walk in nature helps to raise our vibration because we are gently exercising the heart, which is a complex muscle. Exercising the lungs, the muscles, the bones and the joints; the tissues that make up every organ in our body are all getting a workout just by taking a regular walk.
Nutrition
Quality nutrition influences our physical health but also our mental health and cognitive function, our memory, focus and ability to absorb new information. For optimum support, our bodies require vitamins and minerals from high quality sources; probiotics, prebiotics and fibre to support basically every cellular function in our body, including the gut microbiome. Whatever dietary advice you choose to follow, your food should ideally be non-processed and minimally processed. In other words, foods you need to prepare.
We currently have guest speaker Emmie of Hummingbird Naturopath delivering nutrition workshops that explore gut health, immune support, foods for energy and so much more, for those seeking further nutritional guidance and support. Please click here to keep an eye out or register for any upcoming workshops.
Social Connection
Limit the amount of social interactions that feel taxing or cause stress. This is especially important for those moving through a journey with chronic disease. We can support our nervous systems internally through our actions, choices and thoughts, but we can also help to regulate from the outside through our interaction with other people’s nervous systems. This might feel difficult to control sometimes, but we should really strive to take note of social interactions that make us feel stressed… thus leading to negative emotions, energy depletion and elevated levels of autonomic arousal.
On the flip side, surrounding yourself with the right community can regulate our nervous systems in ways that cause physiological changes and make us feel happier and more relaxed. Such interactions resource us to feel more capable, and provide us with a lasting elevated mood and improved mental health even after the interaction is over.
Stress Control
Life is filled with stressors, it’s an unavoidable part of life. But living in a constant state of stress has very damaging effects on the body, with studies showing the influence chronic stress has on illness and disease. There are plenty of accessible stress management techniques you can utilise such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), meditation, gratitude practice and natural walking, all of which we can advise on at the centre. Breathwork is also a powerful physiological way to instantly induce a state of calm and support mental health… e.g. take a deep inhale through the nose, followed by a second brief and sharper inhale through the nose, then release a long exhale through the mouth.
‘The Big Six’ or ‘six pillars of mental health’ is a phrase coined by Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University. He is known for his research on the neural mechanisms that underlie various aspects of human behaviour, such as stress, sleep, and vision. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of the brain and its functions.