Key Takeaways
Background stress can be drastically reduced by optimizing your home environment – this means get rid of clutter, take full advantage of available natural light and add houseplants.
Using tools of the nervous system (such as ‘box breathing’ and daily log activities), anxiety can be processed and mental debris can be cleared.
Nutritional psychiatry validates the direct link between an optimized gut microbiome and right levels of serotonin and well balanced moods.
Daily walks, somatic movement and stretching helps to release negative hormones and eliminate muscle tension, and doesn’t need the gym.
Digital bedtime and sleep hygiene protocols are sacred trade-offs for emotional balance and cognitive replenishment.
Intro
Living in the fast-paced, hyper-connected modern world, this is the new normal where chronic stress, anxiety and emotional exhaustion are a reality of life. We’re constantly dealing with busy careers, a constant onslaught of digital distractions, money concerns, and social expectations while at the expense of our mental health. In times of overload, our impulse is often to pursue outside help – expensive therapies, pharmaceuticals or even to flee and retreat from reality.
While medical interventions are essential in the clinical setting, there are many powerful, available interventions that can be utilized within the home. Retreat, big lifestyle changes, and a peace in the mountains aren’t always necessary.
Making sense of mental health and environment in the home
Mental health is not just the lack of a mental health condition; it is a positive state of emotional, psychological and social health. It influences our thoughts, emotions, behaviour, coping stress, interpersonal relationships, and decisions.
Your house truly is the safe place of your ideas. Unfortunately, many modern homes are greater nursery’s of stress than they are sanctums sanctorum for recovery. All of those are major clues that if you have all of them, your mental state may be suffering. Creating a healing space within yourself is the first step in natural healing.
The first phase consists of what you may do to make your life situation easier and improve mental clarity.
Phase 1 – Optimizing Your Living Environment for Mental Clarity:
The outside world greatly affects the inside world. When your home is chaotic, cluttered and dark, your nervous system will believe that it’s disorganized as background stress.
2. The Benefits of a Clean Environment
Physical clutter = cognitive overload. Facing piles of laundry to fold, dishes to wash and paperwork to sort while your eyes are processing it all day will make your brain’s visual cortex over work while doing these tasks and needlessly use up your mental energy and promote cortisol.
Action: Work for 15 minutes/day on cleaning up one surface – a desk, a kitchen counter, a bedside table. As you clear away the clutter, you feel empowered, satisfied and at ease right away physically, which translates to mental empowerment, satisfaction and calm.
This module empowers learners to appreciate a time study analysis. This module provides learners with the ability to value a time study analysis.
Constant dazzling lights and dark rooms fool the mind into maintaining a constant state of sluggishness or anxiety, thus affecting the body’s natural timing and reducing serotonin levels.
Action: 1) Open blinds & curtains first thing in the morning to bring in natural sunlight. When your skin is exposed to sunlight, your brain sends a message to the body to decrease melatonin and increase serotonin, which creates great mood, energy and emotional balance during the day.
Class 3 – Biophilic Design (Houseplants)
This is a natural evolutionary predisposition to feel affinity towards nature – and it’s who we are. There have been studies after studies which have revealed that indoor plants can alleviate stress, lower blood pressure and improve mood.
Do: Bring easy-to-care plants such as snake plants, or inky black, or peace lilies to your desk and home. Be in touch with the “garden” and your energy is grounded and brought a little more of nature indoors.
Phase 3: How it feels around your mind in everyday life.
Every day you need to nourish your body and move it, every day you need to engage in deliberate activities to cope with stress and create emotional strength.
Mindful Breathing and Nervous System Regulation
Storey is providing this workshop at no cost. Storey is offering this workshop for free.
We unconsciously breathe shallowly and quickly when we’re feeling anxious or stressed to let our sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) know to remain engaged. This response can be manually set using breathwork.
Technique: Box Breathing- 4 second inhale, 4 second breath hold, 4 second exhale, 4 second breath hold. This exercise can be done at home for a few minutes at a time and restores your vagus nerve, slows down your heart rate and will help you to relax immediately.
Brain Dumping and journaling are two powerful processes!
When anxiety doesn’t exist, it lives in theory. Worrying thoughts, when they invade your mind without any control, are like a huge elephant.
Technique: Do a daily “brain dump. Take 10 minutes with pen and paper and jot down everything that enters your mind that you are annoyed by, frustrated with, anxious about, or that is cluttered; don’t filter or edit anything. What you have in your mind is now in the written word and can now be manipulated like a small problem to solve.
Digital Fasting and Screen Boundaries
The time that an average user spends tucking through channels of social media to make comparisons, incite rage, and induce “dopamine fatigue” is measured in hours. An overload of information and negativity cooks up your nervousness and shortens your attention span.
Habit: Set aside a time before bed for “Digital Time-out” at home. One hour prior to sleep, make sure all work computers, tablets and social media feeds are turned off. Consider refrains from late night scrolling and instead do something calming like reading a book, listening to music or journaling.
Access to the most cutting-edge nutritional psychiatric program available in the world today:
Phase 3: Nutritional Psychiatry (Food as Mood Medicine).
Your diet drastically affects your brain chemistry. The gut–brain axis is an amazing system of communication between the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system. Your gut produces more than 90% of the serotonin that transmits signals to your body regarding your mood, your sleep and your happiness.
The first category is foods for mental health.
The first are foods that promote mental health.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids: These fatty acids found in fatty fish like salmon, sardines, walnuts and chia seeds help to decrease inflammation in the brain and help to support neurotransmitter function.
Complex Carbohydrates: Certain foods including oats, quinoa and sweet potatoes keep blood sugar spikes low to maintain a stable serotonin level.
Soured delicious foods: Yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut and kimchi contain beneficial probiotics which impact directly on the gut-brain axis.
2. Things That Bring You Down
Excess Caffeine: The caffeine in coffee gives a quick hit of energy, and if over consumed can cause the body to react like it does when it is undergoing a panic attack—possibly a racing heart, jitters, and too much cortisol, and all of these are associated with anxiety symptoms.
Processed Sugar and Refined Carbs: Because they induce a huge spike in blood sugar that crashes too soon, resulting in feeling irritable, brain fog, and depressive dips.
The last phase involves practicing movements and somatic release at home.
Emotions or mental health is not a strictly mental process as emotions are stored in the body where you find muscular tension, trapped stress hormones. Exercise doesn’t have to be costly gym time to get you moving and shedding emotional baggage.
1. At-Home Movement Practices
Yoga or Stretching: Perform some gentle evening stretching or restorative yoga to stretch out areas where physical stress tends to build up in the hip flexors, shoulders and jaw muscles.
Living Room Dance Breaks: If you delight in putting your favorite upbeat tunes on the stereo and dancing away for three minutes, you’ve got a powerful somatic release that would clear your body of cortisol and fill your brain with endorphin and dopamine.
Mindful Walking: If you have a backyard or a neighborhood nearby, create a daily 20-minute walk without your cell phone. Just concentrate on the footwork and the noises that are around you.
Phase 5: Sleep Hygiene for Restorative Sleep
One of the leading causes of anxiety, emotional ups and downs, and cognitive impairments is sleep deprivation. Accordingly, when you are sleep deprived, your emotional brain (amygdala) is allowed to run amok, without being held back by your logical brain (prefrontal cortex).
Constructing a refuge for sleep.
Sleep Bedroom Cool and Dark: Maintain the bedroom temperature at approximately 18°C (65°F) and ensure there are no LED stand-by lights on electronics in the bedroom.
Go To Bed On Time: Have a consistent bedtime and waking time daily; even on the weekend, to help set your internal time clock.
Wind-Down Rituals: establish a daily bedtime routine, like taking a warm bath, having chamomile tea or reading, as a signal to your nervous system that the day has passed.
Summary
Knowing how to maintain natural health with regard to mental health enables you to take control of your psychological health. You don’t need elaborate interventions to create true emotional resilience; rather, it is built over time, one day at a time, with small increments of change.
When you detoxify your physical space, use breath work to calm your nervous system, feed your gut-brain connection, move your body, and ensure you sleep well, you put yourself into an extra strong position to stay peaceful. Be kind to yourself, start taking little steps and make your home a haven for your mind.
