This article is a guide to Andrew Huberman’s episode on mental health, which I recommend listening to so that you can understand these concepts more deeply. In this article, you will learn about the six pillars of good mental health and how to apply them to your everyday life.
We all know that it is important to work on our physical health, but what often gets neglected is our mental health. Right now it is crucial that each one of us makes a daily effort to enhance our mental health because we are experiencing a global mental health crisis.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the “global prevalence of anxiety and depression” increased by a staggering 25 percent in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. You almost certainly know someone who has been affected by some sort of mental health illness.
The best thing you can do to help with this global problem is to get your mental health in good shape. Doing so will allow you to help others who are struggling with their own mental health issues.
Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, is doing his part to assist with this crisis by offering scientifically proven and zero-cost approaches to improving your mental health.
He released an episode on mental health titled Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood and Mental Health. In the episode, Huberman provides you with a mental health toolkit that you can immediately use to improve your mental health. The toolkit includes what he calls the “big six pillars” of good mental health and self-care.
“It’s important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood, given our life circumstances, and to have the best possible mental health, given our life circumstances, and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time,” Huberman said, “that we have to pay attention to what I’m referring to here as the big six or the Six Pillars of mental health.”
The Six Pillars of Mental Health
He considers this a “necessary list, but not sufficient,” meaning we all need to work on these six things every day, but we also need to do things like talking with licensed professional therapists and psychiatrists, practicing mindfulness and gratitude, and journaling our thoughts and emotions to name a few self-care habits. Beyond the six pillars, Huberman touches on how to improve relationships with yourself and others and better understand oneself.
Sleep
The first and most important pillar to good mental health is sleep. We all should strive to get six to eight hours of sleep each night. It’s okay if some nights you get less, but it’s best for your physical and mental health to stay in the window of six to eight hours each night.
There are a ton of negative effects from a lack of sleep including difficulty concentrating, weight gain, weakened immunity, risk for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, memory loss, low sex drive, and increased risk of driving accidents.
To put it another way, everything in your life improves with good sleep and without it everything diminishes.
Huberman relates our relationship with sleep to exercise, in that we will need to work on getting better sleep every day for the rest of our lives.
“A really good way to think about sleep is that sleep, much like physical fitness, is something that we have to constantly be working on,” he said. “It’s not the sort of thing where you can get a great night’s sleep one night and then the next night just let all the protocols go and expect to get a great night’s sleep.”
Here are some ways to improve your sleep:
- Expose yourself to bright light, ideally sunlight, first thing in the morning.
- Exercise for 20 minutes a day
- Take a warm shower an hour before bed
- Avoid sugary snacks before bed
- Cut off caffeine intake 10-12 hours before bed
- Dim your lights and avoid screentime an hour before bed
- Keep phones and TV out of the bedroom
- Set a bedtime alarm
- Keep your bedroom cool and dark
- Read a book before bed
Keep a consistent sleep routine: +- 1 hour
To increase your chances of getting consistent and quality sleep, Huberman suggests that you go to bed at more or less the same time each night and wake up at more or less the same time each morning.
“This turns out to be really important for regulating mood and mental health and indeed for improving your overall levels of sleep getting the optimum amounts of slow wave sleep, aka deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep,” he said.
He says to try and get to sleep within plus or minus one hour of your regular bedtime. So if you normally go to sleep at 10 pm, your sleep window would be between 9 pm and 11 pm. You don’t have to strictly follow this rule every night. Of course, there will be occasions where you will want to stay up later, for example at a wedding, or maybe an emergency happens where you can’t get to bed at your normal time. That’s ok. The plus or minus one-hour rule is a good target to shoot for on most nights if your goal is to get consistent, quality sleep.
Light/Darkness
The second pillar to good mental health is light and darkness. It turns out that getting bright light in your eyes first thing in the morning, as well as exposing yourself to six to eight hours of darkness throughout the day plays a major role in your mental health.
Sunlight
“Your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously from getting morning sunlight in your eyes,” Huberman said.
Viewing sunlight first thing in the morning sets into motion a cascade of positive effects, including:
- Resetting your circadian rhythm or sleep cycle, improving your sleep
- Boosts your mood
- Increases your focus and alertness
Huberman’s guide to viewing sunlight:
- Get outside immediately after waking up to view sunlight
- Strive to get 10 minutes of sunlight on non-overcast days
- Strive to get 20-30 minutes of sunlight on overcast days
- “There’s far more photons, light energy, coming through that cloud cover, even in the darkest mornings and later than there are at night in those dark winters. So get that light in your eyes. Do it as consistently as possible.”
- Viewing sunlight through windows and windshields doesn’t work
- “Windows and windshields filter out the relevant wavelengths of light that you want to get directly onto your retina.”
- You don’t have to stare at the sun, just look near it
- You don’t need to wear sunglasses to view morning sunlight
- Afternoon and evening sun exposure is important
- “Just get as much light in your eyes ideally from sunlight throughout the day, as is safe for you meaning where you’re not getting sunburned and you’re not damaging your retina.”
Light Therapy Lamp
If you can’t view sunlight in the morning, Huberman says your next best option is to use a light therapy lamp or a season affective disorder lamp.
“If you can’t get sunlight, you might think about investing in one of those sad lamps,” he said. “Those sad lamps aren’t as good as sunlight but they are the next best thing if you really can’t get sunlight on a consistent basis.”
These lamps are relatively inexpensive, going for $20-$60 on Amazon. You will want to make sure that the lamp emits 10,000 lux of light. If you are interested in purchasing a SAD lamp, just search “light therapy lamp for seasonal depression.”
Darkness
Huberman referenced a new study published in the scientific journal Nature that shows that darkness is also beneficial for mood and mental health outcomes.
“Darkness at night, that is avoiding lights, not just bright lights, but light for up to eight hours at certain periods of your 24-hour circadian cycle,” he said, “has been correlated with improved mental health outcomes and indeed, has been shown to significantly offset certain negative mental health outcomes.”
So not only should we strive to get sunlight throughout the day, we need to make sure that we get 6-8 hours of total darkness. This of course is achieved during sleep, but you need to make sure that your sleep environment is absent of all forms of light. That means keeping the TV and phones off. You may even want to get rid of all devices that emit any form of light because the smallest amount of light exposure has been shown to interrupt sleep.
Movement
The third pillar to improving your mental health is movement or exercise. It is well known that physical exercise works in concert with mental health, but how much exercise should you get and what kinds of exercise should you include in your routine?
Zone 2 Cardio
Huberman says we should strive to get 180-220 minutes of zone 2 cardio each week. That’s roughly 25-30 minutes of exercise each day. He describes this type of exercise as, “Movement where you can hold a conversation but if increased a bit you would no longer be able to hold that conversation.”
You can achieve zone 2 cardio through brisk walking, jogging, elliptical work, hiking, etc.
Increase Heart Rate
Huberman says that it’s also important that we engage in some kind of physical fitness that increases our heart rate at least once per week.
“We should get our heart rate very high at least once a week doing some sort of movement that say for you so that could be running or cycling or swimming or Pilates,” Huberman said.
This type of exercise could be done by raising the speed and intensity of a run, doing high-intensity interval training (HIIT), or jumping rope.
Resistance Training
In addition to cardio exercise, it’s also beneficial for both our physical and mental health to mix in resistance training, whether that be weight lifting, bodyweight exercises, or resistance band training. Huberman says to shoot for 6-10 sets per muscle group each week.
Nutrition
The fourth pillar of good mental health is nutrition. As the old adage goes “you are what you eat.” The better quality food you put into your body, the better you are going to look and feel, but it goes beyond just that.
“As we all know, quality nutrition influences of course our physical health,” Huberman said. “But also our mental health and our cognitive functioning, our memory, our ability to learn new things and to focus and we know that one of the most important features of high-quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals.”
Although Huberman doesn’t go into specifics in the episode (due to the abundance of diet plans available and the fierce debate between them), he says that the majority of our food intake should come from quality calories.
“Regardless of whether or not you’re vegan, omnivore, carnivore or keto or whatever, everybody needs to consume sufficient amounts but not excess amounts of quality calories per day.”
He defines quality calories as food that is non-processed or minimally processed food.
“These will be foods that you’re going to need to prepare or foods that would perish over time, he said. “These are not the sorts of foods that live in boxes and cans and other packages that would allow them to live on the shelves forever and ever.”
Social Connection
The fifth pillar of good mental health is our social connection. The people we spend time with can have a positive or negative impact on our mood and overall well-being.
“We need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside and through our own actions, choices, and thoughts,” he said. “But also through interaction with other nervous systems.”
In this part of the episode, Huberman briefly summarizes a concept he previously discussed in an episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett about taxing, neutral, and net-saving interactions.
“While we don’t always have as much control over which social interactions or work interactions we have to engage in, we should really strive to understand, and indeed pay some serious attention to whether or not certain types of social interactions are what she referred to as net savings, neutral, or taxing right certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people,” Huberman said.
Taxing interactions: Interactions that leave us stressed and cause us to ruminate afterward, potentially leading to poor sleep.
Neutral interactions: Interactions that don’t have much of an effect, positive or negative.
Net Saving interactions: Interactions that are relaxing, boost our mood and give us energy.
Huberman says to take 10 minutes to think about the people and groups you spend most of your time with, this could be in person or online, and categorize each interaction as either taxing, neutral, or net savings.
The key takeaway is that we should strive to spend more time with people who make us feel good and energize us and less time with energy vampires who drain us of our mental and physical resources.
Stress Control
The sixth and final pillar of good mental health is stress control. Stress is going to happen in life, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. So it’s important that we develop tools to better help us manage it when it arrives.
“I’m not here to tell you that stress is bad for you,” he said. “What I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time”
Huberman provides two tools that are effective in helping you manage stress and increase your stress threshold.
Physiological Sigh
The first is what he calls a “real-time” tool, which is a breathing technique called the physiological sigh. It’s an effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real-time.
How the physiological sigh works:
- Inhale deeply through your nose
- Take one quick additional inhale at the top to expand your lungs.
- Exhale slowly through your mouth.
“Just one physiological side is effective in bringing down one’s level of stress significantly enough that you don’t need to do it again,” he said.
This technique can be used to help you calm down before a speaking engagement or as a way to help with anxiety or panic attacks.
Deliberate Cold-Water Exposure
The second tool for dealing with stress is deliberate cold-water exposure. The main benefit of taking a cold shower or soaking in an ice bath is to increase your stress threshold or your tolerance for stress.
Cold-water exposure is an effective approach because this tool is readily accessible to just about everyone and only takes about a minute to achieve the desired results.
“The best way to do this, because it works the first time and every time and is also zero cost – in fact, it will save you money – is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment”
Exposing yourself to cold water puts your body into stress mode by elevating your levels of adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine. Doing so forces you to calm yourself down in real-time. The more you do this, the better you will get at slowing your breathing and heart rate down, so that when stress inevitably does happen you will be better prepared to handle it.
Huberman recommends that you take a cold shower for 60 seconds a few times per week or even every day as a way to increase your stress threshold.
“For the first 10 or 15 seconds that you get into a cold plunge or a cold shower, you should fully expect yourself to feel stressed and for your breathing to accelerate,” he said. “And then your goal is to try and anchor control your breathing in that stressful environment.”
He uses the analogy of driving in a snowstorm to show the benefits of cold-water exposure.
“Learning how to drive in a snowstorm, you would never elect to do that but once you do it a few times you feel more comfortable in those extreme conditions. So that’s really what raising your stress threshold is all about.”
Final Thoughts
Andrew Huberman’s six pillars of good mental health that we all should strive to accomplish each day include sleep, light and darkness, movement, nutrition, social connection, and stress control.
Remember, that these six areas of physical and mental health are “necessary, but not sufficient.” If you want to have the best possible mental health, there is more you can do including therapy, mindfulness, journaling, and practicing gratitude.
If you learned something from this article, that’s great, however, I encourage you to check out the episode for yourself, because you will be able to understand these concepts better.
As always, you got this!
