Quickstart Guide to Improving Mental Health & Q&A with Dr. Dawn Elise Snipes

Hey there everybody. Well, it appears that YouTube is having some difficulties. I've gotten booted twice. So I am going to try to restart this live presentation and okay, there we go. They are catching up now. So I would like to welcome everybody to today's presentation or meeting for members of the All CEU's education channel. Today we're going to be talking about 10 tips for improving Mental health. As most of you know, it is Mental Health Awareness month. So this entire month I'm going to be focusing on guess what? Improving mental health. We're going to start out by just identifying 10 really simple tips that people can start doing today in order to improve their mental health. The first one is nutrition. Encourage people to download a nutrition journal like Spark People and track their nutrient intake every day. Water, calcium, magnesium, iron, B, vitamins, omega 3s, potassium and vitamin C, D and E are all essential for your body to be able to break down proteins to make neurotransmitters and hormones. You are going to feel like crap if you are eating like crap. That's just the way it is. And I am going to do a short video on 10 easy ways to improve nutrition later in the month. But the first thing you just need to do is get a baseline, see where you're at, see what your nutrient intake looks like and just start becoming more aware. When you are dehydrated, it impairs sleep, it impairs cognition, and it just makes you feel more sluggish, which takes us to sleep. Encourage people to create a sleep routine. Eliminate nicotine two hours before bed, preferably completely. But you know, let's be realistic. Two hours before bed Alcohol. Your blood alcohol level should be zero when you go to bed because alcohol severely impairs sleep quality. Try to eliminate caffeine now here's the one that's really difficult. Try to eliminate caffeine at least eight hours before bed, preferably 12. So try not to have anything caffeinated after about noon at the latest. If you go to sleep at a semi regular time, it takes caffeine a really long time to get out of your system. So if you stop drinking at noon, then that caffeine is still going to be interrupting your sleep or impairing your sleep quality even as late as 10:11 o' clock at night. Don't over hydrate or you're going to be getting up multiple times in the night to pee. But by the same token, like I said, dehydration will contribute to impaired sleep. So it's important to hydrate but Hydrate throughout the day and don't over hydrate, especially right before bed. And pay attention to your ergonomics. Sleep comfortably. Don't sit up. Make sure you're not sleeping where your head is all kinked up. Yes, being the little spoon or the big spoon can be really nice, but a lot of times that does not contribute to good sleeping ergonomics. So when it's actually time to drift off to sleepy land, find a position that supports your head and neck and keeps your spine in alignment. Number three. Use sunlight and bright lights to help set your circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms impact your hunger, your satiation, your whether you're sleepy or not. When you get sleepy and your cortisol levels throughout the day. Getting bright light throughout the day is really important to helping you improve your mood. Additionally, if you go outside doesn't have to be for a long time, five to 10 minutes a day, and get direct sunlight, it increases your vitamin D levels. Vitamin D levels are significantly associated with mood. If you're not getting outside, and I know with the quarantine, a lot of people are not getting outside very much right now, that vitamin D levels are going down to that level where people start experiencing seasonal effective disorder. Get outside. It wakes your brain up, it wakes your body up, and it gives you a little bit of vitamin D exercise. And I'm not talking about going to the gym. A lot of our gyms are still closed. I'm talking about moving your body. It can be vigorous cleaning. It can be taking a walk around the neighborhood, playing with the dog, playing with your kids, something to get your body moving. When we sit still. And if you've had your arm in a sling or in a cast or something before, you know that if you keep joints immobilized or you don't move them much, they get stiff. Think about that old physics principle. A body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. We tend to seize up, for lack of a better term, if we're not moving around much when we do that, we will start to feel achier. Typically, if we're not moving around much, we also probably don't have very good ergonomics. So we're going to experience more pain. It's important to move. Yoga is good, even stretching, anything to make sure that those muscles are staying loose and limber. Exercise also increases oxygen. When you're moving your body, you slightly increase your heart rate or more, which increases your oxygenation. That helps you have more energy. It helps your Immune system. It helps your muscles and tissues repair. More oxygen's a good thing. And if you exercise intensely enough, you can even increase endorphins and serotonin. On the other hand, if you exercise at a really low level, at a really moderate level, like a gentle walk, that actually reduces cortisol levels. They found that exercising at 40 to 50% of your target heart rate zone actually reduces cortisol levels, reduces that stress hormone number five, news and negativity. Turn it off. We see too much negativity, we see too much stressful stuff and we're bombarded with it constantly on the radio, on the, on the television from our friends, whatever. It's important to turn that down. Remembering that our brains are created to help us survive. So our brains assign more weight or more what they call emotional valence to negative or threatening information. They found generally in about a 5 to 1 ratio. So for every one negative story you see on the news, you really need to counter it with five positive stories. And you know, our local news and even our national news does not do that. News contributes to our anxiety. Yes, it's important to stay educated and in the know, but there is a limit to how much you need, whether you need it every day or not. And that's a personal decision. But it is important to eliminate and to set barriers and boundaries to protect yourself from as much negativity as possible. The environment. You can do a lot of things in your environment to improve mental health. Look around if your environment makes you go, eh, okay, that's not a happy environment to improve mental health. Add things that make you happy. Add things that make you feel good. Do things that help you relax. I can't relax if there is a bunch of stuff and clutter all over the place or if I see dust. We have a lot of animals in our house, so there's dust, generally a lot of dust. And I usually swiffer and do a real light dusting twice a day on the weekends when I'm home, because it takes that much, but it only takes me a minute and it helps me relax. Think about what you want to see. What would make you feel relaxed and happy? Smells. Get rid of the bad ones, you know, Febreze, whatever you have to do. And add positive smells. That can be for me. I love the smell of coffee, I love the smell of bread baking. There are a lot of smells you can add without having to even start to think about essential oils or anything. And you can also include perfumes, anything like that. Sometimes I'll just Spritz perfume in the air in order to improve the smell in the area. Because I tend to be very nostalgic with a lot of different smells. Recreation. Do something fun, fun every day, maybe just for 10 minutes, but do something that you enjoy if it is walking outside. For me, I love watching the birds. I love watching squirrels. So I fill my bird feeder. I make sure the hummingbird feeder is full, and that is sort of recreation for me. Sometimes I'll go in the garden. I have a variety of things I do. But it's important to incorporate things in your day that you enjoy doing. Otherwise you get stuck on the autopilot of get up, go to work, come home, eat, shower, go to bed, and repeat. All work and no play. As they say. Relaxation is different from recreation. Recreation is having fun. Relaxation is winding down, loosening up, if you will, your your mind and your body. Relaxation. Mentally, you can use guided imagery. Think of your happy place, whatever it is, and use your senses to really transport yourself there. What does it smell like? Identify four things that you smell. What do you see? Identify five things that you see. Identify three things that you hear. My place, as most of you know, is a cabin in the woods by a babbling brook. But that is very one dimensional when I say it that way. When I start transporting myself there with guided imagery, I really try to smell and imagine all the different sounds that I'd be hearing, from the wind blowing to the birds chirping to the little squirrels scampering around. Try to really transport yourself there. That will help you tune out all those anxious thoughts and really just focus and give your brain a rest in a happy place. Physically, you can use progressive muscular relaxation, going from the top of your head all the way down to the tips of your toes. Start one muscle group at a time, and that includes, you know, your scalp and your eyes. Tense them and then relax them and notice the difference between what they feel like when they're tense and relaxed. They do that three times. For each muscle group. There is a form of stretching that is called active stretching, which means when you tense one muscle, like when I tense my bicep, it forces my tricep to relax. When I tense my tricep, it forces my bicep to relax. Same thing for your face, for your chest, for your arms. As you're going through and tensing and relaxing, not only are you noticing the difference, you're also bringing blood to the area and you are forcing the opposing muscle group to relax. So you're prompting physical relaxation. When I used to walk people through progressive muscular relaxation in. When I taught at uf, I would generally have about a third of the class fall asleep before we got down to the toes. It can be very relaxing to do. There are scripts online on YouTube that you can follow if you want to. Not on my channel, but on other channels or like I said, you can just focus on one muscle group at a time. Tensing and relaxing three times. Radical acceptance and distress tolerance is number nine, and I use the acronym scream. Sometimes when you're stressed, it makes you want to scream. It is important to recognize that distress is part of life. Dealing with distress is on us. We've got to figure out what to do, and you can do it by screaming. Serenity is the first part in scream. Accepting the things you cannot change and the courage to change the things you can. Recognizing you don't have control over everything that goes into the radical acceptance. C stands for cognitive restructuring. Instead of seeing something as a barrier, which you can't get around, barriers see it maybe as an obstacle, just like an obstacle course, that you have to get over it, around it, under it somehow, but you can get past it or see it as a challenge or a learning opportunity instead of something that is devastating. E stands for emotions. Do some things that trigger the opposite emotion, that trigger happiness, that trigger curiosity instead of triggering anger and anxiety. A stands for activities. Sometimes you just need to take a break until you can get into your wise mind. You feel all distressed. You're. You're really wound up. Maybe you had that test at the doctor's office and you find, find out you're going to have to wait a week to get the results and you're really stressed out about it. But there's nothing you can do to get those results any sooner. So you may choose to engage in activities that will help you distract until you can address the issue. And M stands for mindfulness. Being mindful of how you're feeling in the moment and what your options are to deal with it in order to improve the next moment. And finally, number 10, relationships. It is important for us as human beings to engage with others, to get social support. But it's important to engage with others who provide positive social support, constructive social support that are beneficial, that enhance your environment. So connecting with those people is important, but it's also important to connect with yourself and notice that relationship with yourself. Being kind and compassionate and telling yourself the same things you would tell other people. Because a lot of times we tell ourselves much nastier things than we would tell other people. Being compassionate with yourself and loving yourself as you love others. Others. Those are the 10 top tips for improving mental health for today's little snippet suggestions for how to get to sleep now on the YouTube channel, there are a couple of long version, you know, hour long videos that talk about different things that impair sleep and different ways to address sleep. But to get to sleep, it is important to create a sleep routine. It is important to make sure you are eliminating the stimulants and eliminating alcohol. It is important to figure out what's keeping you up and address those things and set that circadian rhythm so your body knows when it's time to go to sleep. All of those things are good techniques and steps towards improving sleep. Now, some people will talk about melatonin for sleep and the Sleep foundation says that if you are going to try melatonin, number one, you need to make sure it's not medically contraindicated, so check with your doctor. But number two, most people take way too much melatonin. The body only needs like a quarter of a milligram, not a full milligram of melatonin. The amount of melatonin your body usually makes, it pales in comparison to what most people take orally. Additionally, remember that melatonin is made by breaking down serotonin. So if you are experiencing depression, if your serotonin levels are out of whack for some reason, then you're probably not going to make enough melatonin. Or that could be for a lot of reasons. Maybe you're not making enough serotonin or maybe you don't have the nutrients for your body to break down serotonin into melatonin, which is impairing the construction or of the melatonin. It's important to recognize that our deficiencies and neurotransmitters come from multiple places. One, you may not make enough. Two, the receptors that receive it may not be functioning quite as well. And three, you may just not be giving your body the raw materials it needs in order to make enough. So checking your your sleep hygiene, checking your nutrition and evaluating what is keeping you up are all things that can be helpful for improving sleep. Are there other questions? I see a bunch of you have joined over the past few minutes and that is awesome. What else would you like to talk about today? Do you have questions? Do you need resources? What can I do to be of service? I think it's really interesting that Mental Health Month is happening right when we are getting ready to reopen the economy and a lot of people are starting to go back out into public and go back to work. And there is a lot of anxiety associated with that. So I think it's really interesting that we're having the opportunity to remind ourselves about the importance of doing things to improve our mental health, doing things to make us more rested and resilient as we are going back into this somewhat stressful situation. It's also important to remember to prevent burnout. And burnout happens for a lot of different reasons. You can be emotionally burned out from seeing too much, from trauma, from being extremely empathetic. And sometimes we just get burned out because we are burning the candle at both ends. It's important to look at the reasons for burnout. And again, on the YouTube channel, there is a video, a full video on preventing burnout. And I use the acronym pieces on that to help you remember different tips in order to help stave off burnout and. And. And try to prevent it as much as possible. I know a lot of us are working a lot of hours right now, and we want to. We want to be out there and help. But one of the challenges in helping professions is that it never seems like there's an end. It never seems like we've helped enough. There's always somebody else that needs help. And it's to be aware that if we get burned out, if we get completely drained, we're no good to anybody. So at a certain point, we need to set boundaries and let other people step in and help. Are there any other questions? Alrighty, everybody. Thank you for being here with me today, and I will see you next week.