Seven Elements of a Healthy Mind

Posted on by helpingsoul

The Daily Practices That Actually Sustain You — Not as a Productivity Hack, but as the Architecture of a Life Worth Living

A substantial revision of an earlier 2019 post on workplace wellness. The clinical framework is the same. The audience and orientation have been redirected from corporate productivity to the individual reader building a sustainable daily life.

Most popular advice on daily habits is framed around productivity. The right morning routine that will help you accomplish more. The optimal sleep schedule that will improve your output. The mindfulness practice that will make you a better worker. Even the well-being advice tends to be packaged as a path to higher performance.

This framing misses something important. The point of taking care of yourself is not to become more productive. The point of taking care of yourself is to live a life that does not feel like an emergency you are trying to survive. The productivity gains, if they come, are a byproduct. The actual goal is a life that contains enough of what you need to remain yourself in the long days, the hard seasons, the years that ask more of you than you knew you had.

The framework I have come to rely on for thinking about this comes from Dr. Daniel Siegel, the psychiatrist and researcher who has done foundational work on interpersonal neurobiology. He calls it the Healthy Mind Platter. Seven elements that, taken together, support a brain and nervous system that can function well across the demands of a human life. Not as a checklist to optimize. As a description of what a sustainable life actually requires.

Here are the seven elements, and what each one actually means.

1. Sleep

The brain repairs itself during sleep. Memory consolidation happens during sleep. Emotional regulation is restored during sleep. The accumulated stress of the day is metabolized during sleep. Without adequate sleep, the rest of the elements cannot function at full capacity, because the underlying system is running on borrowed reserves.

Most adults need seven to nine hours per night. Many adults are running on less, sometimes significantly less, often for years at a time. The cumulative effect is not just tiredness. It is altered cortisol patterns, impaired immune function, reduced cognitive capacity, increased emotional reactivity, and accelerated aging at the cellular level.

If you are short on sleep, this is where to begin. Not with a more ambitious morning routine. Not with a new productivity system. With adequate sleep, protected, prioritized, treated as the foundation rather than as something to be sacrificed in service of other things.

2. Physical activity

Movement releases endorphins. It strengthens neural connections. It improves cardiovascular function. It reduces baseline stress activation. It supports better sleep. It improves mood through mechanisms separate from any specific calories burned or fitness gained. The body is built to move. When it moves regularly, the entire system functions better.

This does not require a particular kind of exercise. Walking counts. Gardening counts. Dancing in your kitchen counts. Climbing stairs counts. The body that gets thirty minutes of moderate movement most days is doing what the body is built to do. The body that sits for ten hours and then attempts to compensate with one intense workout is not.

Find movement that you actually enjoy. The exercise you will continue to do is more valuable than the optimal exercise you will quit after three weeks.

3. Focus

Sustained attention on something that matters to you produces specific benefits. Deep neural connections form. A felt sense of accomplishment develops. The brain learns that effort produces meaningful results. The capacity to remain present with one task strengthens over time.

This element has become particularly important in an era of constant distraction. The phone in your pocket is engineered to fragment your attention. The notifications, the social media scroll, the rapid context switching that modern work often requires — all of it erodes the capacity for sustained focus. Reclaiming that capacity is its own kind of work.

Choose, daily, something that matters to you and give it your full attention for a period of time. Not multitasking. Not partially listening to a podcast while you do it. Real focus. The work, the conversation, the creative project, the person you are with. The capacity to focus, once rebuilt, becomes one of the most reliable sources of life satisfaction available.

4. Downtime

Different from focus. Different from sleep. Downtime is unstructured time in which the mind is allowed to wander without a goal. Looking out the window. Sitting on the porch. Watching the clouds. Walking without an audiobook. Letting the system settle into a state of low-stimulation drift.

This is harder than it sounds. Many adults have lost the capacity for genuine downtime. The phone comes out at the first moment of unstructured time. The podcast plays during the walk. The to-do list runs through the mind even during what should be rest. The system that has been trained to produce constantly has trouble with the genuine release of doing nothing in particular.

Building this capacity matters. The mind that has time to wander produces creative insight that the focused mind cannot reach. The system that has time to rest produces emotional regulation that the stimulated system cannot maintain. Downtime is not the absence of value. It is its own form of value, with effects that show up everywhere else in the system.

5. Play

Play is what the nervous system does when it knows it is safe. It is spontaneous, exploratory, not goal-oriented. Children do it naturally. Adults often have to relearn it after decades of treating every activity as a means to some other end.

Play matters because the system that can play is the system that has access to its full creative and relational capacity. The absence of play in an adult life is often a symptom of chronic activation rather than a sign of maturity. The serious adult who has not laughed deeply in months is not more accomplished than the playful adult. They are more depleted.

Find what is play for you specifically. It may not be what others call play. It may be hiking. It may be cooking experimentally. It may be making something with your hands. It may be the conversation with the friend who makes you laugh until you cannot breathe. Whatever it is, prioritize it. The system that gets to play regularly is the system that can handle the rest of life with more resources available.

6. Connection

Time spent in genuine presence with other people. Not parallel time on phones. Not scrolling next to each other. Real attention, real conversation, real felt sense of being seen by another person and seeing them in return.

Connection also includes presence with the natural world. Time outside. Awareness of trees, water, sky, weather. The nervous system was built in environments where being outdoors and being with others were the default conditions. Modern life has often inverted this, making solitary indoor time the default. The system suffers in proportion to how far it has drifted from its evolutionary baseline.

Connection is not an optional add-on to a busy life. It is a core requirement. The decades of research on happiness and well-being converge on this finding more reliably than on any other. The quality of your close relationships, and the regularity of your contact with the natural world, predict your well-being more than almost any other factor. Prioritize accordingly.

7. Reflection

Time spent quietly attending to your own inner experience. Meditation, if that fits you. Journaling, if that fits you. Long walks where you let your thoughts surface without forcing them. Therapy, if you are in it. Prayer, if your tradition includes it. The specific form matters less than the quality of attention — turning your attention inward, listening to what is present, allowing what arises to be witnessed.

This integrates the rest of the elements. The reflection lets you notice when your sleep has been off, when you have been neglecting movement, when the focus has been scattered, when you have been avoiding the people who matter to you. Without reflection, the other elements drift without correction. With reflection, the small adjustments that keep the system in balance become possible.

Build in some form of reflection daily, even if briefly. The five minutes in the morning with your coffee, attending to how you actually are. The walk home from work where you let the day settle. The conversation with your partner at the end of the day where you tell each other what is true. The form is yours to choose. The practice is what matters.

Why all seven, every day

These elements are not menu items. You do not get to pick three and skip four. The system functions best when all seven are present, even briefly, in any given day. The brain integrates better. The body regulates better. The emotional life carries more easily.

This does not require that each element get equal time. The day may be heavy on focus and connection and lighter on play. Another day may be lighter on focus and heavier on downtime. The variation is fine. What matters is that none of the elements is consistently absent. The element that goes missing for months at a time becomes the place where the system begins to fail.

Notice, as you read through the seven, which one or two are most absent from your current life. That noticing is the data. The work is not to immediately overhaul your entire daily structure. The work is to begin reintroducing the missing element, small at first, with patience. A short walk most days. Twenty minutes of reading without checking your phone. A weekly meal with someone you love that is not interrupted by screens. The accumulation, over months, shifts the system.

On rest as the foundation

If you are running on chronic depletion right now, the most important place to begin is rest. Not productive rest. Real rest. The kind that produces no measurable output. Sleep, yes. But also the willingness to do less than your usual output for a period of time so that the system can recover the reserves it has been operating without.

This is hard to permit, especially for adults whose worth has been measured by what they produce. The voice that says you cannot afford to rest is often the same voice that has been driving the depletion. Resting in the face of that voice is its own act of courage. The voice will eventually quiet. The system will eventually recover. And the work you do from a rested baseline will be of better quality than what you have been producing from depleted reserves.

Where to begin today

Pick the element from the seven that feels most absent from your current life. Just one. Make a small move toward it today. Not a dramatic restructuring. A small move.

If sleep is the gap, go to bed thirty minutes earlier tonight. If movement is the gap, take a fifteen-minute walk before dinner. If play is the gap, spend twenty minutes doing something purely because you enjoy it, with no productive end. If connection is the gap, call someone you love and ask how they actually are. If reflection is the gap, sit quietly for five minutes before bed and attend to your own inner state.

Then tomorrow, do it again. And the day after. Small repetitions accumulate into the sustainable architecture of a different kind of life. The seven elements are not a productivity hack. They are the actual conditions under which a human nervous system thrives across the long arc of a life. Build them gradually. Honor them. Notice what changes.

Further reading: Daniel Siegel, The Healthy Mind Platter. Daniel Siegel and David Rock, the original framework. Siegel’s broader work on interpersonal neurobiology and the integrated brain. For the clinical companion to this work, visit thecourageousself.com.

April Wright, MA, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and Florida. She blogs about attachment, healing, and the courageous arts of becoming oneself at courageous-arts.com and sees clients at thecourageousself.com.

Close-up portrait of a smiling woman with long hair and earrings.

5 Ways to Improve Your Conscious Listening

Posted on by helpingsoul

active-listening_pinkTaken from Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better | Video on TED.com

Conscious listening is understanding sound.   It increases empathy, connection, consciousness, and peace.  Listening externally improves relationships.  Listening internally increases awareness of inner wisdom and self-sabotaging talk.  Read on to learn ways to uplift your capacity to hear with clarity.

1. Sit silently for three minutes a day to recalibrate and hear the silence again.

2. Listen and count the many channels of sound (i.e. count birds chirping or the different depths of sound listening to the flow of a creek, or the clasps of the coffee machine being worked at Starbucks as you stand in line).

3. Savor mundane sounds.  Turn the sound of a washing machine into a waltz.

4. Listening positions allow room to navigate, see different perspectives, and find solutions.

  • Active | passive
  • Reductive | expansive
  • Critical |empathetic

5. R A S A is an acronym to simplify the rules to listen better.

  • R = Receive, pay attention
  • A = Appreciation, thank for sharing
  • S = Summarize, use so… frequently
  • A – Ask, pose many questions

Listening is a rare art form that takes practice, dedication, and consciousness.  Notice how slowing down to listen to others and yourself can help transform your relationships, decision-making, and peacefulness.

The Secret of Love (Spoiler Alert)

Posted on by helpingsoul

journey by Deepak Chopra, MD

The Internet has taken up the slack from print media by offering tips on love and relationships, which pop up on home pages, in tweets and in news teasers many times a day. If the secret to lasting romance could be shared like a recipe for cinnamon buns, our problems would be over. But love isn’t a fact, formula, or definable in words.

Love is a process, perhaps the most mysterious one in human psychology. No one knows what creates love as a powerful bond that is so full of meaning. If romance was only a heady brew of hormones, genetic inheritance and sex drive, all we’d need is better data to explain it. But love is transporting. It carries us beyond our everyday selves and makes reality shine with an inner light. The reverse can also happen. We crash to earth when the wear and tear of relationships makes love fade.

The process of love is kept alive by evolving and not getting stuck. Infatuation is an early stage of the process. You bond with another person as if by alchemy, but in time the ego returns with the claims of “I, me, and mine.” At that point love must change. Two people must negotiate how much to share, how much to surrender and how much to stand their ground. It would be tragic if romance faded into everyday familiarity, but it doesn’t have to.

Beyond the stage of two egos negotiating for their own interests, there is deepening love. It doesn’t try to turn the present into the past. A married couple of twenty years isn’t still infatuated with one other. So what keeps the process alive? For me, the answer was revealed by reading a startling sentence from the Upanishads, which are like a textbook of spiritual understanding. The sentence says, “You do not love a spouse for the sake of the spouse but for the sake of the self.”

At first glance this seems like a horrible sentiment: We all love on a personal basis and we expect to be loved the same way, for ourselves. But if “self” means your everyday personality, there is much that isn’t very lovable about each of us and as a marriage or relationship unfolds, there’s a guarantee that our partners will see those unlovable things more clearly. Even a knight in shining armor might want to save more than one damsel, and even saint must use deodorant once in a while.

In the world’s wisdom tradition, “love” and “self” are both universal. They exist beyond the individual personality. The secret of love is to expand beyond the personal. When people say that they want unconditional love, they often imply that they want to be loved despite their shortcomings, issues and quirks. But that’s nearly impossible if love remains at the personal level. At a certain point, if you begin to see love itself as your goal, universal love is more powerful and secure than personal love.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore described the spiritual side of love in a single expression” “Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.” The gift of human awareness is that we can locate the source of creation in ourselves. By going deeper into the self, asking “Who am I?” without settling for a superficial answer, the ego-personality fades. A sense of the true self begins to dawn, and it is this self that exists in contact with love as the only reality.

The journey becomes more fascinating if someone else travels with you. Life isn’t about abstractions; it’s about experience. If you have a beloved who stands for the feeling of love, bonding, and affection, your journey has a focus that can’t be supplied merely by thinking. The experiences that love bring include surrender, devotion, selflessness, giving, gratitude, appreciation, kindness and bliss. So if the phrase “universal love” seems daunting or improbable to you, break it down into these smaller experiences. Pursue them, and you will be traveling in the direction of your source, where the true self and true love merge.

That’s where my spoiler alert comes in. Announcing the secret of love cuts short the actual experience. It doesn’t always help to know what’s coming, because you might fall into exaggerated expectations and fall short. It’s better and more realistic to become aware that love is now your personal project. Show kindness and gratitude. Speak about what your beloved means to you. Every step on this journey works on behalf of the two of you but also on behalf of the self that unites you at the deepest level.

Want to be happy? Stop trying to be perfect

Posted on by helpingsoul

By Brené Brown

The quest for perfection is exhausting and unrelenting, but as hard as we try, we can’t turn off the tapes that fill our heads with messages like “Never good enough” and “What will people think?”

Why, when we know that there’s no such thing as perfect, do most of us spend an incredible amount of time and energy trying to be everything to everyone? Is it that we really admire perfection? No — the truth is that we are actually drawn to people who are real and down-to-earth. We love authenticity and we know that life is messy and imperfect.

We get sucked into perfection for one very simple reason: We believe perfection will protect us. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.

We all need to feel worthy of love and belonging, and our worthiness is on the line when we feel like we are never ___ enough (you can fill in the blank: thin, beautiful, smart, extraordinary, talented, popular, promoted, admired, accomplished).

Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be our best. Perfectionism is not about healthy achievement and growth; it’s a shield. Perfectionism is a 20-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from being seen and taking flight.

Living in a society that floods us with unattainable expectations around every topic imaginable, from how much we should weigh to how many times a week we should be having sex, putting down the perfection shield is scary. Finding the courage, compassion and connection to move from “What will people think?” to “I am enough,” is not easy. But however afraid we are of change, the question that we must ultimately answer is this:

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think — or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

So, how do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough — that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy? Why we’re all so afraid to let our true selves be seen and known. Why are we so paralyzed by what other people think? After studying vulnerability, shame, and authenticity for the past decade, here’s what I’ve learned.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

There are certainly other causes of illness, numbing, and hurt, but the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

As I conducted my research interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. It’s as simple and complicated as this:

If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

The greatest challenge for most of us is believing that we are worthy now, right this minute. Worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites.

So many of us have created a long list of worthiness prerequisites:

• I’ll be worthy when I lose 20 pounds

• I’ll be worthy if I can get pregnant

• I’ll be worthy if I get/stay sober

• I’ll be worthy if everyone thinks I’m a good parent

• I’ll be worthy if I can hold my marriage together

• I’ll be worthy when I make partner

• I’ll be worthy when my parents finally approve

• I’ll be worthy when I can do it all and look like I’m not even trying

Here’s what is truly at the heart of whole-heartedness: Worthy now. Not if. Not when. We are worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As is.

Letting go of our prerequisites for worthiness means making the long walk from “What will people think?” to “I am enough.” But, like all great journeys, this walk starts with one step, and the first step in the Wholehearted journey is practicing courage.

The root of the word courage is cor — the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.

Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics are important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage.

Heroics are often about putting our life on the line. Courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. If we want to live and love with our whole hearts and engage in the world from a place of worthiness, our first step is practicing the courage it takes to own our stories and tell the truth about who we are. It doesn’t get braver than that.

Healthy Relationship Habits: Communication

Posted on by helpingsoul

1.    Communicate daily.  Communicating daily ensure you are in tune to your partners latest interests, ideas, thoughts, and emotions which give greater opportunity for connection and intimacy.

2.    Learn to listen. By listening, you are able to summarize what your partner said and how they feel in about two sentences when they have completely stopped speaking.

3.    Check in.  Randomly inquiry about your partner.  Showing interest in unexpected way, shows you care, are curious, and want to included in your partner’s daily life whether mundane or not.

4.    “I” statements – I think, I feel, I prefer.  By taking ownership of your wants, needs, and emotions, your partner is less likely to become defensive.

5.     Express emotions.  Use specific feelings and actions that instilled the anger, hurt, sadness, joy, or happiness.

6.     Don’t blame. Take a moment to declare what your role may have been in the situation. No matter the situation, everyone involved played a part.  Taking responsibility for your function creates an atmosphere for safety and expression.

7.    Share, get to know each other, ask questions, be curious, and unleash childhood experiences, share pictures, memories, and stories.  Sharing small bits of you ensures safety and trust over time.

8.    Speak what is true to you. Stop, reflect for a moment, determine what is true for you in the situation and speak your truth kindly.  Identify a specific event or topic and use “When this happened, I feel/ felt, because I, and I (clarifying your requests, what you’d like to see in the future, actions you plan to take, and when, and what you will do to take care of yourself), and I appreciate.  Finish with kindness.

9.    Never go to bed angry!  Clear up the argument before hitting the sheets.  Come to a

Couple_sitting_outdoor_table_talking

compromise or determine a time and place to reconvene the discussion.  Make-up sex just may be the perfect way to move past an argument.

10.   Be Specific in your communication.  Discuss one topic at a time and don’t move on to the next until the first one is resolved.

11.   Remind your partner why you fell in love with them.  Describe specific things you love about them.

12.   Show appreciation for who they are and what they do.  Again be specific in sharing your appreciation. “I appreciate it when you….”

13.   No Yelling.  The louder you yell, the less the other person listens to you! Speak in a warm and loving tone calmly and respectfully and more likely your partner will listen.

14.   Use preferences – avoid demands. Ex: Instead of “You need to clean the scattered newspaper in the living room tonight” try “I feel anxious because the large stack of newspaper in the living room is distracting.  I would really appreciate it if you could find a secluded place to store the newspapers tonight.”

15.   Use eye contact. Think how it feels to be spoken to while someone is looking at you versus looking at the newspaper.

16.   Do not give unsolicited advice. When you know you partner is having a rough day, just listen and don’t try to solve their problem.  They are fully capable of solving their own issues.  A good listening ear may be all the help that is required.