Care and Tending of the Whole Human
Just like plants, humans need very specific things
When many Americans have a day off to celebrate the Fourth of July Independence Day holiday, I’m reflecting on how to use time off for better mental health. Ironically, my reflection takes me back to a cold winter day this year…
One dark, January day, I woke up so blue that even asking Alexa about the weather seemed like too much effort. My coffee addition was the only thing that got me out of bed. Seasonal depression had set in. Or was it more?
That day I had not one, but two offers to go to the gym and swim with friends, which I love doing. I turned them both down. When I did finally leave the house, I found myself at the grocery store accidentally contemplating gourmet dog treats as a snack. My head was not with my body.
Nothing was really wrong. Yet I had a deep malaise.
After the grocery store, I went to work in a cafe. But I still wasn’t feeling great, and rather than focus on my work, I wanted to curl up and cry.
Finally, I called a friend and told her what was going on. Gently she asked me a series of questions about what I might need more of in my life. In fact, this series of questions closely mirrors an excellent mental health tool called the Healthy Mind Platter.
We got to talking about that framework, and in a short time, my friend and I mapped out a plan to pull me out of the funk. We’ll get back to that in a little while.
But first, what the heck is the Healthy Mind Platter, and why was this framework so useful for me?
The Healthy Mind Platter
I first discovered the concept of the Healthy Mind Platter during a grueling period at work half a decade ago, when I was a new-ish Chief of Staff to a Fortune 500 executive who led a sometimes contentious team of VP’s in an organization of nearly 500 people. I was putting in loads of hours, much mental effort, and all the emotional labor I had available within me, in order to manage the combination of team conflict, business headwinds, and the managing up required.
It was exhausting, and, at wits end, I had gone in search of answers one weekend. How could I re-energize in the face of such never-ending effort and exhaustion? What could I do?
When I first found out about the The Healthy Mind Platter, I found it fairly amusing. It’s constructed to mimic the USDA’s MyPlate concept, which illustrates what to eat to stay healthy.
But instead of food, the Healthy Mind Platter is about the activities we need to incorporate into our daily lives in order to keep our brains healthy. The tagline read “Healthy Brain Platter for Optimal Brain Matter,” a rhyme that rather tickled me. I read on.
Quickly it became clear that our brains need certain kinds of workouts to stay in shape, much like our bodies do. And if we don’t keep the brain workouts up, there will be health consequences that are no less real than the ones that happen if we sit on the couch for our entire lives instead of exercising, or fill our diets with junk like sugar and highly processed oils while leaving out nutritious foods.
There are seven essential mental activities that promote cognitive health. These seven activities need to be balanced on a regular (if not daily) basis in order to optimize our mental health, and to feel and do our best.
The best part is, this isn’t like trying to be the fastest runner on the track team. It’s not that kind of optimization. It’s the kind that leads to a fullness and a richness in our human experience and to an optimal overall state of well-being.
The Seven Healthy Mind Activities
Sleep time: Sufficient restful sleep to support physical and mental health. When we give the brain the rest it needs, we consolidate learning and recover from the experiences of the day.
Doctors recommend 8 hours a night (combined in total, even if a small amount comes through napping), to allow for sufficient homeostatic restoration, thermoregulation, tissue repair, immunity, memory processing and emotion regulation. Yet most adults get nearly two hours less per night during the work-week.
Physical time: Engaging in physical activity to support physical and mental health. When we move our bodies, aerobically if medically possible, we strengthen the brain in many ways.
Doctors recommend 30 minutes of activity daily. Exercise doesn’t just bulk up our muscles and burn fat. It also strengthens the brain in ways that enhance our ability to learn, recall facts, and reverse aging in the brain. It enhances our executive function and increases processing speed, inhibits inappropriate behavior, improves focus, reduces anxiety and depression, and practically seems like a cure-all.
Time in: Engaging in reflective practices such as meditation, prayer, or mindfulness to support mental and emotional regulation. When we quietly reflect internally, focusing on sensations, images, feelings and thoughts, we help to better integrate the brain.
Just 10 minutes of meditation a day has been shown to improve our ability to cope with stress and external stressors, and mindfulness practices in general (including journaling and prayer) can aid with depression, anxiety, stress, and pain (which is processed not in the limbs but in the brain).
Play time: Engaging in activities that promote creativity, exploration, newness, humor, and joy. Play isn’t about competition or competitive sports, though when approached playfully they can fit, since this is all about activities that have the mindset of play, which keeps us young and keeps our brains plastic. When we allow ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, playfully enjoying novel experiences, we help make new connections in the brain.
Play is a fundamentally social activity, and research shows that play-joy is one of the core emotional systems in all mammals, including humans. Activating this system provides neuro-adaptive benefits such as managing stress and promoting behaviors that allow us to more flexibly, lightly, and open-mindedly handle unexpected events and situations that are out of our control.
Connecting time: Engaging in positive social interactions. When we connect with other people, ideally in person, and when we take time to appreciate our connection to the natural world around us, we activate and reinforce the brain's relational circuitry.
Social support offers benefits for the endocrine system, cardiovascular health, and immunity. Perceived social support and the integration into social systems can even decrease mortality. Connection with others also reduces stress and improves sleep.
Down time: Engaging in inactivity, or non-directed activities that allow for restoration. When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and let our mind wander or simply relax, we help the brain recharge.
From wandering along a quiet lane without a destination, to window shopping, from laying on the floor in a sunbeam, to aimlessly tidying whatever we feel like, painting or rocking in a hammock, downtime is all about being undirected, open-ended, unstructured, unscheduled, and up to you.
During the “inactive” state of wakeful rest or daydreaming, our brain activates the default neuronal network (or task-negative network), which is the part that operates when we’re not in “doer” mode. This aids our subconscious in the process of integrating seemingly unconnected elements of our experience and drives those flashes of sudden insight we sometimes get. It also helps facilitate complex decisions. Think of downtime like incubation for your brilliant ideas.
Focus time: Engaging in activities that require sustained attention and concentration. When we closely focus on tasks in a goal-oriented way, we take on challenges that make deep connections in the brain.
Focus uses the brain functions governing self-control to block out things happening around us so we can get something done. Luckily, the more we focus, the stronger this “muscle” gets. Thus, spending time focused on one thing or person at a time carries benefits into other areas of life that require self-control, such as sticking with a plan, picking healthy foods to eat, or habit changing. With low blood glucose, focus becomes almost impossible.
Note that to work well, the functions governing focus rely on the benefits of the other six healthy mind activities. That’s why we need all seven and can’t just “produce, produce, produce” all day long.
Also, multi-tasking impairs brain function, and is incompatible with the benefits of focus time. So just because you’re “at work” or “working” doesn’t mean it’s good for your brain. It needs to be real focus time. For more on that the book Flow further explores how we get into this kind of deep focus state.
Where The Science Comes From
The Healthy Mind Platter was developed by Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. David Rock, experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, and the authors behind many books, including Mindsight and Aware, plus Your Brain at Work and Quiet Leadership, respectively. They developed the Healthy Mind Platter framework in the early 2010s, based on emerging research on the brain and its functions.
The Healthy Mind Platter was designed to be a practical and accessible tool for us all to use in our daily lives.
Siegal says that as he and Rock were developing the model, they asked themselves:
“If we embrace interpersonal neurobiology’s proposed definition of a key facet of mind as an embodied and relationally embedded process that regulates energy and information flow, how can we make a practical definition of mental habits that can help people with their diet of “daily essential mental nutrients”?”
They looked to the science for answers.
One thing they noticed was all the ways that our brain distracts us during the day. We get bored and want to stand up and stretch, go for a walk, or have a snack. On the way to the vending machine we pass a friend and stop to chat and joke. Back at our desk, we work for a while but then stop, staring at the screen. Unbidden, our friend’s joke replays in our minds and we catch ourselves laughing out loud. These distractions are ways our brain is pushing us to meet our basic needs for physical activity and nutrition, for connection and play. We just don’t realize it. And without realizing it, at the end of the day we wind up exhausted and irritable, frustrated about how our day went.
Digging into this insight about our natural brain interruptors, Siegal and Rock looked into what would happen if we intentionally planned to give our brain what it needs, rather than endlessly reacting to these “distractions.”
As they synthesized what they had learned from clinical work, behavioral research, affective and social neuroscience, and psychology, they identified the seven mind platter activities. Rather than being distractions, they realized, together these activities constituted the basis of brain health!
Care Instructions for Humans:
Based on everything we know today, the care instructions for a human being are about as cut and dry as the care instructions for plants.
Unfortunately they can also be about as easy to implement as some of those elusive watering + sunlight checklists which still somehow leave people like me enormous room to watch my plants turn brown, lose leaves, and wither away.
And yet, it’s worth it to figure this out. Using the Healthy Mind Platter gives us the chance to grow vibrant, healthy, and strong. As Siegal and Rock envision:
“What would happen if we were to start the day after a good night’s sleep with half an hour of reflective practice, taking advantage of the rested and centered mind to prioritize the activities of the day?
We might consciously plan to take a break over lunch, allowing for down time or even a brief nap, and arrange for a tennis game with a friend right after work, thus combining connecting time and physical activity.
When we arrive at work, we mindfully schedule the meetings of the day to alternate individual focus time with meetings with colleagues so as to have a day with variation in brain activity.
The result might be that when we come back home we actually have sufficient reserves to connect and play with our children, completing the list of healthy activities for the day before dinner time.”
Applying the Platter to My Life
One of the first things I noticed about the Healthy Mind Platter back when I discovered it in 2018, was that there were some activities I went hard on. Like really hard. And others I ignored almost completely.
As a workaholic (yes, I’ll admit it), I managed to put in quite a lot of focus time each day.
I also often viewed physical activity through the lens of work. When you view exercise as a measurable “exercise regime” it takes on the quality of being task driven, and therefore I could justify putting it on my to-do list, unlike things that seemed pleasure driven, like a random afternoon wander about my neighborhood. This meant I ran, biked, and did a weekly yoga class.
At the time, I also ate out with friends quite often, which sometimes felt like the only thing keeping me sane. Luckily, I have a strong drive for connection time.
And yet, I often ran low on sleep, completely forgot to spend time reflecting or journaling, rarely gave myself time to wander or just “be,” and honestly thought play wasn’t for adults. So I was missing out on sleep, time in, downtime, and play!
Maybe this is why my favorite yoga teacher at the time was the one who was very spiritual, did her own reflections to share at the beginning of class, played the Harmonium, made us do laughter breathing and long chants, provided ultra-long Shavasana sessions at the end of class (where you lay down in meditation with your eyes closed), and used aromatherapy on our temples while we lay prone. It was all the things I was missing, packed into one 90 minute weekly session! Not nearly enough, but everything I craved.
I had some rebalancing to do.
Fixing my January Gloominess this Year
This winter, crying on the phone to my friend about feeling depressed, I wondered why I was so down when things in my life were actually pretty good. (I mean, I was dating someone new and great, I was working on new and exciting projects, and I wasn’t stressed for time).
That’s why my friend’s questions about what I needed more of in my life were so useful. They pointed to the fact that feeling down, and being in a state of poor mental health, is a health issue. To get out of it we need health-creating solutions.
As I considered how the Healthy Mind Platter had helped me back in 2018 when my work was so exhausting, I decided to use the model to identify what I needed, and then get intentional about adding those things to the balance.
I realized that this time around, I was missing sufficient physical activity and sleep more than anything. I’d gotten into poor cycles of watching Netflix late at night. Yet people who sleep less than 6 hours a day are 43% more likely to be depressed than those getting 8, and those who report feeling sleep deprived are 97% more likely to be than those who report sufficient sleep.
I’d also cut my 3-4 weekly trips to the gym rather abruptly, just before Christmas, and hadn’t picked them back up for almost a month. Plus, in the extremely dark, cold weather, I hadn’t wanted to go outside much. Yet during exercise, our brains light up in almost every region, creating reinforcing benefits on all our brain functions. Of particular importance the impact on sleep quality and the seemingly miraculous ability of exercise to ward off anxiety and depression.
In addition, people who lived in the dark and cold nearby me were mostly hibernating, I hadn’t seen many of them all month, and I was especially missing deep connection with old friends who lived far away, who I hadn’t seen in a while. So I made a point of reaching out and calling people I’ve known for years and who know me extremely well. This enhanced my feeling of social support, and led to laughter, playful conversations, more positive feelings, and better overall sleep.
In total, as I adjusted my sleep schedule, got more active (both in the gym and outdoors), and felt more connected, my gloom quickly turned to more energy. Within just a couple of weeks I felt like myself again.
Knowing how to balance your activities to improve your brain health can be a cheat code for giving yourself the things you want and need the most, while speeding you on the path to more energy, better mood, and more secure mental health.
Do you need the Healthy Mind Platter?
Which of the seven activities do you need to make space for more of in your life?
What takes up time in your life, which is not on this list? What might you want to cut back on to make room for more of the seven?
Sleep time
Physical time
Time in (reflection)
Play time
Connecting time
Downtime (inactivity)
Focus time
To brain health, with love,
Marisol