56. Aligning with Nature and Bio-Rhythms to Boost Mood & Resilience

Welcome to the Joy Lab Podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Imi Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at joylab.coach. Hello, I'm Henry Emmons, welcome to Joy Lab. And I'm Amy Prasek. Here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to help you uncover joy. To do that, we focus on building the elements of joy. Those are the positive emotions and inner states that become the building blocks for a joyful life. So the element for this episode is resilience. When we're in our Roots of Resilience series, working on that third root, which is aligning with nature. If you've missed the last few episodes, you may want to go back to episode 53 to listen from there. So just a brief recap, in the last two episodes, we have talked about balancing brain chemistry and managing energy. The angle that we took for brain chemistry is to nourish ourselves through diet and maybe a few targeted supplements if needed. The goal there is really to sustain mood as much as possible through natural measures. In last week's episode, then we talked about how we can coax our bodies to stay energized by becoming more efficient at making energy. And that has a lot to do with the smart use of exercise and then again, possibly adding a few nutritional supports. So today, we're moving on to the third and the last of the Roots of Resilience that are primarily focused on the body. I think this is my favorite. It's also the one that I think we can most easily ignore. So this is about bioarithms, about aligning ourselves with the cycles of nature. And I think it combines really powerfully with those other roots that we've already talked about. It would be hard to overstate how important this is to mental health. If you look at the natural world, you'll see cycles are everywhere. You know, the sun and the moon, the tides, the obvious things, the weather, seasons of the year and the seasons of a life, even. All of these things are built on rhythms. Now, plants and animals just fall in line with these cycles completely naturally. They don't have a choice, but we do. And we often choose to ignore them or even to fight against them. So we can pull all nighters. We can go south in the winter. And I'm definitely not suggesting we shouldn't do that. We can make ourselves look younger. We can stay up later. We can push through given that extra effort, even though we probably should stop and rest. So we don't let nature set limits on us. And I totally get that. But it does come at a cost. Now, what we don't see so obviously is how these cycles are also going on inside our bodies, our hormones, energy, focus, even our moods are clearly directly affected by these rhythms. One way of looking at depression in fact is that it's a problem with our internal timing where we've gotten out of sync with our bio rhythms. I think that's such a fascinating way to look at depression, just another angle to consider. And this really is a booming field of study often called chronobiology or body clock research. But as you are alluding here, Henry, when it comes to our physical and mental health these cycles really matter. For example, seasonal depression or sad is something we probably all have some familiarity with. I can turn my camera to look at my satellite right next to me that I turn on every morning. Very helpful. Our moods change with some predictability in this relates to the seasonal shifts. This is the alignment we're exploring in this episode. So we're going to break down our conversation into three rhythms. We've got all tradian rhythms, which are cycles less than 24 hours, circadian rhythms, which are these 24 hour cycles, and infra-adian rhythms, which are cycles more than 24 hours and generally less than one year. So Henry, do you want to talk about all tradian rhythms and how they relate to our mental health? Sure. So I think this might be the easiest of these bio rhythms to overlook. So think about your typical work day. Are you really able to stay focused and productive for eight to ten hours a day? You might think so, but I doubt it. We have become so tied to clock time that we tend to ignore these micro rhythms that are happening in our bodies. Some years ago I read a book called The 20 Minute Break, and it was all focused on these all-tradian rhythms and talked about how most of us just push right through them. So this book was neuroscience based and it was focused on our ability to stay focused, our energy, our productivity. And the gist of it is that we are really built to be able to sustain kind of a concentrated focus for only about 60 to maybe 75 minutes, 90 minutes tops. And then we fade and our productivity just drops and it can drop sort of off a cliff if we push it too far. So we might feel that we need to get more done or it's not lunchtime yet or we just work right through our lunch and we just keep going and ignore the fact that we are starting to get spacey and maybe even starting to make mistakes. Or the typical thing is we'll turn to sugar or caffeine to get a quick artificial boost. I even know a lot of people who experiment with what are called no tropics, which are different substances that are supposed to kind of supercharge our brain, get us, make us smarter, keep us focused longer. But what our bodies are trying to tell us is that we should just take a break, maybe for 15, 20 minutes, sometimes longer, and we should rest or we should move our bodies or get some kind of a healthy snack that isn't mostly sugar or do a brief meditation or even a chat with a friend. But something to kind of give us a chance to get our brain back online. So I have in my own work life, I've started to think about managing my energy rather than managing my time, which is kind of what we're trained to do. And I think of this even as kind of a mindfulness practice because you have to notice when you're starting to fade. If you push through it, you're likely to crash and it might take longer and be kind of hard to get your focus back. If you can notice it early on and you can honor what your body needs, then maybe just that short break is going to be enough to get you back on track and keep your focus and even your mood at a healthier level. I love that cute, manage energy instead of time and that it can be a mindfulness practice. And employers would do well to tune into this if they actually want productivity. There's so much good research here. They focus on up breaks so they can focus better productivity. Pretty simple. I do want to hit on a study here from Dr. Anders Erickson and colleagues. So Dr. Erickson was an expert in human performance and understanding folks who really excel at what they do. And in this classic article, he was looking at violinists and how they practiced. And the findings really support what we're talking about here with all trading rhythms. So the ones that became professional soloists practice three and a half hours a day on average and typically in three separate sessions of 60 to 90 minutes each. So the good but not great performers practiced about an hour and a half a day typically with no rest. They just went straight through. So the excellent violinists clearly practiced more but they had a strategy that offered them breaks. On top of that, the excellent ones napped more frequently and averaged a full one hour more of sleep per night. Wow. So you are talking to me, Amy. I know. I mean, and this, he's done great studies with other top performers. This was not just violinists. This goes across genres and activities. And I think one interpretation of how these folks excelled in their craft is that they tended to their rhythms more and in such a way that actually allowed them to practice more. It's not that they just fought through it and practiced more. It's that they created the context, the situation, the support so that they could, right? They were more fresh for practice. They gave themselves breaks. They slept more. And this isn't evidence to say, as I said, that we need to pick one thing. We don't need to be violinists and be an expert at it and practice like this. I think the more powerful message is that we can be more present and engaged in our daily activities and more in tune with ourselves when we follow these kinds of hourly rhythms and they'll feed us so that we can continue. So nice transition here. Let's go to circadian rhythms because I did just touch on sleep. And that's a big one here. And like this violinist study, other studies looking at average sleep for high achievers has found that a key part of their success seems to be that they sleep more than the average American, which is about six and a half hours per night. So let's compare that with a suggested sleep time for the average adult human, which is seven to nine hours, there is an issue right there from the start for circadian rhythms. I like to think about being above average simply by sleeping more. That's a great way. That's a great way. You want to be better taking on sleep. So I do see sleep as the linchpin for good mental health. You know, sleep is the most obvious of these circadian rhythms. And I think sleep might be honestly the best mood stabilizer available to us. So the research on this is not ambiguous at all. People who have depression and also have problems sleeping, if they can get their sleep improved, they have just doubled their chances of recovering just by that one change. On the flip side, people who don't yet have depression but do develop sleep problems, their risk of becoming depressed has just doubled. I don't know of anything else that has such a big impact on preventing depression. So there is another less obvious aspect of circadian rhythm and that involves our hormones. And I want to talk for a minute particularly about the stress hormones. But really, you know, it's not just cortisol. All of our hormones, by and large, tend to fluctuate normally throughout the day. So cortisol, the stress hormone we probably hear the most about, it is normal for it to go up and down to fluctuate over the course of a 24-hour period. When we're really healthy and well-balanced, by and large, cortisol will reach its lowest point kind of early during our sleep. And this is when we sleep at the deepest stages. And then from probably somewhere around three in the morning or four in the morning, it starts to go up a little bit. And it's one of the factors that probably helps to wake us up, let's say around six or seven in the morning if we're typical sleepers. And then it just keeps rising over the course of the morning when a lot of us are at our most productive or at least our more mentally focused. Then after lunch, cortisol takes a little dip downward, you know, which for a lot of us might be a good time to take a little rest or a nap or go for a walk. And then it starts to go up again by mid-afternoon. And cortisol levels then, after roughly five, six p.m., they just are decreasing and decreasing and they keep, they help us unwind and get ready eventually to fall asleep. So this whole system is called the HPA axis, which means hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal. And this has a ton to do with mood. So this is what I was referring to earlier. Depression can happen when this system gets out of sync, out of balance. In a sense, the adrenals stop listening to the signals from the brain. And then this normal up and down rhythm of cortisol is disrupted. Maybe other folks caught that three to four a.m. They'll start to surge in cortisol. I'm just thinking, you know, when I'm stressed, what time do I wake up? In the middle of the night is three o'clock. Witching hour when cortisol starts to surge and maybe it's got the gas pedal. Do you see that a lot in your... Oh my gosh. I hear that all the time. And you know, for some people, like when they're really going through a stressful stretch of time, it's almost like they could set their clock to it. They wake up almost exactly the same time every night in the middle of the night. Yeah, sort of that your body clock is shifted a bit, right? Yeah, good point. In a way that isn't supporting your system. Right. Yeah. So I think it's really interesting too to think about mood issues, arising or worsening because we're battling our bodies natural cycles. There is just so much friction, energy being used to try and bypass all of it. And to get back in with this circadian rhythm, to maybe stop waking up at 3.30am on the dog every morning, I think it can be really helpful to notice the rhythms around us. So I'll just start with like dogs, for instance. If you have a dog or a cat, but I think cats are condescending, so I like to focus on dogs. Sorry. Sorry, cat folks. That was a slam. We just lost half of our listeners. I'm just scared of cats and allergic to them. Anyway, if you have a pet, even a sweet cat, they probably know their meal times too. The second, it's amazing, right? And the birds chirping at the same hour in June right outside your window for us. It's 5.45am at our house. Our chickens go into their coop every night at like 7.45pm in July, a little later. The sun is out, the way flowers open and close at particular times. And actually, for any of you gardeners or just those who want to try something new this spring, you can make a flower clock and keep time to the half hour from dawn to dusk with flowers simply based on when they open or close. I think this is so cool. I want to do this. The famous version of this is Linnaeus's flower clock. There's also a poem from Andrew Marvell, who was a late 16th century poet that may have done this before. Linnaeus, I want to read his poem. I think it's perfect. It's the poetics of circadian rhythm right here. How well the skillful gardener drew of flowers and herbs this dial knew, where from above the milder's son does through a fragrant zodiac run. And as it works, the industrious bee computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours be reckoned but with herbs and flowers? Wow. Manage energy not time. So that's one strategy, maybe not the flower thing. It's kind of a whole big thing, but try it if you can. Let me know how it goes. But tapping into your circadian rhythm with the rhythms around you, head outside, see what else is cycling. What other suggestions do you have, Henry? Well here's something that relates directly to what you just talked about, Amy, and that is how we interact with light. So I happen to think that our adoption of artificial light, which obviously lets us override the signals from nature, is probably one of the reasons why we have seen mental health problems increase pretty steadily over the last century. I'm not saying we should go back to not having electric lights, but it just really does allow us to kind of plow through nature's rhythms. So we can take a lesson from nature here, and this is really not hard to do. We can actually use technology to make this easier. So get bright light exposure early in the morning, preferably in the first hour or two after you wake up. And then in the evening, particularly in the winter, keep your lights very, very dim around you. Now, this is easier to do in the summer because you can get outside and get that bright light exposure. In the winter, you do have to trick your brain, essentially, by using artificial lights, but it's really easy to do. Like a dawn simulator or a bright light device that you use early, first thing in the morning. A lot of people actually benefit by doing it again in the late afternoon around five o'clock, roughly just for about 15 minutes, because it might help them help to set their sleep time at the right time. But then in the late evening, be super careful about how many lights you have on in your house, or you can get LED lights that do not have blue spectrum in them that you could read by or sit by in the evening. So I want to go back briefly to what I was saying earlier about how cortisol fluctuates over the course of the day. Remember that's normal. It's supposed to happen. And it does a lot of good things for us. But when we are under a lot of stress, it pushes that whole system into overdrive. And if you were to measure your cortisol levels throughout the day, and there are some tests that do this, they have four different testing points through the day, you can see that maybe it's gotten too high throughout the day all the time, or maybe just at night, like we were talking about earlier, and it disrupts your sleep, you know, when you wake up at that three or four hour in the morning and you just, your brain starts to ruminate, right? So that's a really good sign that your stress hormones are elevated. Now, some of us who are really resilient, you know, we can go through this a long time before things start to break down. But if it does go on long enough and we don't address this, our adrenal glands can really become overtaxed. And that can create a condition called adrenal fatigue, which is a little bit controversial, but I believe in it, because I see this happen to patients from time to time. And I think of it as a state of depletion. So if your adrenal glands are tired out, so is the rest of you. Sometimes that sense of fatigue is profound. I think it's one of the things that might happen to some people even with long COVID. But this long term outcome of stress, it is really something to avoid if at all possible because it can be a little bit tough to recover from or take a while. So the best thing to do is to look for early signs and then address your stress as soon as you can. And then really importantly to protect your sleep because if you continuously being well, that kind of teases or allows your stress system to fall into place and give your adrenals a chance to recover. Sleep really is so powerful. We have some great resources in our free mini courses for sleep as well, just to address some of those sleep issues that you might be facing. So you can head over to the quiz at naturalmentalhealth.com. You'll find it at the top of the homepage, you can get your free mini course and then head to the sleep section for a bunch of resources. I'll put a link in the show notes. So our last rhythm to hit is infradium rhythms. So these are the cycles that occur more than 24 hours apart. These cycles may not seem so obvious either, but when we become aware of them and the symptoms or experiences that surround them, then you can see how powerful they are. So here are a few infradium rhythms that I think are important to note when we're talking about our mental health, menstruation, seasonal effect of disorder. These are big topics as they relate to mental health, but let's just talk about them for a moment here as they relate to tuning into our infradium rhythms because just the awareness of these cycles can be enlightening. So what I think is enlightening here is that, for example, menstruation brings with it changes in mood and energy, needs for sleep, and other symptoms that can be identified and predicted because it's part of the sophisticated elegant cycle, maybe in concert with some of the kind of lunar cycles, but the evidence is not clear on that possibly because we don't really live in sync with nature compared to our ancestors as you were sort of hinting at earlier, Henry. But whatever the relationship here is with the natural world. I think it can be really helpful for women to give a bit more attention to the symptoms that show up around menstruation, maybe document them in a journal or an app. It provides an awareness practice that can be really comforting. For example, when you feel that dark cloud of depression or exhaustion pile on you, seemingly out of nowhere, you can look back at your app or journal and see, oh yeah, this happened last month at nearly the same time. Easy to forget, powerful to realize. And attributing some cause to those symptoms can feel really good. I think that can help release some of the judgment about those symptoms that might come along because we can acknowledge that they are part of this infradian rhythm working in good order within us and then we can do what we need to do to care for ourselves. Yeah, I think a lot of mood problems for women can be tied to their hormones. And I'm not personally expert in treating this, but I've seen a lot of my patients feel much better when it gets addressed. So if this is an issue for any of our listeners, I really think it is important to work with someone who has got a lot of experience with treating more subtle hormone imbalances because it really makes a difference if you're able to get your hormones stabilized particularly with more natural hormones. So seasonal depression is another big topic. And so I'm just going to say a couple of things about it right now. We have a lot more information again at naturalmetalhealth.com and we'll put a link in the show notes. So the root cause of winter depression, I think, is the change in circadian rhythm. The cold, crappy weather doesn't help. And we also do tend to be less active and probably don't eat quite as well in the winter, but it is basically the short days that mess up our biorethms and probably contribute to all of these problems. So here's my short course on how to deal with this and that is to try to convince your body that it's not the middle of the winter. So you use light exposure to make it seem like the days are longer than they actually are. So at the early part and the late part of the day, you try to eat fresh, light foods that are kind of similar to what you might eat in the middle of summer and you keep your body moving. There are also two or three key nutritional supplements that can really help and we'll post those in the show notes as well. Sure. Yeah. Head to all the show notes and naturalmetalhealth.com and your mini course will help with those resources as well. So as Henry said at the top of this episode, this is our last of the more body focus roots of resilience. And next episode, we'll talk a bit more about how resilience and hope come together to nourish our body, mind and spirit. To close our time, there's perhaps no better insight on aligning with nature than the concise wisdom from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. Here it is. Nature does not hurry. Yet everything is accomplished. Thank you for listening to the JoyLab podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, visit joylab.coach to learn more about the full JoyLab program. Be sure to rate and review us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. ♪♪