5 practices for mental wellbeing

Here are the 5 tools that I wish I knew about earlier. The ones that, out of trial and experimentation and dozens of mental health books, have personally stuck with me and help me on a daily basis.

1. Build a coherent value system

I remember I first started noticing incoherence in my value system when I would catch myself mid-judgment. It turned out that my brain was really good at constantly imposing "good" or "bad" judgments on pretty much everything it had access to; people, events, ideas, research articles, photos, you name it. It had two response modes, attraction or condemnation, and this judgmentalism was like a hidden puppet string driving my thoughts and actions. But that voice of judgement running in the back of my mind was something I had neither chosen nor wanted. Once I took a step back and observed it (something that was difficult), I realised that it was often harsh, self-righteous, or superficial. And it turned out to be essentially an echo of the judgments from others that had most hurt or validated me in the past.

I didn't want to see the world through someone else's value system. I started trying to build my own. I started asking what my values actually were. Or even: what I would want them to be. What were the things I deeply cared about consistently? And which things did I care about only because I cared about the opinions of other people who cared about them?

There’s a quote in my book:

Here is the recipe for living well: align your values to each other, align your thoughts to your values, align your actions to your thoughts.

This is self-integration, which I believe is essential for wellbeing, and the first step is a coherent value system.

If you are unsure on your current values, take a clear look at what you spend time on on a daily basis - both what you think about and what you actually do - and the most memorable moments of your life in the past few years. Ask yourself for each one, did I choose to give value to this? Do I actually want to? Are my values generally aligned with each other, or have I squeezed some major drives into specific time slots or situations in order to suppress conflict with other parts?

Value system formation is part discovery, part construction, and part destruction. Experimentation is essential. I remember how some thoughts I found appealing at the beginning (e.g. living off grid in some remote beautiful place) turned out to be temporary; essentially an overcorrection to an imbalanced routine. I believe that it is not the nature of one’s values that makes a value system better or worse, fundamentally. What matters is whether the value system is coherent or conflicted - it just so happens that empathy, compassion, and authenticity (and by extension the health and authenticity of our social relationships) are so key to human wellbeing that it could be argued that they are part of some universal human value system (in that everyone gains benefit from practising and prioritising them, whether they consciously value them or not). It would follow that to maintain value system coherence, empathy, compassion and authenticity can't be in conflict with any other values you pick up.

I removed the rhetoric around hard work and built my own value system around it. I do believe there is value in mastery - when the domain is one you wholeheartedly choose. Working hard is not necessarily self-sacrificial or a symptom of drinking society's kool-aid when deep down the motivation is to contribute something, rather than receive something (read: recognition and validation).

I started practising looking at the world through my own eyes. I practised yanking my locus of perspective away from the default judgement I had been sharpening and reinforcing for years which was a direct reflection of my conditioning, and explicitly looking at situations using my shaky but handmade value system. I dropped false idols. I practised resisting the urge to reach for others' opinions, in order to test and strengthen my own perception. I actually stopped sharing the details of all my plans. I noticed that I was so outwardly oriented towards other's judgments and reactions, real or imagined, that telling others deteriorated my focus and my intrinsic drive to action those plans and carry them to fruition.

My value system continues to be tested, and to change, but the resolution of internal conflict in decision making has had an impact on my sure-footedness and peace of mind. Values ground me, motivate me and anchor me. They give me solid ground and handrails on the path. They make commitment feel easy: without values, commitment to anything is hard because it just feels like a constraint. In other words, I’ve found that resilience comes from purpose. Not from chocolate cake or even therapy or time off work, although those may be necessary contingencies! Ultimately, where you find aligned purpose, you find your resilience.

2. Practice humility

This is the antithesis to every marketing message we receive, whether that's the egotism underpinning much of pop culture or people explicitly writing books about how to accumulate power (if you don't know about the author I'm talking about, be glad). The reality is that we are all just tiny momentary particles in evolution's giant, billion-year particle physics experiment, whether you are Beyonce, a trash collector, or have 100 direct reports in a giant multinational. And I've found there to be significant benefits to accepting that.

Daily schedule at the meditation and yoga retreat where I taught for a few weeks

Recognising your relative insignificance opens the door to humility, gratitude, and appreciation. On the other hand, taking everything you receive for granted, out of a misplaced sense of superiority, drains your life of wellbeing. Again, I'm fully aware that this may sound like common sense to some, but to those of us who grew up on a treadmill of chasing and trying to live up to praise, humility and gratitude are acquired tastes that feel like bitter medicine while ego is still running the roost.

Humility is pure fuel. It makes you far more receptive to learning (ever noticed how ego slows your ability to learn from mistakes? Or even caused you to learn the wrong lesson?). It propels you in a sustainable way, where setbacks and slowdowns don't seem to discourage you as much. It opens your eyes to your small foothold in a much larger universe; it allows you to connect to something much bigger than yourself. Humility takes the pressure off your achievements and helps you notice that the value lies in your ever-present participation. In gratitude, you begin to live from the perspective of what you can give, rather than always optimising for what you can gain.

Humility also deepens our social connections. For love-starved kids, connection is a healing balm, but we tend to end up seeking admiration instead, for the simple reason that admiration is what we are trained to seek. Unfortunately admiration and genuine connection are oppositional in nature (which isn't to say they can't coexist in the same relationship, just not at exactly the same time). Admiration is what we're taught will bring others closer, but the reality is that it distances them at an experiential level: people only admire you when they don't relate to you on some level. To connect with someone, we need to be able to be genuinely vulnerable and share struggles that don't necessarily put us in a hero's light. (That's false vulnerability - more common, no humility needed.) The human in them needs to be able to see the human in you, beyond the shiny armour. Without humility, this is terrifying; with humility, it feels effortless.

It's not practical, or desirable, to live permanently in a state of deep humility. But even if you are submerged in a profession where the culture requires a certain degree of egotism to contribute to the level of your capability - like academic research - you don't have to fully buy into it. Being able to use a behaviour and being controlled by it are different things. I resolve this conflict between ego and humility (to prevent conflict in my values) by putting the focus on the meaningfulness of the directions I give my energy to, and not my personal contribution to them.

And I try to retain awareness of my insignificance in the grand scheme of things in the back of my mind.

3. RAIN for on-the-spot emotional regulation

The first time I heard about this in a TED talk, it didn't resonate with me at all. I only understood it intellectually. For every inner work practice, I believe we each have to get to a point where it becomes accessible to us experientially.

The RAIN acronym stands for:

Recognise
Accept
Investigate
Non-identify

I often use this practice when I catch myself in emotional imbalance. Even joy, sometimes - I've learned what makes me wildly happy isn't always healthy, especially when I was early in the journey - but I mostly practise this when I'm feeling anxious, judgmental, unsettled, fearful, angry or ruminative. For example:

First comes recognition. Wow, I'm caught in a negative spiral again. This involves taking a step back from the situation mentally. With distance comes objectivity and the ability to see the truth of what is happening in the moment (which is often precisely nothing).

Then acceptance. My brain has its quirks. It is what it is. It's ok.

I investigate a little by asking where these thoughts are coming from. I find it’s often an old fear or coping mechanism that has caused me to lose sight of my values.
Finally comes the third person viewpoint. Bringing to mind someone I both admire and connect with, what would they say to me? Or, what would I say to my inner child?

After some time, it became apparent through this practice exactly how repetitive and pointless many of my ruminative thoughts were, to the point where I sometimes smile in the recognition stage. Sometimes the experience is one I have already investigated multiple times, so that stage is fleeting. Sometimes I reach recognition and acceptance in the same stage. The whole process can be over in 5 seconds, or I might need a few minutes.

I've found this practice works reliably at helping me process emotional experiences by neutralising them without suppressing them. It helps me learn from my emotional responses, as opposed to learning by my emotional responses.

4. Default positivity

I used to think that negativity reflected a good grip on reality, and even consciously or subconsciously associated it with intellect. Now I associate chronic negativity with unprocessed suffering or trauma. I used to have a bias towards pessimism. Whenever I was dwelling in resentment towards the past, what I eventually realised I was actually doing was holding onto the suffering out of the subconscious belief that if I didn't protest what had happened, no one would, no one would pay for it, and my inner child would be stuck there alone and invalidated. Each mention of parenting would trigger me; if not out loud, then in my head. It was effectively a delayed (and ineffective) attempt at protecting my inner child and giving them the attention they never received. Once I brought my focus to the fact that my inner child lived on in me in the present, and I was actually hurting them by constantly dragging up the past, I started being able to catch myself in the negative thought patterns, and subsequently unlearn them.

We need to have a balanced view to engage effectively with the world, and this precludes unconditional positivity. But the default tone of my response to both rewarding and challenging situations is now typically neutral-positive, whereas it used to be either really negative or (on rare occasions) wildly celebratory.

The first step was acknowledging that I actually wanted to be more positive; that positivity was one of my chosen values. I accepted that emotions would arise in a way I couldn’t control, but how I responded to them was my choice, and that I would give life to whatever I gave energy to. I stopped fearing that positivity was foolish in the face of potential rejection or failure because I started seeing rejection as redirection. I started acknowledging all the good things I had in my life - which appear not when they actually appear, but when you notice them - including how many things that I once wanted actually materialised.

Some of the practices I developed included becoming much more aware of the general tone of my thoughts, and gently nudging myself out of negatively valenced states by immediately bringing to mind something I was grateful for in that moment. I became more mindful of the content I consumed, especially the kinds of music I listened to, people I followed online, and news content; I noticed a particularly significant shift in my mental wellbeing after I drastically cut down how much time I read the news. The unfortunate reality of the information age is that content is optimised to keep our attention, and often that means hooking up to our fear response. Being aware and controlling these sources of influence is consistent with my greater values; I’m not going to be of much service to the world if I walk around constantly fearing the worst.

5. Self-care rituals

Acts of self-care are not a self-indulgent luxury. I believe it's like prescription medicine; self-care will generally not heal you on its own, but it plays an important supporting role in the process because it's an accessible way to make life a little easier to deal with, giving you more breathing room, while the deeper, slower, less instinctive mechanisms like those listed above can do their work.

I’m a particular fan of self-care through food. I may be in health research now but like Attia, I don’t believe that living to 200 years old is either a realistic or worthwhile goal, and I acknowledge that health neuroses and orthorexia are real risks. I’m interested in health ultimately because I’m interested in the question of what it means for a human to live well, whether that’s at a macroscopic or molecular level, which may well preclude being religious about nutrition. Having said that, nutrition is undoubtedly a key pillar of health - even if the details of the science are fuzzier than one might expect - and it’s one area that I’ve found relatively easy to practice what I preach.

I think the key to sustainable healthy eating is to learn to enjoy it. To try to make food choices with a nourish-and-appreciate mindset, as opposed to a restrict-and-punish mindset.

Here are some of my favourite self-care activities:

Solo yoga practice
Making an easy healthy meal
Cup of tea and a snack
Spiritual book
Nap with soothing audio track
Finding a sunny or peaceful spot in nature to sit
Planning and editing my schedule
Half hour unstructured writing session

Is scheduling an act of self-care? I consider it to be one of the most important ones. With my todos all jotted down and approximately time allocated, a weight is taken off my head and I feel more free to focus on the present moment knowing that nothing is forgotten. That the small and large goals on my mental vision board are in the process of being developed.