Boost Your Mental Health With These 5 Simple Daily Habits

5 easy things you can do to improve your mental health, today.

“Wellness is daily.” — Sir John Kirwan

Our mental state largely comes down to what we do on a daily basis.

Our habits and routines either support or sabotage the state of our minds. This is good news, because it means we can improve our mental health by simply optimizing our habits. These don’t need to be big, herculean actions either. Small steps, repeated often, lead to big results.

Here are 5 simple daily habits that will boost your mental health.

1. Keep a Consistent Sleep-Wake Schedule

Sleep needs to be a priority if you want to boost your mental health.

Sleep is the foundation of health. Without adequate sleep, both your physical and mental health will start to suffer.

Keeping a consistent wake time and bedtime is the first step. Our internal clocks — the circadian rhythm — thrive off consistency. It only works well when things are kept the same every single day.

The circadian rhythm needs to be able to predict when you’re going to wake up and when you’re going to go to sleep so that it can prepare your body and mind accordingly.

Action Step

• Pick both a wake time and bedtime you can stick to every day of the week. Your body doesn’t know when it’s the weekend.

2. Get Outside

Daylight exposure is crucial.

Humans have not evolved to sit inside under artificial lights. In fact, this can actually harm both our mental and physical health.

You need to make an effort to get outside on a regular basis. And when you can’t be outside, at least sit near a window when possible.

Our circadian rhythms are at play again here. Daylight signals to the body that it’s daytime, and it’s time to be awake and alert. This has huge benefits for your mental wellbeing.

When we sit inside in dimly and/or artificially-lit rooms, our mental health suffers.

Action Steps

• Get outside as often as possible
• Avoid wearing sunglasses when safe to do so (so that you’re optimizing the daylight exposure)
• Sit near windows when you can’t be outside

3. Meditate

“How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore the quality of our lives.” — Sam Harris

If you want to support your mental state, you need to make meditation a priority.

Your mind is all you have — and meditation is the greatest tool at your disposal for optimizing it.

Meditation gives you the mental space and clarity to handle any adversity. It allows you to recognize, process, and manage thoughts. And in most cases, negative thought patterns are what lead to the breakdown of mental health.

Action Steps

• Create a daily meditation practice
• Commit to meditating every single day — even if just for a few minutes

“Having a life so hectic that you can’t fit in 20 minutes for your mental well being isn’t a sign of productivity, it’s a sign of disorder.” — Nat Eliason

4. Eat Single-Ingredient Foods

What we eat literally becomes who we are.

Our brains are made up of the foods we have eaten, which means if we want to take care of our minds, we need to be eating well.

The simplest way to do this is to eat single-ingredient foods as much as possible. A single-ingredient food is a food as it comes in nature — fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, nuts, seeds, etc. These are made up of just one ingredient, not a list of ingredients.

This will help you make sure that the foods you are eating are nutrient-dense and will build a high-quality brain.

Action Step

• Opt for single-ingredient foods as much as you can

5. Limit Cheap Sources of Dopamine

Dopamine is the molecule of more.

It’s what motivates you to continue doing something. For example, when scrolling social media, you get hit with a lot of dopamine. This is what keeps you scrolling.

Similarly, eating junk foods releases dopamine — which is why it’s so hard to stop. The dopamine keeps you coming back for more.

Dopamine is a good and helpful neurotransmitter. But in our society, we get way too much of it, and we get it way too easily.

Things like

• Junk food
• Porn
• Videos games
• Social media
• Notifications

are all cheap sources of dopamine that we need to limit.

When your dopamine system is fried by these cheap sources, you don’t experience excitement and motivation for other things. You don’t experience pleasure and joy to the same degree. And like drugs, you need more and more dopamine to get that excited feeling.

Action Steps

• Avoid cheap sources of dopamine where possible
• Get your dopamine from productive sources — such as working out, working on meaningful projects, and pursuing the things that interest you

Want to transform your health, one habit at a time?

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