The Secrets to Being a Successful Adult & Building Your Own Mental Fitness

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Today on Something You Should Know, you probably have some favorite comfort foods, but why those foods? Then some great, quick, and insightful tips on how to be a successful adult. Here's one I think that is very helpful.
Before declaring that something is superficial, unhealthy, inefficient, dangerous, disgusting, or immoral, we should consider maybe this just doesn't suit my taste. Also some wonderful benefits of drinking more water you may not know and important ways for you to improve your own mental health.
These are some of the core tenets that I really want people to focus on, say, making better human connections or building more self-awareness, living a life with more purpose. If there is a bench press for mental health, these tenets help answer some of that.
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Something you should know.

Fascinating intel.

The world's top experts.

And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
When you hear the term comfort food, you know exactly what it is. And comfort food has a couple of interesting characteristics.
Hi, and welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know. By definition, comfort food is food that helps us find comfort when we need it.
It is especially appealing when we're feeling sad or lonely or rejected. Comfort food is most often food that we grew up eating as children.
And comfort food can be different for everyone. In a study at the University of Buffalo, some participants said their comfort food was healthy food.
For others, it was starchy, fatty food. Upon closer examination, the researchers discovered something pretty interesting.
Comfort foods are often the foods that our parents or caregivers gave us when we were children. As long as we have a positive association with the person who made the food, then there's a good chance that you will be drawn to that food during times of rejection or isolation later in life.
And that is something you should know. Do you know what an aphorism is?

An aphorism is a concise statement that contains an expansive truth.

Here's one.

We often know that we want to leave before we know where we want to go.

Here's another one.

It's more fun to change the wallpaper than to fix the roof, but it's less important.

Okay, so now you know what an aphorism is. Let me tell you about my guest, Gretchen Rubin.
Gretchen's been here before, and I love having Gretchen here because, well, first of all, she's fun and happy, and she's made a whole career out of writing and talking about happiness. She's also very wise and insightful,

and she has a new book out called Secrets of Adulthood.

And she is here to talk about some of these,

and I know they will ring true for you and perhaps even give you some clarity on what it means to be an adult.

Gretchen is also host of the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin.

Hey, Gretchen.

I'm so happy to be talking to you again. so rather than go into a big long explanation about aphorisms because that would kind of be contradictory grab one pick one and talk about it as it relates to why you're talking in aphorisms so something like a quest is more fun than a jaunt i just noticed that.
A quest is more fun than a jaunt. It's more fun to go to the flea markets of Paris than to just go to Paris.
Or, you know, it's more fun to walk. And I find it's more fun to sort of walk through the Metropolitan Museum and look for something than to just be wandering around.
So as I go through and look at many of these, you know, some of them ring a louder bell than others. And I imagine everybody has that experience when you look at these going, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh yeah. That's like what we do every day matters than what we do once in a while.
That, that struck me. I mean, I like that one because it's, well, because it's true.
Because it's true. I know.
It's helpful because it's true. Well, one of the things that I'm really excited about having the book going out into the world is which of these are going to resonate most with people? Because I think you're exactly right.
Some of them will strike a chord with people and, you know, you're like dog-earing the page and underlining it. And then for other people people it might not be that meaningful so can we pick a few and and talk about them sure so since you're kind of the queen of happiness um i don't mean to crown you and give you a title i'll take it yeah that there's no right way to create a happier life just as there's no best way to cook an egg.
And I like that. That's so true.
Well, and I found that the hard way because I do write about happiness so much. People would often say to me, but what's the best way to make yourself happier? And I gave a very unsatisfying answer, clearly, which is, well, you know, there's no one right way.
It all depends on your nature and your temperament and your challenges and your situation. And they'd say, okay, sure, but what's the best way or what's the right way or just what's the most efficient way? And I could never find a way to answer that question to people's satisfaction until finally I started saying, well, what's the best way to cook an egg? And people would always look at me very puzzled and they would say, well, it depends on how you like to eat your eggs.
And then some people would say, well, I don't even like eggs. You know, like, oh, I escaped this whole, you know, the whole premise of your question.
And I'm like, that's right. There's no one best way to cook an egg, because everybody has it.
It feels different. Everybody has a different view.
So there can be no one right way so you pick uh one or two that that really either people say they like them or you really like them or you were kind of struck when you came across them or just you just grab grab a few well one that has many people who have seen the book have quoted back me is, we care for many people we don't particularly care for. People are sort of like, oh, yeah, I get that.
We care for somebody, even though we don't particularly care for them. You know, and that's sort of, and that there's a, there's sort of a paradox there, there.
And many, the form of the aphorism often will embrace the paradox as a way to make a point. Another one that I think, and some of these are literally true and then also metaphorically true.
So one that I like is the place that hurts isn't always the place that's injured. And I learned this from when I strained my back because they said, oh, well, you know, your back hurts and you think it's your back that you've injured, but actually it's your hip flexor or something like that.
So the place that hurts isn't always the place that's injured. But I think that's also true in life where often we say, oh, well, you know, I need to switch careers, but in fact, it's my marriage that's in trouble or something like that.
You know, sometimes what we identify as the pain point isn't actually the place that needs to be fixed. One day now will be a long time ago.
I like that because we get so worked up and wrapped up in what's going on right now. And ultimately, you won't even remember this.
Yes, that is so true.

And it's very helpful when you're just dreading something that's on your to-do list.

Just think, in five years, I will not remember this.

But it's also true about remembering how to appreciate the present as well, that it feels like it's now and it will be this way forever.

But I remember when my children were young and it just annoyed me to have a stroller right by our front door. It just, there was no other place to put it.
It just looked terrible. It was just, it just bugged me so much to have that stroller.
And I thought we'd have a stroller by our front door forever. And then looking back, I thought, oh, you know, that now is a long time ago.
And any, everybody can think back on times in their life when they were so involved in something. And like you say, you think it's going to be like this forever and, and the storm never lasts.
It's very, yeah. Yeah.
Pick another one. It's a good thing to remind ourselves of.
Pick another one. Oh, well, another one that's metaphorically true and literally true is, If you don't like a pair of pants, don't pay to get them hemmed.
I think that's funny.

here's one i think that is very very helpful before declaring that something is superficial unhealthy inefficient dangerous disgustingoral, we should consider, maybe this just doesn't suit my taste. Because a lot of times, in my estimation, the things that people say are superficial, unhealthy, inefficient, dangerous, disgusting, and immoral are often things that you're like, no, that's just not my taste.
I used to tell people, oh, you should just get up early and do everything first thing in the morning. That's the most efficient way.
And it's like, yeah, but that just suits my taste. I'm a morning person.
Like for me to say to somebody, oh, there's no way for you to be productive at 1130 at night. Who am I to say that? Many people are highly productive at 1130 at night.
It just doesn't suit my taste. Well, I know a lot of people who I wish would get that.
Don't, yeah. Don't you, I mean, I hear that all the time, you know, the best way to do this, or, you know, how you should do this, or, no, no, no, that's not, that's not me.
Right. That's not me.
Yes, and it's very often that you can just say,

I don't have to tell you how to do your business.

Another one that I really like, this is very helpful.

And when I was writing these, I wrote many aphorisms or secrets of adulthood,

which I realized were just sort of mere observations.

They were just my observations about the world.

They were things like, the tulip is an empty flower.

I'm going to say, that are secrets of adulthood, which I realized were just sort of mere observations. They were just my observations about the world.
They were things like the tulip is an empty flower. I really believe that the tulip is an empty flower.
To me, that's an interesting idea, an interesting way to put it, but it's just an observation. It's not a secret of adulthood.
It doesn't have any kind of, it doesn't, there's nothing helpful about it in terms of moving through life. But one thing, and so I cut all those out.
These are the secrets of adulthood are only things that I think are useful in navigating adulthood. Whether it's like young adults and people are entering adulthood or people are well into adulthood like me.
And one that I live by all the time, which is when in doubt about how to spend our time, energy, or money, spend it on relationships. Because ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree that the most important element of a happy life is relationships.
And so if you're, if we're debating, should I spend money on going to my college reunion? Should I spend time joining a poker club? Should I, you know, should I make an effort to go to that happy hour to see some friends from work? The answer is probably yes, because anything that we spend on relationships benefits our happiness. We're discussing the secrets of being a successful adult, and my guest is the wonderful Gretchen Rubin, author of the book, Secrets of Adulthood, Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives.
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I am a food lover. I love to cook.
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What we do at our house is we serve the food on nice plates, maybe with a glass of wine,phorisms you wrote, as soon as I saw this, a face popped into my mind, and I bet it happens to anybody else, a good friend can be a bad friend if they bring out the worst in us. Mm-hmm.
Yes, that's so true. It's something that we have to remember.
Sometimes people, they don't bring out our best side. But you say, but she's such a good friend.
Well, maybe. Yeah.
Maybe not. Right.
Absolutely. Here's one that caught my eye that I'd like to get you to talk about.
Repeatedly rehearsing for disaster doesn't protect us from it. I think a lot of people have sort of an almost superstitious belief that if they review and review and rehearse disaster, that somehow they'll prevent it.
But that doesn't happen. I mean, it's good to mindfully prepare for disaster, but just going over and over it in your mind is not going to do anything to offset it.
You said earlier that sometimes, you know, people will say these back to you, that they read them and they struck a chord with them and that they would repeat them back to you. Give me an example of that.
One that many people say are kind of puzzled by, and that's part of what I like about some of these, is that you have to stop and reflect and ask yourself what they mean. It might be that some of the people will disagree, and that's good, too.
That's one of the strengths of the aphorism is it forces us to clarify our own thinking because we have to decide whether we agree or not. But one of them is don't expect to be motivated by motivation.
And this is something I believe very profoundly. In my observation, people are not motivated by motivation.
Being highly motivated does not at all correlate with whether somebody does something. So don't expect to be motivated by motivation.
Perfectionism is driven not by high standards, but by anxiety. Yes, because I think a lot of times people make the mistake of thinking like, well, I'm a perfectionist.
And so what you're asking me to do is to lower my standards. And so I refuse to lower my standards, maybe, or maybe I do lower my standards, but it doesn't seem to help.
That's because perfectionism is about anxiety. And so you have to address the anxiety, not the standards.
Because some people have extremely high standards, but they don't have the anxiety. And so then they don't feel they don't have that feeling of, oh, I'm a perfectionist.
They just think I'm just doing my best. Well, one that that I think intersects everybody's life multiple times is do you need more time or do you need to make a decision? Okay, Mike, this took me so long to understand.
This was something that I realized that I did all the time. I delayed making a decision by pretending that I had, I needed more information or I needed to consult with somebody.
It was really just a form of procrastination. I didn't need more time.
I just needed to make up my mind. And you probably already had made up your mind.
You just needed to say it out loud and do it. Or I just needed to just deal with the facts that I knew, which I had perfectly satisfactory amount of information.
I just was hoping that somebody else would do the hard work of deciding, or I just wanted to put it off. And yeah, you're right.
Probably sometimes I kind of in my heart already knew what I wanted to pick, but sometimes you just, you just, you're just sort of hoping that somebody, deciding is hard. Deciding is hard work.
We get a lot of decision fatigue. And sometimes we're trying to, I realized that a lot of my bad habits are me trying to foist off decision making on other people.
Like I realized I had a bad habit of saying to my husband, like, well, what time do you think I should leave for the airport? It's like, it's just, I live in New York City. It's a hassle to figure out what time you leave for the airport because there's so many factors.
Like what time of day is it? How is the traffic? Are you going, you know, which airport are you going to? It's like a multi-factor decision-making thing. And I just wanted him to tell me.
But like, why is that his problem? That is not his problem. He has no more information than I do.
I don't, and then, so I'd be like, oh, I'll just wait and see what he thinks. No, I don't need more time.
I just need to make a decision. And I don't need to consult with somebody else or like, you know, make them do that work.
That's for me to do. I'm the one going to the airport.
Just deal with it. It was just me trying to avoid that.
When I saw that one, what I reflected on is more that when I look back at some of those kind of decisions that I put off and needed more time, I ended up doing what I knew in the beginning I was going to do. Well, that's true too.
I knew a long time ago what I was going to do, but just in case, maybe there's something else I need to consider. But at the end of the day, I did what I was going to do in the first five minutes I knew I had to make a decision.
Yeah. No, that's, see, that's another meaning of it that I hadn't even considered, but that's a great example of how an aphorism can reverberate in many ways.
And this also reminds me of something that I've noticed, you know, because I have the podcast, Happier with Gretchen Ribbon, and I've written all these books. Sometimes people will write it, and I try not to give advice, except to me, I give myself advice.
People will write with situations, and they'll say, well, what do you think I should do? And inevitably, I can just write back. It sounds like you already know what to do.
Because even in their framing of the question, they almost always tip their hand. You know, they know what to do.
And so I think you're exactly right. You sort of, you want someone to come in from the outside and sort of tell you.
I mentioned one in the intro to this segment that I liked and like you to comment on, and that is, we often know we want to leave before we know where we want to go. I trained in law, and I was actually clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor when I decided I wanted to be a writer.
And people often say to me, like, oh, how did you do that? Like, that must have been really hard and everything. But what made it much easier for me is I knew the book that I wanted to write.
I had an idea for a book and I was doing all this research sort of, even before I thought, oh, this could make a book. Then it occurred to me, hey, this could make a book.
And hey, I could be the person to write that book. And so it was so much easier for me to leave because I knew exactly where I wanted to go.
It wasn't even that I wanted to write. It was that I wanted to write this particular book, which, in fact, I was well, was already well underway.
And that made it so much easier for me that I realized, like, as I talked to other people and observed the world, that actually that was very unusual. And then I was extremely fortunate.
That actually made my transition much easier than it usually is. Because often we know that we want to leave before we know where we want to go.
And sometimes it's just helpful to realize, like, yeah, you may not know where you want to go, but you know it's time to leave. Yeah, I guess you don't need to know where you want to go in order to leave.
First, you just need to leave. In fact, maybe you can't figure out where you want to go until you do.
I think that's very true for some people. Yep.
One that I think is funny is you're unique, just like everybody else. We don't have to be good at something to be good at something.
Oh, this is so helpful. So Dolly Parton can't read music.
Michael Jackson can read music. I think when I was growing up, I kind of had this idea that if I was going to do anything, I had to excel at all the parts of it.
But now I know people who work in finance who are not good with numbers. I know people who are highly acclaimed artists who are not good at sketching.
This idea that you have to be good at everything to be good at something. You don't have to be good at something to be good at something.
I feel like sometimes people limit their possibilities because there's some element that they think is necessary. Maybe you don't need, maybe you just work around that.
Maybe there's just something that there's some part of it that you just don't do. There was one, and I don't have it in front of me, but it relates to the idea that not deciding is a decision.
Yes, that is it. Not deciding is a decision.
Yeah. One of the great challenges of life is making decisions because that's just one of the hardest things that we have to do.
And sometimes we just delay and delay and delay without confronting the fact that not deciding is a decision. Because at a certain time, events are foreclosed, or something just isn't possible anymore, or it's not realistic anymore.
I remember when my husband and I first got married, we were moving cities a couple times, and my mother and father said to us, well, if there's someplace you want to go, get there. Because at a certain point, you're just going to stop moving.
You get rooted in place. It becomes much more challenging to keep moving.
Obviously, some people do, but it becomes harder. And I thought that was such good advice because we might have just ended up someplace, not because we were deciding that we wanted to spend the next 30 years there, but just because we hadn't thought about it.
Or, you know, you just you miss a window of opportunity for something and not deciding is a decision. Don't do something to make yourself feel better if it just ends up making you feel worse.
And who hasn't done that? I mean, yes, that's just a very helpful thing to keep in mind. Because people will say, oh, well, I'm doing this for self-care.
I'm doing this because it makes me feel better. I'm doing this because I need to calm down.
I need to energize myself. But if it just makes you feel worse, the minute it's over, if you've been impulse shopping or impulse snacking or impulse doom scrolling, it's not making you feel better.
It's just making you feel worse. Well, you're always a pleasure to talk to.
You always brighten the day. And of all the authors that I've interviewed, I've never before today interviewed someone who wrote a book in aphorisms.
I've been talking to Gretchen Rubin. The name of her book is Secrets of Adulthood, Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives.
And if you'd like to buy a copy of that book, which apparently an awful lot of people are, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Gretchen, thanks for being here.
Thank you. Great to talk to you again.
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We're talking Parasite the Home Alone. From Grease to the Dark Knight.
So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.
And don't forget to hit the follow button. Do you have good mental health? I don't think I really know what that means exactly, to have good mental health.
Don't we all have our little quirks and issues? And isn't your mental health largely the result of your childhood? Maybe, maybe there are some things we can do to steer our own mental health in the right direction. That's what Dr.
Drew Ramsey is here to reveal. He is a board-certified psychiatrist and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.
He's author of a book called Healing the Modern Brain, Nine Tenets to Build Mental Fitness and Revitalize Your Mind. Hey, doctor, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi, Mike. Great to be with you.
So I like that term mental fitness because it because it implies like physical fitness it is something you can do yourself to make better but i'm not sure i'm not sure i know exactly what mental fitness is so can you explain that yeah that's the whole point mental fitness are the things that we do to build our mental health and i formally define it as it's the knowledge patterns habits and skills that culminate in a more enjoyable more mentally sound life and these include just in broad strokes here these include things like what like diet like sleep like i mean just like what are the the big buckets here yeah, so there's some of the classics of lifestyle medicine that, you know, everybody knows they need to do a little better job on, probably whether it's in nutrition or sleep hygiene or maybe moving our bodies more. So it's some of those ideas.
I try to put those ideas in a new context for people, which is how it specifically relates to brain health and mental health. And these new parts of mental health that people aren't really paying attention to that maybe we'll get into a little bit, you know, the idea that our brain grows, that's a different motivation for sleep time.
But along with these classic tenets of lifestyle medicine, you know, sleeping better, eating better, moving our bodies, I saw that some things were changing for my patients around a certain set of issues that when they invest time in, you know, let's say making better human connections or building more self-awareness or living a life with more purpose, it just did transformative things for their mental health. And so it seemed that investing in these, you know, if there was a bench press for mental health, like what would it be? I feel like these tenants help answer some of that, that we have a set of activities and a framework where we can, you know, whether we have a mental health diagnosis or not, whether we can be making our mental fitness stronger.

And so when you say it improves mental health, what does that mean? What does improved mental health look like compared to pre-improved mental health?

That's really easy. Mike, you have a hobby?

Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, that's great.

Your risk of depression just went down by 30 percent.

Have you eaten seafood in the past two to four weeks? Yeah. Leafy greens and nutrient-dense stuff? Yeah.
Yeah. Your risk of depression probably just went down by another 30% or so.
Do you have a life that you're living with a sense of purpose? Sure. Yeah.
I think so. Okay.
Well, you just have, according to the data, a bunch of factors related to both your biology, your brain health, and your risk of mental health illnesses, all of which look a lot better to me as a psychiatrist because of your answers to those questions. Not everybody is in as fortunate a position as Mike of having a great sense of purpose.
And I think particularly when you've had some mental health struggles or when you're having mental health symptoms, which we know more than ever people are, those types of things can be a little bit elusive. And so these are some of the core tenets that I really want people to think about and focus on, you know, beyond, again, some of these standard, really important pieces.
We also want people working on and thinking about things like living a life with purpose, having hobbies and being engaged in those hobbies, because these are really protective for our mental health. The things like diet, and I know you talk a lot about that, like, what's the connection? What's the science? Because I don't think people think of that as, you know, we hear things like sugar makes kids hyper kind of science but that's not from my understanding real science anyway but but the connection between food and brain seems tenuous oh boy i'm so glad you put it that way because it blows me away that more people don't know about the connection.
You know, it feels like so often folks know misinformation about food or fear mongering or, you know, something they're trying to avoid, but they haven't heard something like, wow, if you have clinical depression and you're in treatment and you're not getting all the way better and you start eating a Mediterranean style diet, which means, you know, more nuts, more whole grains, more lentils and beans, more seafood, you know, tasty diet. You're about a 30, I'm sorry, 32% of people in that situation will go into full remission from their depression.
So that was a randomized trial called the SMILES trial. And there've been a number of these trials that connect our food to our mental health.
So there are a lot of mechanisms by which this work. Number one is how our dietary pattern, the foods that we eat, affect the growth and repair mechanisms of our brain.
This is called neuroplasticity, and it's really cool, cutting-edge neuroscience. And it has to be how we start thinking about the care of our brains and our minds.
We want to think about our brain, our mind, not again, this is like broken thing, right? Struggling with all these symptoms, but is this dynamic organ that is growing and repairing herself. And we have, you know, with our activities, with our choices, we have a say in how well some of that goes.
The other way is just people are missing a bunch of nutrients that are super important for mental health. A lot of Americans in particular like to kind of go on a, I don't know, supplement frenzy, but they're missing some things that really food is a much better source, stuff like fiber, phytonutrients, which are all these cool molecules found in plants.
You know, I'd even argue just a lot of people are eating a diet according to the data, most recent research on the American diet, they're just missing a lot of nutrients like vitamin E or magnesium. And what I find really fascinating is a lot of us, a lot of eaters, don't know where to find the most important nutrients for our brain.
Like if I started quizzing you, Mike, on your top folate source vitamin B9, or we're like, when I need a little B12, that's my go-to meal. Most of us don't have one.
And I think that's a huge red flag. I mean, if you're listening and you don't have a sense of some of these nutrients, it's a huge opportunity in terms of a place whereby learning more, going beyond this idea that, you know, a multivitamin gives us an insurance policy and just learning a little more around how to nourish our mental health.
You know, what I find is a lot of people know and like some of the top brain foods, whether it's, you know, wild salmon or pesto or white beans or sauteed greens with garlic. I mean, there's a lot of delicious stuff for your mental health.
And then lastly, Mike, sorry to keep going on, but the microbiome, which is all of the organisms that live in our gut, what you eat directly affects the type of organisms that are living there. And if you just think about it in simple terms, having a diversity, certain sort of markers in your microbiome, that is really good for your health overall.
So one of the things that I think people, at least I'm not clear about when it comes to food, is how big a difference in your diet do you have to make? Is it what you add to your diet, what you take away from your diet? If you eat an apple, is that going to do anything? Or do you have to completely revamp your whole way of eating? And then how much benefit is there? Is it a little bit benefit or is this just profoundly change who you are or what? it depends where you are for certain people for sure there'll be a profound change if you really

embrace this idea and you get off of a diet of highly processed foods, if you, with that, start probably eating more plants, better quality protein, losing weight, I mean, you're on the path to transformative health changes. I think that we do probably need to be serious.
Everyone's kind of hedging like, oh, how much? It's like, we do need to be realistic about where the health of this country is and why we're having such a problem. We don't need a lot of new research.
I mean, it's not a mystery of what's going on, that as a populace, we really struggle with a lot of excess caloric consumption, a lot of excess alcohol consumption. A lot of people are still struggling with smoking.
So we've got some massive health problems on our hand. I'm very convinced that food is medicine and that controlling what you eat is an essential step that I hope everybody listening feels very empowered to do.
None of my food recommendations are onerous or boring. I believe I grew up on a farm.
I've grown a lot of food along with being a physician. And I think food should be simple.
I think it should be delicious. I think it should be really affordable.
That's where recommendations of mine, like lentils, like if you haven't made lentils at home in a while, I don't know. Again, I think that's another little bit of a red flag that something's going on because super inexpensive, a fiber, another great thing you find in lentils, 18 grams of protein in a cup.
Wow. Wow.
I mean, it's just amazing. And dirt cheap.
You can buy dried lentils for almost nothing. What about exercise? You know, I've heard that exercise is better than an antidepressant and that it does wonders for people.
But how much exercise and how much wonder does it do? Just to be clear, for clinical depression, exercise is equal to the antidepressant search for lead in an 18-month trial. And exercise feels like it beats antidepressants because nobody has stigma about exercise and exercise probably has more mechanisms than sertraline Zoloft.
Because I think there's a notion that people have right now that, you know, we got to lift a lot of weights, build a lot of muscle, it's like protein, protein, protein. And that works for some people.
And I think muscles and lifting weights, you know, that's all important stuff. But a lot of people are getting left out of the movement revolution.
And a lot of people maybe who are doing things like going on vigorous walks or getting out into nature, or maybe just riding their bike around town, or signing up for their first 5k that they're just going to shuffle along. I think that all that stuff counts.
In Healing the Modern Brain, I share some really wonderful stories of patients who've just impacted me over the years. And I share the story of a woman who I keep telling to exercise, she has horrible depression, just like you say, you know, it's like, oh, it's as good as an antidepressant.
Do my very best to motivate her, ask her about stuff she liked. And just kind of became a sore point in our relationship.
She wasn't exercising. One day she showed up, she was just radiant, feeling great, big smile on her face, and she'd started dancing again.
So improving your mental fitness, your mental health seems a bit of a daunting task. So if I were to come to you and say, well, okay, doctor, I want to improve my mental fitness.
Where do you begin? You've talked about a lot of different things you can do, but let's put them in some kind of order. Where do you start? The first step of mental fitness and building mental fitness is self-awareness.
And if you're the kind of person who's not setting goals and achieving them, you don't have discipline, you know, you keep picking up habits and dropping them, you've now put years and years of not living a healthy lifestyle. You know, it's really important that the motivation for this gets very accentuated and kind of dissected as a first step.
Otherwise, the same pattern is just going to repeat itself. A lot of people don't know why they aren't successful in caring for themselves.
They really haven't understood why the forces, genetics, whatever has conspired that you do not prioritize yourself, your health, and your mental health. And a lot of people don't.
And so I think the source of motivation has really gotten messed up in the modern world. And so I think, again, to your question, like, how do we make behavioral change in our lives? I'm a psychotherapist and psychiatrist.
And I think at the root of that, and why psychotherapy works is there is a commitment. There's a commitment.
If you have ideas of how you're going to work on your mental health this week and you and I are going to see each other in a week, there is that deadline effect. There's that accountability.
You don't have to be in therapy to have accountability to yourself. I make a lot of different recommendations.
One of them is a journal. And just that, you know, we do better when we write things down.
We see things in front of us. And the tenet of connection, we talk a lot about the meaningful importance for our brain health and our mental health, having friendships and building intimacy with loved ones.
But I ask people to think about their web of connection a little bit more broadly. And it relates to what you're talking about, Mike, which is, you know, when you, for example, are going to an exercise class or running or walking with a hiking group, you know, there's your connections there, you know, to are giving you an accountability, helping you with something that might be hard for you, motivation.
But again, where do you start? Because there are all these things you've been talking about that a person can try to do better in their life. But give me a starting point.
Where am I going to get the most bang for my buck? I start with the first tenet for a reason, which is I think you're going to get the most bang for your buck out of self-awareness. that thinking, not that we want to be isolated from others, but that when we take control of

our mental health, when we see ourselves as connected to a lot of other people who are caring about their mental health and mental fitness, and that there are a lot of new resources, new science, new people to be inspired by. So that's where I started, it's self-awareness.
Some of key tenants, you know, number two is nutrition for a reason. I mean, Mike, you focus on nutrition.
My other books have all been about food and mental health because there's been so much advancement, so much data, so much cool science coming out to give people a better sense of how to eat to feed their mental health. And then, you know, it's hard to imagine anyone having optimal mental health and mental fitness if they're not sleeping.
You know, sleeping isn't just resting your brain. Your neurons are just as active in sleep as they are when they're awake.
Your neurons are going through a cleaning cycle in sleep. The most recent research shows actually, again, it kind of frames how much brain science is changing and how much should it inform these choices that we're talking about today.
We didn't know about the brain's waste-drained system until I think it was 2014 that researchers discovered it. It's a new part of our brain called the glymphatic system.
And the glymphatic system seems to be most active during sleep and during certain deeper sleep stages where our brain cells, at least in the models we've seen, tend to shrink and kind of flush more waste out. There's about seven grams of waste that comes out of your brain in the evening that is what researchers estimate.
And so, again, this notion that sleep isn't just us getting our Zs and having some nice dreams, but it's this really critical period. And we're going to like put our brain into a different state, let it get ready for the next day.
We're also processing motions. We're laying down our memories.
I mean, you know, everybody listening, Mike, you know, too, when we don't sleep well, you know, we just don't feel right. We don't process as well, especially as you get older.
So that would be another one of the foundational ones that, again, we just see so many Americans are struggling with insomnia or waking up in the middle of the night or just not fully, fully refreshed or not having

their sleep apnea diagnosed or eating too late or not having a bedroom that supports sleep. So if you get your bedroom more dialed in for sleep, that, that pays off, that starts paying off night one.
And what is a, my bedroom going to look like if it's more dialed in for sleep? I think that some of the basics of sleep

hygiene get skipped over. I start with air quality.
We're living, again, what's different about your

modern brain? It's full of plastic. Where does that plastic come from? It comes from the foods

we eat. It also comes from the air we breathe.
So is your bedroom filled with lots of nylon blankets

and all kinds of artificial stuff where you have mostly natural fibers and a HEPA filter? Making sure it's really dark. I have a patient who just put up blackout curtains and I was like, I broke into applause.
Track your, well, we're on kind of sleep hygiene things, but I use these sleep trackers. It's not, you know, perfect data.
If you get a bad score, it doesn't mean that, oh, you know, it's over for you. But boy, you can learn a lot about your sleep cycling.
You can kind of see how your brain is trying to sleep cycle. We go through four, two hour sleep cycles every night.
You can kind of get a really good sense of yourself as a sleeper with some tracking. So those are noise.
You know, I spent a lot of my life living in Manhattan. And if you don't do something about the external noise, you just, you know, you get woken up every time somebody takes their dog for a walk or there's a alarm goes off.
So figuring out how to decrease the noise in your bedroom if you're, again, just to decrease disturbance, really important. So those are some of the things I see people do that help.
Well, it's very empowering to think that there are lifestyle things we can do like diet and sleep that will build our mental fitness and improve our mental health. It's great to hear this.
I've been talking to Dr. Drew Ramsey.
The name of his book is Healing the Modern Brain, Nine Tenets to Build Mental Fitness and Revitalize Your Mind. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.
You hear a lot about the benefits of drinking more water. How many times have you been reminded to drink water, stay hydrated? Well, it turns out to be pretty good advice because there are a lot of benefits.
First of all, when you drink more water, you increase your metabolic rate a little bit, which means you burn more calories while at rest. You are also likely to eat less.
A study by the Institute for Public Health and Water Research found that people who drank two 8-ounce glasses of water before each meal consumed 75 to 90 fewer calories while eating that meal. You also look better.
Drinking water plumps up the skin, fills in fine lines and wrinkles, and enlivens a dull complexion. And it can improve your mood.
In one study, people who exercised without drinking water first reported that they felt fatigued, confused, angry, depressed, and tense compared to the people who did drink water first. And that is something you should know.
the podcast player that you're listening to this on most likely has a share button somewhere on it. And all you have to do is click on that share button and send this to someone you know.
It helps us grow our audience and we would be very appreciative. I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. We are here to humbly invite you to join us for our fifth Buffy prom, which, if you can believe it, we are hosting at the actual Sunnydale High School.
That's right. On April 4th and 5th, we will be descending upon the campus of Torrance High School, which was the filming location for Buffy's Sunnydale High.
To dance the night away, to 90s music in the iconic courtyard, to sip on punch right next to the Sunnydale High fountain, and to nerd out together in our prom best inside of the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All information and tickets can be found at bufferingcast.com slash prom.
Come join us. Have you ever heard about the 19th century French actress with so many lovers that they formed a lover's union? Or what about the Aboriginal Australian bandit who faked going into labor just to escape the police, which she did escape from them.
It was a great plan. How about the French queen who murdered her rival with poison gloves? I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History.
Every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know, and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we reexamine well-known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas, sharing the truth behind their legends.
Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get podcasts.
And if you're

curious, the people I was talking about before, the Australian woman was named Marianne Bug,

and the French actress was named Rochelle. No last name, just Rochelle.
And the queen who

poisoned her rival is Catherine de' Medici. I have episodes about all of them.