Four important areas that we need to focus:

• body (nutrition, sleeping, exercise, digital detox);
• mind (productive, focused,  innovative & learning, leveraging strengths);
• heart (connected, trust-based relationships, feeling valued, inclusion);
• soul (passion & intent, volunteering, legacy).

Please remember, that all of these areas are key to our holistic health.

Stress is very often a precursor to common mental health conditions, like anxiety and like depression. If it is unmanaged, ends in typically a bad place. Stress is the number one health related reasons for lost productivity. From a behavioral perspective, people can become withdrawn. They start to lose a sense of enjoyment in the things that they would have typically enjoyed.

It can result in more aggressive behaviour. It can often result in poor sleep, which tends to increase that cycle of poor mental health that people are experiencing. Obviously from an emotional perspective it increased level of anxiety, fear, frustration, fatigue.

So what is it that we need in life? – the angel cocktail. These are the chemicals that are good for us and that we want in our lives. We want dopamine, which is responsible for focus and motivation. We want oxytocin, which is often referred to as the love or the bliss chemical. We want serotonin which is to do with our happiness and endorphins, which help to make us feel good about ourselves.

How do we start to get some of these chemicals to help boost the way that we feel every day? Outside the support that we can get from our friends and loved ones and the networks that we have, there’s a lot that we can do for ourselves…..

Exercise – regardless whether you’re doing a small walk or a long jog, playing football, whatever it is that you might be doing, this is the chemical reaction that takes place when you do exercise. Exercises reduces the risk of depression by up to 20 percent and also to improve our complex decision making as well.  

Nutrition – proper food, green tea instead of coffee, vitamin D, B complex

Sleep – it is vital to how we function every day (7-9 hours’ sleep). Think how you prepare to get enough sleep (between 10 and 2 we get our most restorative processes). Consider that the temperature of your room – 18 degrees, get devices down, that have blue ray which tricks the brain into thinking that it’s still day time.

Mindfulness – we have between 50,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day, Thoughts are going to come and they’re going to come all day every day. That’s what the brain does. The science is showing that 70 percent of our thoughts are negative. Those negative thoughts are having a real impact on us in the now, in the moment and it is impacting out health both physically and mentally as well. You need to exercise how to be focused. Practice small, start with kind of 2-5 minutes exercises and make it as part of your routine. We tend to be worried about what people are thinking, what’s going on. Mindfulness is very powerful way of bringing yourself back to the moment, being focused on what needs to be done and enabling you to live that happier, more fulfilled life in the moment.