optimize your mind, body + spirit during COVID:

A Three-part series

Note: This guide was published March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Part 1: Optimizing the Mind

If you asked me in 2019 if I could find a way to combine my current life as a mind-body doctor at Harvard with my past life as a global health worker at the WHO in Geneva, I would’ve said, nah, impossible. That was pre-Covid, before we were faced with a pandemic that threatened our everyday way of life and our collective sense of well-being. But here we are, in the midst of it all. There is no better time than now to strengthen your resilience! Resilience is a skill you can master, and I’m going to show you how in this three-part series. This week we’ll focus on the foundation: strengthening the mind. Next week, we’ll talk about strengthening your body and boosting immunity. And in week three, we’ll discuss all the ways we can strengthen our spirit to cope with the uncertainty.

Each week, you’ll feel better, gain resilience and decrease stress. Because powering up your resilience while powering down your stress isn’t a magical, mystical thing. It’s a science-based formula based on biology. There are concrete ways to target the biology of stress and the science of resilience, and I’m going to show you how. But we need to remember one mantra: It’s all in the doing! When you do better, you feel better. Doing is everything. So let’s start doing!

WHY WE START WITH THE MIND

When a pandemic strikes, our primal fears are stoked and our self-preservation mechanism goes into overdrive. It’s called the fight or flight response, a cascade of hormones signaled by our brain to respond to danger. Evolutionarily, the fight or flight response saved us from a tiger in the forest during caveman times. Now, it makes us panic buy Purell and toilet paper, watch incessant amounts of news coverage, and scroll through social media feeds late into the night. Same concept. We are evolutionarily hardwired for survival whenever we feel unsafe or afraid. And while we know a lot about preparing for a pandemic by making sure we have the material stuff like food, water, shelter, and other provisions, we don’t know how to optimize our minds in preparation.

So let's start with five concrete steps you can begin today to optimize your mind and outsmart the fight or flight response during Covid.

1. START A MEDIA CLEANSE:

Falling down the rabbit hole when it comes to news primes your fight or flight response into overdrive. It’s time to parent ourselves and minimize our media time. Try slowing down your media consumption by either:

a) limiting the amount of time you spend consuming the news or

b) limiting the number of sources you get your news from

Either way, you’ll curb your media consumption and this will have a direct impact on your fight or flight response. A solid goal is one hour a day using either approach. We all need to find a happy balance between being an informed citizen versus an overconsumer of news. Clickbait has a biological basis.

And since Nature doesn’t like a vacuum, try to substitute your need to read (or watch) with uplifting things. Personally, I’ve been reading a page a day from The Daily Stoic and The Essential Rumi. Also, never underestimate the power of laughter as a therapeutic force during periods of stress (Thank you, Trevor Noah and Lilly Singh!)

2. BREATHE DEEPLY AND OFTEN:

If there is one definitive way to short-circuit the fight or flight response, our breath is the gateway. There are so many kinds of breathing exercises to do, but my favorites are the ones below to immediately and profoundly stop anxiety from escalating into panic:

a. Heart-centered breathing: Place one hand on your belly and your other hand on your heart. Inhale through your nose for a silent count of 4, exhale through your nose for a silent count of 7. Do this for a few breath cycles, then resume normal breathing. This is a great technique to decrease the overwhelm we’re feeling and help us get centered.

b. Diaphragmatic breathing: Place both hands on your belly. Inhale and exhale slowly through your nose (or mouth if that’s more comfortable). Feel your belly rise and fall with each inbreath and outbreath. The GIF below is a great visual for diaphragmatic breathing.

3. CHANNEL YOUR ANXIOUS ENERGY INTO ACTION:

We all have a lot of anxious energy right now. Let’s learn to channel it for good not evil. Remember in science class where we learned about potential and kinetic energy? Anxiety is potential energy (dormant in your head) and action is kinetic energy (an outward movement). There are so many ways to redirect your nervous energy into positive action. Start small and start at home. Find ways to make your home feel like a safe haven for you and your family. Do a deep clean (the act of cleaning can feel therapeutic). Organize your pantry, closets, files, and finances. Get a good supply of educational materials, books, games and entertainment so you can all thrive mentally. Create some new family rituals to bring more unity and cohesion to your home during this time of uncertainty. Spend your mental bandwidth on these productive actions to feel a greater sense of control and preparedness, both of which are like kryptonite to anxiety’s power.

4. FIND YOUR FLOW THROUGH PASSION:

Even during the most ordinary of times, life has no guarantees. So if there’s something huge you’ve always wanted to do, learn or become, now is the time. We live in an era where you can learn anything from the comfort of your home. Have you wanted to learn how to code, how to bake, how to speak French, play the guitar, learn to crochet, woodworking, painting a mural? Whatever big, wacky dream you’ve had, now is the time to make it happen. And if that seems too frivolous for you, take a look at all the famous figures in history who came up with incredible ideas to move humanity forward during periods of quarantine. Scientifically, whenever we immerse ourselves fully in a task that uses all our mental faculties, we get into the state of flow, and flow has a huge therapeutic benefit on our fight or flight response. During times like these, the state of flow can be just the remedy we need to get through the day.

3. GRATITUDE: WRITE IT DOWN:

There is perhaps no greater health promoting emotion than gratitude. It has so many proven wellness benefits, mostly because gratitude helps with cognitive reframing. When we’re stressed, our self-preservation mechanism goes into overdrive. So our brains become like Velcro to bad events (it’s a protection mechanism to recognize danger) and our brains treat the good events like Teflon, letting them slip away. When you actively practice gratitude, you’re changing your brain to pay attention to the good stuff. And over time that has profound effects on stress and resilience.

Start by keeping a gratitude journal: a paper notebook by your nightstand where you write down 5 things you’re grateful for each day and why. It should be a 90 second exercise. Research has shown that the act of writing uses different brain circuitry than typing, and retrains your mind to optimize healthier thoughts.

This pandemic has called into question so much for so many, that being able to count five things we’re grateful for each day is an exercise in abundance. And since pandemics create a scarcity mindset, having a sense of abundance internally is more important now than ever.

PART 2: Optimizing the Body

Welcome to part 2 of our three part series! In this section, we delve into our body and the concrete steps we can take to build our body’s resilience during the pandemic. Our lessons from Part 1 apply to this section and vice versa, because the mind and body are inextricably linked. What’s good for the body is good for the mind! That's the mind-body connection in a nutshell.

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether we can increase our immunity to Covid.

From the strictly biological perspective, this is a new, emerging infectious disease that our immune system has never seen before so theoretically-speaking, no one has immunity. But looking at it from the integrative medicine perspective, there is so much we can do to optimize our immune system, and that’s precisely what we’ll talk about this week.

1. BUILDING OUR IMMUNITY FROM THE INSIDE-OUT

Our immune system is dynamic and always in flux, responding to our internal and external cues. Studies show that at the molecular level, our immune system responds not just to our daily actions (what we eat, how we sleep, and how we move) but it also responds to our emotions, specifically happiness. When we cultivate a specific kind of happiness, called purposeful or eudaemonic happiness, we can alter how our immune cells respond.

So how can we increase this specific kind of happiness during unhappy, pandemic times? Through the integrative practices of yoga, meditation, tai-chi and others, which have been proven to build the happiness muscles in each of us, irrespective of what's happening on the outside. We'll talk much more about these practices in later posts, but if you've been interested in a mind-body practice but never took the leap, now would be a great time to get yourself into the Om Zone!

2. SLEEP IS A THERAPEUTIC INTERVENTION

Besides social distancing and hand hygiene, one of the best things you can do right now for your immune health is to protect your sleep. Sleep is a therapeutic intervention. It is restorative for every single cell, blood vessel, and organ system in the body. And in times of crisis like now, the restorative benefits of sleep cannot be overemphasized. Our immune system is more powerful at night while we sleep, so protecting our sleep like the vital resource it is has never been more critical.

The two components of sleep- quantity and quality- can be protected and strengthened in a two concrete ways:

To improve sleep quantity, its key to set an early bedtime. The ideal bedtime is 10pm, since the most restorative sleep usually happens between 10p and 12am. By going to bed after this window, you’re shortchanging yourself out of the copious benefits that sleep provides. An easy way to adopt an earlier bedtime is to set a night time alarm at 9p to give yourself a nudge to start winding down. Try it, it works!

To improve sleep quality and decrease sleep fragmentation, try to create a relaxing bedtime routine and minimize your bedtime screen time, specifically two hours before bedtime. Screens of any kind (TV, laptops, smartphones) emit a blue light which stimulates the awake center in our brain, so even if we are tired and physiologically ready to sleep, screens can artificially keep us up. Choose a non screen-based activity like reading an old-fashioned novel, listening to music, or doing a calming yoga sequence or meditation session before bed. These bedtime activities help soothe the sympathetic nervous system and decrease the fight or flight response. Personally, I love the legs up the wall yoga pose (below) before bedtime since it helps relax the sympathetic nervous system and gets the body into a rested state. It’s a game changer for sleep quality.

3. TRAINING YOUR BRAIN TO EXERCISE

Exercise: the word alone is so cringeworthy isn’t it? We all know its good for you and yet so few people do it. But if there’s ever been a time to start exercising, the time is now! Exercise changes not just our external appearance, it can change our internal landscape too. It alters our genes and immune response, improves our sleep, increases our mood, decreases anxiety and has protective effects on our vital organs like the lungs and heart. As my exercise coach says, don’t exercise so you can appreciate your fit body in the future, exercise because you appreciate your healthy body in the now. That’s some wisdom!
To reap the rewards of exercise, you don’t need to run a marathon or even run at all. A simple daily 20-minute walk is enough. And if you can’t get outside, there are so many indoor, low-impact options to consider.

The one thing to remember is that when starting an exercise habit, its important to do a little bit everyday than just once in a while. When we do something everyday we automate the task (like brushing our teeth or showering) and building a habit is all about making something automatic and habitual. When we’re learning something new, its easier to train our brains to do something daily than to do something once in a while.

4. YOUR GUT-BRAIN CONNECTION AT WORK

During periods of stress, our brains are evolutionarily programmed to crave high-fat, high-sugar, calorically-rich foods. When our self-preservation mechanism is on red alert, at the most basic level calories equals survival. Enter the donut. When you reach for the donut its your brain appropriately responding to its internal environmental cues. To curb stress eating, ask yourself, what am I hungry for? More connection, more safety, less stress, less uncertainty… and work to address that underlying emotion. Over time, the downstream mechanism of stress eating will respond accordingly.

Once your stress eating is under control, aim to eat a version of the Mediterranean diet, which has been scientifically studied to be the best overall diet for boosting immunity, increasing lifespan, and warding off most chronic illnesses. Another great thing to consider adding to your diet is probiotics (yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi). Probiotics help strengthen your gut microbiome, which many scientists believe houses a large proportion of our immune system.

The gut microbiome also helps to regulate the gut-brain connection and our mood. Did you know there are three to five times more serotonin receptors in the gut than the brain? This may be why the gut microbiome is intimately linked to our mood state. By keeping our gut microbiome healthy, we give our bodies the best chance at creating a positive internal environment for our immunity and mood, two things that are top of mind for most of us right now.

Part 3: Optimizing Your Spirit

This section marks the end of our three-part series on optimizing our mind, body and spirit during Covid. In this section, we’ve delving into building resilience in the spirit. When we talk about spirit in this context, its totally secular and non-religious. What we’re talking about is at the heart of what resilience really is: fortitude, courage, and power. How can we spark these things within us in the midst of the pandemic? The answer lies in the wise Eastern saying: No mud, no lotus. Meaning, the challenge to cultivate these inner attributes is brought on by the challenge itself.

Humans are by definition meaning-seeking, purpose-driven creatures.

We thrive when we are leading purposeful, meaningful lives. And resiliency feeds off this energy. So to build a resilient spirit, we need to a find ways to create meaning and purpose during this pandemic. There have been so many examples of resiliency in spirit all around the world: on the balconies in Italy, the press briefings of NY’s Governor Cuomo, and in the relief efforts to get PPE to healthcare workers worldwide. The human spirit is the most resilient force on the planet!

So today, I want to focus on three specific ways you can start building a resilient spirit by creating a sense of meaning and purpose in your own lives during this time:

1. STEP INTO A GROWTH MINDSET, NOT A SCARCITY MINDSET

The stress caused by a pandemic creates a scarcity mindset. Its our self-preservation mechanism in overdrive. Pandemics on the whole breed the scarcity mindset because it’s a survival tactic we as humans have evolutionarily developed. We are biologically primed to scan our environment for danger and act accordingly. It is inherently protective because it keeps us safe. But at the individual level, we have great power in outsmarting our biology to turn off our scarcity mindset and turn on our growth mindset.

At the core of the growth mindset is the belief that challenges can make us stronger, wiser and more able than we were before. The mere fact that you are reading this is proof that you are stepping into your growth mindset, because you believe you have the power to change and grow.

We can take concrete steps to cultivate a growth mindset by first managing our stress response using many of the tools we learned in prior weeks. When we build resilience in our mind and body through the ways we’ve talked about before, we can step out of the fear zone and into the growth zone even in the midst of a pandemic (see below).

2. WATCH THE MOVIE OF YOUR LIFE

Another way to build our spirit during this crisis is to become the observer. Mindfulness experts talk a lot about this concept, but let me break it down into very Hollywood terms: start watching the movie of your life. We’re not talking about an action-packed blockbuster here, we’re talking about our quiet inner ability to watch ourselves and really pay attention to how we’re living in the day to day during this pandemic.

Think of your life right now as a movie and you as the hero or heroine of this tale. Are you the lead character you want to be? Are you stepping into your power and intentionally working on your potential for calmness, peace of mind and inner strength? Are you making intentional choices to read and watch uplifting things, to spend time (virtually of course) with people who make you laugh and bring you joy? Are you working on creating a calm, safe haven within yourself amidst the chaos of the outside world?

We’ve talked a lot in the past few weeks of how when we do better, we feel better. And with this doing, resilience has a chance to grow. Its time to channel your Hollywood starlet and cultivate that Oscar worthy, resilient performance.

3. LIVE A LIFETIME IN A DAY

As an integrative medicine doctor, living a lifetime in a day is a mantra I repeat often to patients. It’s a way to incorporate all the elements that make up an arc of a long, purposeful and meaningful life- work, family, solitude, vacation, and retirement- and building each of those into one single day.

For example, engaging in work could mean any project that brings you a feeling of productivity or achievement. Spending time in family life (whether you have a family or not) could mean connecting virtually with your tribe to feel a sense of belonging. Taking a vacation could mean doing something that brings you joy and levity and gets you into a state of flow. And retirement could mean taking a pause in the day to reflect and take stock of your blessings.

By living a lifetime in a day, we learn to take the long view and zoom out. And when we zoom out, we can paradoxically learn to zoom in on what matters most: people, love, connection, health and ultimately happiness, the most universally resilient life force of all.

THE SPIRIT OF RESILIENCE IN A POEM

Here’s one of my most favorite poems about the spirit of resilience. Charles Bukowski wrote this in 1993, long before the Covid pandemic. If there’s one piece of literary genius that summarizes the resiliency of the human spirit, I think this might be it:

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