The Hidden Heroes of Self-Help - 'Foundational Accelerators'

I laid out in my opening blog the positive impact of focusing on what I call the foundational accelerators of sleep, hydration/nutrition, exercise/movement and mental health, can accelerate your ‘self-help journey. Neglecting these ‘foundational accelerators’ is never a good idea. If you are trying to change or grow aspects of yourself then neglecting them is really like taking two steps forward and then one step back. Put another way, loading the knowledge, best practice, new thinking into our brains but not servicing the underlying mind and body ‘engine’ is like spending all your time mapping out a road trip, researching the best route, where to stop along the way, where to stop and have lunch without thinking about if your car is ready to do it’s part during the journey. Let’s make sure that 'car' is tuned and ready for the journey.

Let’s take a deeper look at the foundational accelerators one by one.

Where to Start with Sleep - For now, I am going to assume that you have bad sleep habits, a poor sleeping environment, an inconsistent bedtime routine or all of the above. These are the most common aspects that impact the foundation of sleep. If you are not sleeping you are going to undermine your self-help journey. You’ll be tired, moody, irritable and unmotivated. Not a great start to your day of growth. So, what does good sleep look like?

Firstly, duration is arguably the starting point, and depending on age the recommendation for 18 year and older, is between 7 and 9 hours, of uninterrupted sleep is universally the guidance. Of course everyone is different and you may need more, or less, but the amount of hours needed is likely more than you are getting today. Next is quality. You may be in bed for your desired block of 7-9 hours but are you getting solid restful sleep? This starts hours before you actually go to bed. You might think that’s a bit excessive but you’re spending (or should be) about a third of your life sleeping so give it some thought. Go to bed at the same time every day. Get up at the same time every day. Make a plan around lights out and wake up alarm time and try to stick to it. It will be difficult at first but keep going, your mind and body will thank you.

Also, think about your pre-bed/sleep routine. Eating that bag of chips, guzzling half a liter of soda and sitting on your phone for an hour is not the best routine for the hour before sleep. At a minimum, stop eating after dinner and stop drinking stimulants like soda and caffeine after lunch. Take a hot shower, or hot bath just before bed and make sure you are getting into an already made bed, preferably made after airing sometime during the morning. For the basics, that’s about it.

Of course you can do light bedtime friendly exercise like yoga, or relaxation breathing exercises, reading a book (not on a device), adjust the lighting and temperature in the room to name just a few, but the important thing is to start tinkering with your sleep habits. A little trial and error may be needed as we are all different. Sleep can be tricky at the best of times so stack it in your favor and reduce the impact it has on your growth journey. There is so much more that can be done to hone your sleeping environment and bedtime routine but start small and go from there.

Baselining your Nutrition & Hydration - Two things to think about right up front. By hydration I mean water, plain water. And nutrition is about what you don’t eat as much as what you do eat. Common wisdom suggests there are no bad foods, just bad quantities and habits. Unless you are a professional athlete, diabetic, or have a food allergy, then this is certainly a healthy approach to food. Remember you are feeding your body and soul, if you are too strict you won’t stick to it.

On the other hand, don’t fall into the trap of having your five veg a day over the course of breakfast and lunch and then having double white pasta and half a key lime pie for dinner and still thinking you hit your nutrition goals for the day. Remember, you are what you eat! Literally. A good way to start is to think veg first, or plant based first, and reduce white carbs and white refined sugars.

Also, a balanced diet for each meal across carbs, protein and fats is key. A good general rule if you are in maintenance model is divide your plate into roughly thirds, 30% protein (P), 30% good slow release carb (C) and 30% healthy fats (F). These numbers are not exact but you won’t go far wrong. If you have specific goals like for example losing fat (45%P/20%C/35%F), building muscle (45%P/30%C/25%F or endurance training (50%P/30%C/20%F) then, as you can see, these splits can be quite different. As you start addressing your nutrition there is a quick win that will have a huge impact. Bottom line, no one needs to eat white rice, white pasta, white flour/bread and or added refined sugar in any quantity (Spoiler alert: Added sugar is in almost everything, read the labels, know what you are eating. Anything over 5g of added sugar and you should start to question its nutritional value). These ‘white carbs’ have limited to no nutrition and spike your blood sugar in a negative way, best avoid, period. If you are looking for a big positive early move on the nutrition side then generally avoiding white carbs is it. Despite my rhetoric in the previous couple of sentences, you don’t need to ban any foods but do think about what you are putting in your mouth.

Don’t let your diet be based on your bad habits either. Be kind to yourself, have exceptions and off days, it’s ok. Just make the high majority, 80-90% of what you eat, high in nutrition. Same goes for hydration, the occasional soda, coffee in the morning to get going, glass or wine/beer/cocktail of an evening is all ok, it’s the volume and frequency that becomes the issue and is often downed at the expense of water. Hydration is a bit of a minefield and is very specific to the individual. But we all need to keep hydrated. Based on your size, the weather, if you’re exercising and so on there's no one-size-fits-all answer, as fluid needs vary among individuals but it’s a pretty safe bet that you are under hydrating. General consensus says on average the body need approximately 15 cups of water a day (US measurement, 1 cup = 8 oz. = approx. ¼ liter).

If eating a balanced diet, one should expect to get approximately 8-10 cups of water from your diet while consuming 7-5 cups of pure water daily. I suggest starting by having a room temp 8 oz. (16 oz. if you can manage it) glass of water next to your bed/bathroom sink and downing this when you open your eyes, or shortly after. For the first hour of waking, your lymphatic system is screaming out for water to flush out toxins. Make sure you provide what it needs. You will literally feel the body hydrating during that hour, it’s quite the mini buzz. Your body isn’t really ready to benefit from and process caffeine properly during the first 60-90 mins after waking so although that coffee in bed first thing tastes good having it a little later will have a much more beneficial impact. Then fill a water bottle up and sip it through the day. Start with these two things. Plenty of time to invest into the quality of the water, ease of use, supplements, gadgets and the like to up your game, but let’s start with the basics.

Starting small with Exercise & Movement - The word movement is in there by design. Unless you are training for the Olympics the chances are you need to be exercising with less intensity, or for less time than you think. A lot of people enjoy the feeling of pushing themselves physically but there are also a lot of people who don’t and it’s those that need to up their movement, not take up exercise routines and sports they simply don’t enjoy. So if you like your running, biking, gym, yoga, soccer, swimming and so on and you can’t get enough, then you’re all set, keeping investing into your success here. If you don’t, finding a way to move more will boost your ability to stay engaged with your self-help / self-improvement journey and reach/sustain your goals.

Start by identifying opportunities in your day to day routine where you can move more. Park on the far side of the parking lot, take the stairs instead of the elevator if it’s just a floor or two, stretch in the morning for a few minutes, takes a walk at lunchtime and listen to music or a podcast or if you have a dog walk it every day, maybe twice, it really won’t mind. In short, find opportunities to up your low intensity movement. I recently watched a viral video that came through my social feed that showed a mother as she went about her day doing a squat every time she heard the word “MOM" being yelled by her kiddos. Needless to say, she got a lot of squats in!. Also, years ago I read that the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver did 50 squats while brushing his teeth every morning to ensure he spent the right amount of time cleaning his pearly whites.

There are so many ways to incorporate movement into your day. Take your stairs slowly, 2 at a time, go walking or take a light hiking. Just working on your posture when standing and sitting takes energy and starts to strengthen muscles. If energy starts to show up and the vitality that comes with moving more feels good then there is plenty more you can do. If not, just keep building easy movement opportunities into your day and be proud of yourself, you are doing enough.

Mental Health Basics - This area has traditionally been the most underinvested of all areas. It’s encouraging to see in recent times we have experienced an increase in the trend of being mindful, perhaps even using apps to meditate or increase focus and even engaging the services of licensed therapists. You’ll repeatedly hear me talk about the topic of ‘the self-help genre’ and therapy and how they are very different. In short, learning how to improve your bad habits, lack of knowledge and understanding on a topic, or getting out of a bad rut by diving into the world of self-help books, blogs and videos is not the same as engaging a licensed therapist to work through underlying trauma. You can’t ‘self-educate your nervous system, and the trauma that has formed it. If you believe you may have underlying trauma then engage a licensed therapist, there will be plenty of time to come back to your self help / self-improvement journey or perhaps work through it in parallel. If you want to read more on this topic, please read my blog entitled ‘That self-help book is not your Therapist’.

The examples of mindfulness and meditation I mentioned earlier in this section are huge steps in the right direction and if you are doing these things lean in, keeping going, do more. The important point is to be aware of what is possible and available and then choose something that suits you, that you feel the benefit from, and is sustainable. My personal favorites, which are also great places to start, are breathing exercises (aka breathwork), cold water therapy and meditation. There are many ways to help with your mental health basics but for now I’ll share how I started. Although I know techniques to enhance mental health are highly impactful, If I’m honest, this is the area of the four foundational accelerators I find it hardest to be consistent so I worked to keep it achievable and impactful. If you are starting out I would suggest choosing one of these three areas I started with. Breathwork and meditation are highly linked but for the purpose of finding a starting point I’ll separate them. An important view point to consider on the topic of mental health is, and there are differing views on it, that ‘story follows state’. In short, the suggestions is the make-up of your nervous system, which is largely based on your life experiences to date (good and bad), and how it interprets the world around you, will make you feel a certain way before you can consciously think about, or interpret, what you are hearing, seeing or smelling. To learn more, a good place to start is understanding Polyvagal Theory. In short, your nervous system will trigger your feelings (your state) and your conscious mind will bring in a story to match the state. It’s how humans work, there is nothing wrong with you. This is the underlying mechanism that supports our fight, flight, freeze response. The frustrating bit is when it does it, and the frequency. Much the same as how humans make decisions. Believe it or not, decision making is an emotional reaction (nervous system state) to a situation and then the brain comes on-line to make sense of the emotions and build a narrative (the story). With this in mind, anything we can do to influence the nervous system will release different combinations of chemicals which will undoubtedly change the story we tell ourselves about how we feel in that moment. This is the value and purpose behind breathwork, and related activities like mediation and cold plunging. Focusing on our breathing, how we breath, the frequency and patterns of breath and we can greatly influence the nervous system and create a more calm, mindful state as a baseline over time. Even a few seconds of the right type of breathwork can work wonders. The same goes for meditation, anything that you can do to focus your mind to stop it wandering and ‘chatting’ to you about unhelpful topics and points of view about the past and future is huge.

Meditating for 30 seconds at first on a regular basis (morning and night) is a great place to start. Even doing an activity that takes concentration and engagement is a form of meditation. If you are focused on winning the next point in in your tennis or squash match, not falling off your skateboard or paddle board, getting out of the saddle on your bike for that last hill, not slicing your tee shot into next week, they are all ‘moment in time’ examples of your mind being present which is essentially what meditation is. I personally like to combine cold water therapy with my mediation. There are a lot of conflicting views and options on the best temperature for cold water therapy. From, it has to be icy and as cold as possible and no more than 2-3 minutes, to anything that is cold enough to interrupt your breathing pattern is positively impacting your nervous system and therefore improving your mental (and physical) health. I personally like to cold plunge at a temperature of 55 degrees for 10 mins. After getting into my cold water bath containing 20 lbs. of melted ice, the first 30 second to 2 minutes (depending on how cold it is) are spent regulating my breathing followed by the rest of the time slowing my breathing, perhaps doing some breathing techniques, and meditating by concentrating on my breath, while I enjoy the release of hormones like adrenaline, epinephrine, and noradrenaline (also known as norepinephrine) which are going to see me through at least the first half of my day.

So there you have it, that’s my take on where to start bringing in the four foundational accelerators to underpin the success of your self-help / self-improvement journey. If you like what you have read and want to further your learning then find your book / podcast / source material (The Snackable Self-Help series of books is one option :), make a few small adjustments to your foundational accelerators and subscribe to the blog, the email newsletter and check us out online wherever you consume your social feeds.