The Trifecta and Taking Care of the Basics
In my first three short articles, I’ve dedicated one to sleep, one to exercise and one to healthy eating. Today, I’ll combine the three to supercharge our health and wellbeing.
The Trifecta, or the key essential ingredients of our wellbeing, include proper sleep, regular exercise and healthy nutrition. If we want to participate in aspects of health that we have control over and lessen the feelings of stress we contend with on a regular basis then we want to look to the Trifecta or what I call taking care of the basics. These are the fundamental ingredients of our wellbeing that impact our physiology and should be part and parcel in any recipe of life much like butter, eggs, flour and sugar are in the baking world. Combined, I know of few other mechanisms or pathways more helpful to our overall day to day functioning. These activities get housed under the category of lifestyle measures, and in my estimation, when absent in tandem they contribute to a large degree to the higher preponderance of mental health problems we see on the rise in this country (APA, 2020).
What this raises is that if we are ignoring our bodies and how we treat them and expect ourselves to feel good and function at our best, we are doing ourselves a disservice. I think a lot of us tend to ignore our bodies and how we treat them because we think the solution to our struggles in life are too obvious or because we don’t recognize the connection between caring for our bodies and how our mental state can fluctuate on a daily basis depending on whether we engage in the Trifecta or not. What I have found is if we hope to tip the scales of life in our favor and cut down the difficult, negative noise in our minds and bodies the Trifecta is one of the most effective, easy and more enjoyable ways of doing so.
The external stressors that negatively impact our health and wellbeing are here to stay for the foreseeable future and in order to better respond to them we want to be able to impact our mindset and physiology in positive ways in tandem. To do so, is no small ask as I’ve seen more than a few highly educated people spend large quantities of time trying to figure out how to navigate the stressful waters of their life to no avail. If we hope to tip the scales of life in a positive direction, if we don’t have an underlying medical problem or physical complications and continue to struggle with aspects of energy, anxiety, depression, irritability or self-esteem, we might consider taking stock of what we may not be doing in our life and a good place to start is with the Trifecta.
Related, I’ve read countless self-help books on grit, determination, perseverance, emotional intelligence, perfectionism, the good life, stoic thinking, proper mindset, how to influence people, proper parenting, love languages, unconscious processes, personality differences, trauma, toxic emotions, toxic masculinity, change your thinking change your life, men are from a different planet, anger management, positivity, here and now, achieving your goals, self-discipline, changing bad habits, thinking big, beyond vulnerability, radical acceptance and just be you and just say yes to name more than a few! The list goes on as does our struggle to figure out what the tips to live by are and what tips the scale of life in our favor. I can honestly say that every one of these books has something helpful in it that has been useful to me in terms of how I think about helping others go about living their lives. What these various books boil down to, including this one, is they help us ask questions related to how we are going about our lives. In this vein, they help us self-reflect and ask ourselves questions about who we are and where we are at in our lives.
However, before these questions can be answered with more certainty we often need our cognitive abilities to be firing on all cylinders and to help with this I’m suggesting we start with the Trifecta of our wellbeing to help jump-start our physiology. Meaning, if we are suffering and there are no known medical problems, chances are the health choices we are making may not be the best for us though there are limits to my thinking. For instance, if we’ve lost a loved one such as a parent, spouse or child it’s understandable that a certain amount of suffering and grief will be inevitable and want to be respected.
Having said this, I’d argue the level of suffering within reason is under our control and that the fight in life to contend with and offset various different types of suffering to the extent possible, comes down to a large degree to our behaviors and mindset in relation to how we are living our lives. Related our mindset is effected in large part by our physiology and how we go about taking care of our minds and bodies. Time and time again I run across highly motivated and intelligent individuals, who are honestly suffering in their own right, that ring the bell for perfectionism and yet while they are extremely invested in doing well in their academic pursuits, at the same time, they have shown episodically to have ignored the relationship between their physical health and their ability to apply their mental abilities to these very pursuits.
I have even run across a small subset of perfectionists who take a sense of pride in running themselves ragged and fooling themselves into thinking they are a set of outliers who the normal rules of health need not apply. A set of outliers who, in essence, tell me they can stay up as late as they want, get very little sleep, eat at random hours, eat unhealthy types of food or not enough quantity and quality foods and forego exercising and only focus on their academic output.
When these individuals eventually hit my door wrestling with bouts of anhedonia, depression, anxiety, irritability, panic attacks, relationship problems and mood swings, I eventually have to convey to them what I convey here. If we don’t put the Trifecta in place and tend to it regularly, dare I say daily, we end up diminishing our mental clarity and thus our ability to carry out the very activities of daily living that contribute to our success and feelings of wellbeing. Eventually, I end up asking them what they do to offset a day in which they don’t feel good? Often enough, I hear about doubling down on the very behaviors that cause the bad mood including telling themselves they aren’t good enough and they should try harder.
What I convey is that if they want to put their perfectionistic tendencies to good use they might consider changing trajectories from academic excellence at all cost, to keeping the Trifecta in place at all cost. Because when all is said and done, if we aren’t taking care of the Trifecta we aren’t feeling as good as we could. To skip out on sleep, exercise and healthy eating is to decrease our ability to feel motivated, productive, feel emotionally and physically healthy and to reduce our capacity to think about and think through the different problems in our lives.
When we focus on keeping the Trifecta in place, doing so allows our mind and body to function simultaneously at higher levels and do so in relation to one another in unison. When this happens we are often able to produce our best work and socialize with others around us with ease and less effort and strain on ourselves. This experience of our mind and body working in unison contributes in no small part to many of the pop psychology and or positive psychology phrases that have come into vogue in the last few decades such as Mindfulness, Flow and its colloquial meaning “being in the zone”.
When we don’t feel good physically and mentally it takes more energy and resources for us to get through our day versus when it feels like we are feeling healthy and in good spirits. Meaning, should we be struggling to enjoy aspects of “normal life”, whatever that may be for us historically that we’ve been able to do, we should do ourselves a favor and figure out whether or not elements of the Trifecta are missing in our lives. In line, should at least two out of the three elements of the Trifecta not be in place for periods of time longer than two weeks, it’s a fair assessment that a certain amount of our current struggles in content and/or degree is causal in nature beyond chance alone is likely related to the Trifecta.
Related, should we come from families or live in environments in which negative self-critical messages and or harmful behaviors and mindsets are common and we’ve internalized these negative messages and ways of thinking about ourselves, in my experience, the Trifecta won’t be enough to offset them alone. It will take work on the psychotherapeutic front to understand not only how our family of origins and various different environments in which we live, and have lived, effect us but also figure out how to offset these dynamics to the extent possible. Then there are other environmentally generated stressors such as noise and air pollution, being exposed to large quantities of artificial light or not being exposed to enough naturally occurring light that happens to many of us in the winter months (check our Vitamin D levels), exposure to natural disasters, tragic events, overcrowding, high amounts of work stress and relationship issues to name but a few that can effect our stress response and mental health over time.
When we first begin to tackle the Trifecta, we should consider separating them out and focus on them as individual items as they each have their own unique contributions to our overall sense of wellbeing. Only later, when we tackle one of them consistently enough, would I have us move towards incorporating the second and third together in tandem. However, in order to get the full effect, or the “biggest bang for our buck”, I find it helpful to bundle these experiences together as they contribute to a type of synergism that I will speak to in another article. For now let me just say do yourself a favor and eventually chain these three items together in a twenty-four hour period for two weeks on end and pay attention to how you feel thereafter.
- When you wake up first thing in the morning, soon after your feet hit the floor, move towards some form of exercise. If you’ve never developed a morning exercise routine previously make sure to start off slow and pick movement that is easy to engage with. Perhaps, begin with once or twice weekly, 5–10 minutes a day to help develop a habit. This might be walking around your neighborhood, riding a stationary bike or walking slowly on a treadmill. The eventual goal will be to exercise every day for 20–30 minutes with some form of aerobic cardio exercise.
- For a two-week period look to reduce as much sugar and heavy carbohydrate intake as you can. Buy organic foods, if this is affordable, and consider adding in a fresh pressed vegetable and fruit juice once a day. Eventually, the goal will be to give up processed sugars and most heavy carbohydrates for a 30 day period of time. Most importantly, experiment with healthier eating habits in slow and steady fashion moving toward goals that are reasonable and attainable for you.
