(Image: Shutterstock.)

 

Editor's note: This is the second part of Dr. Turvill's essay on mental health struggles in the legal profession. The author is the widow of Ian Turvill, who was the CMO at Freeborn & Peters and who died by suicide about two years ago.

As I've navigated my own recovery from the chronic illness of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and as I have worked with clients over the past seven years, I've found that there are three areas you must work on continuously to restore and maintain both mental and physical health. Ignore any one of these and you'll limit your success. Done properly, these become auto-pilot parts of your daily routine so that ultimately no extra effort is needed to maintain excellent health.

The three foundational pillars of health are body, mind and environment. Here are a few things you can start to do now on your own or with a little help to begin to master the three pillars and assure yourself the health you need for the success you deserve and desire:

Your body: Your mental health is primarily a reflection of your physical health—of having the raw materials your body needs to run properly and of being free of inflammation, chronic stealth infections and accumulated toxins. If you decide to take on transforming your health, you would be wise to seek out a functional medicine practitioner since such practitioners are focused on restoring health while conventional doctors are trained to diagnose and manage illness. As a driven professional, you can't afford to just manage symptoms and ignore their root causes.

As Hippocrates said, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Inflammation is the driving force behind every symptom and chronic diagnosis, and what you eat is one of the biggest sources of inflammation if you're not purposefully eating to reduce inflammation.

Eat real food, mostly plants, organic whenever possible and with little or no sugar and definitely no artificial sweeteners.

Get tested for food sensitivities, also known as delayed-type food allergies, which most people have but are unaware of. Stress disrupts the integrity of the gut lining, which literally opens the door for all sorts of health problems. When you are sensitive to a healthy food, that food is poison to your system despite its known health benefits, but you won't be able to tie your symptoms to the food if you are eating it regularly.

The extra time you put into eating for health will be rewarded quickly with more energy, mental clarity and focus.

Make sure your body is getting the raw materials it needs for the trillions of cellular processes it manages every second. To do this right, you'll need to test for intracellular levels of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, amino acids and anti-oxidants). Micronutrient deficiencies are behind many mental and physical health issues and are easily correctable with high-quality supplements in just minutes a day.

Other ways to work on the body pillar are to check for and treat stealth infections, digestion, mold toxicity, detoxification pathways, oxidative stress, heavy metal toxicity, chemical toxicity, hormone balance, and more.

Your mind: Your thoughts are powerful creators or destroyers of health; stress accumulates relentlessly unless you take active measures to reduce it; and your brain detoxifies and repairs only during sleep.

Practice gratitude and celebrate wins every day. This is not woo-woo! The Reticular Activating System (RAS) in the brain is responsible for bringing to your awareness only the important things in your environment, based on what you've told it is important. You "tell" it what's important by what you focus on. Our world is way over-focused on the negative, which is somewhat sensible, because that's where the danger lies that we need to protect against. As driven, often Type-A, professionals, we over-focus on our shortcomings, what we still haven't achieved and all the things that went wrong. No wonder we're depressed and anxious!

Practicing gratitude and celebrating wins literally rewires your RAS to show you more of what's going right, which creates a buffer for the inevitable negative things and thus reduces the stress you experience around them. Less stress means more health. Gratitude and wins can be reviewed in just minutes a day—a few minutes when you first wake up, while you're waiting in lines or traffic, and a few minutes as your head hits the pillow at night.

Meditate. the Ziva technique is my favorite because it's easy to learn and is designed specifically for busy professionals. I fought this for a long time, and that was a mistake. Meditation is proven to give you back more time than you put into, lessen stress significantly and actually slow down aging. Did you catch that? Fifteen minutes of meditation twice a day will give you back more than 30 extra minutes of high quality productive time and will literally make you younger when done regularly.

Get more and better sleep. This may seem impossible with your schedule but, like meditation, more sleep will give you back more time than you put into it. Sleep is the primary, and sometimes the only, time that your brain detoxifies and that your body has the bandwidth to make repairs.

Most people don't know that chronic sleep deprivation regularly shows up as mild depression, achiness, poor motivation, short temper, easy frustration, brain fog, difficulty processing complex information, and more, all of which kill both productivity and happiness. No on—including you—can function optimally on less than an average of seven hours sleep, and studies show that most adults need eight to nine hours to be their best. You need to be your best, so good sleep is a necessity, not a luxury.

Some keys to better quality sleep include abstaining from eating for at least two hours before bed, a consistent sleep schedule, no blue light (screens) for an hour before sleep, and total darkness, plus cool temperatures while sleeping.

Your environment: With more than 85,000 synthetic chemicals introduced into consumer products since the 1940s and the explosion of cell phones and wireless technology since the 1990s, our bodies are increasingly more challenged to stay healthy. To make matters worse, slick marketing campaigns have us incorrectly believing that these are not harmful, when in fact they are highly damaging. You can drastically reduce your exposure without sacrificing convenience or productivity.

Use more natural personal care and home cleaning product. A good rule of thumb is that if you can't pronounce the ingredients or they're not disclosed, then choose a different product. Synthetic fragrances are universally toxic to our brains and are responsible for a lot of the fatigue, brain fog and headaches that take away your competitive edge.

Use high quality air and water filters at home and, when possible, also in your office.

My suggestion is to start slow and commit to gradually adding on more and more ways of caring for yourself. Of course, the majority of you are over-achievers like I am and will scoff at the idea of starting slow. In the end, really mastering the above principles of good mental health is more important than making fast and sweeping changes. In time, your new healthy habits will become as easy and automatic as your current unhealthy habits.

Law firms would also be well-served to change their perspectives on health, but you don't need them to change in order to protect and improve your own health.

Read more – Minds Over Matters: An Examination of Mental Health in the Legal Profession

 

Dr. Marny Morrison Turvill is the owner and founder of Outside the Pill Box, a functional medicine practice in Evanston, Illinois. She helps adults and children discover and effectively treat the root causes of their mystery symptoms and chronic illnesses.