The Trifecta and Taking Care of the Basics

When it comes to your Mental Health — Sleep, Exercise and Healthy Nutrition come FIRST!

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.

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.