Celebrate National Mental Health Awareness month

Originally posted at HubSpot Community (Check out the site and learn how to master Hubspot, master your craft and master your career).. OK now for the post:

TLDR -- Focus on the important stuff: Walking outside to keep the blood flowing, the mind growing and --- the age (ness) slowing.

Sometimes reality checks happen at the most unexpected moments, and it’s often at these times that they strike hardest.  

My daughter Katherine-Rose - aka K-rose (10), like many kids her age, loves expressing herself through drawings and artwork. Her latest drawing depicted me and my son, Scotty (11), together – he was wearing headphones -- he always is walking around the house with his headphones listening to audio books while I was on my phone checking email or LinkedIn. Even though we were in the same room, neither of us was acknowledging each other's presence. She didn’t realize the chord she struck when she enthusiastically presented her work to me, but I knew I had to step back and reflect on what it meant. 

Like most of us, I want to be present and engaged with those around me, my family most of all. I know when I don’t take care of myself and my mental state, I can easily lose that sense of connection, often without realizing. My phone is an easy escape method and a direct connection to my work to boot, but I knew the drawing was about much more than any single incident.

All this to say, I strongly believe tending to my mental health is the foundation for me to live a fully present and engaged life. The more I neglect or lose awareness of my mental health state, the more likely I am to lose engagement and connection with the people I care about. In light of showing one of my shortcomings, I’d also like to share what it looks like when things do go right and how I personally approach this very important subject. 

Of course, everyone’s life situation is unique. My way of thinking about my mental health isn’t intended as a kind of one-size-fits-all. Still, I thought I would share in light of mental health month. If nothing else, I hope to raise awareness on the topic and potentially spark some discussion.

The Three Blocks

Everyone’s sense of work-life balance is different, but I like to think of my days in three 8-hour sections: 

1. Sleep 
2. Work
3. Family/Friends

That the hours are divided so evenly is my ideal, but one of these buckets often gets more hours than the others. – work. Work pilfers time from the other buckets more than I’d like to admit, and that’s taken its toll if I’m to take anything away from my daughter’s drawing. 

I also don’t think I’m alone. 

Covid has forced many people to relearn work-life balance, and it’s been a struggle for many to get that balance right. Though even in the best of times or for people who are already used to working remotely, this can be challenging. Burnout looms around the corner if we’re not careful, and sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge that we truly feel burnt out or out of touch in other places in our lives.  

In my experience, when I can achieve more ideal balance with sleep and family/friend time, the better I engage in all my relationships, including those at work. This might seem counter-intuitive, but I find that strong engagement in all three sections creates a positive feedback loop. A drastic imbalance can sometimes cause a negative spiral in exactly the same way.          

The Importance of Sleep

I’m sure all of us at some point have sacrificed sleep trying to push that extra mile. Whether it’s getting a project done ahead of a deadline or simply getting so engrossed in our work that we lose our sense of time, we start eating into our sleeping time before we know it. The more we do this, the more used to “borrowing” our sleep time we get. 

This doesn’t happen without consequence if our sleep debt gets out of control (to learn more about sleep, I highly recommend The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington). Sleep helps us regulate our stress and emotional health. Without it, we can more easily lose control of our emotions and can make any mental health hurdles in our lives much more difficult to handle. 

According to Harvard Heath Publishing, 65-95% of those who struggle with depression suffer some kind of sleep problem. Additionally, those who continue to struggle with problems like insomnia tend to respond worse to depression treatment than those who managed to sleep relatively well. In the same vein, anxiety disorders and sleep troubles are often paired, but not nearly as much as depression. Symptoms of ADHD, too, can be worsened by a lack of sleep, with people becoming more inattentive and losing emotional control without the necessary rest. 

While there’s certainly no magic bullet for mental health struggles like depression, anxiety, or ADHD – there are far too many factors at play than sleep alone – it seems clear that sleep plays a significant role for mental health more generally. There are also so many different ways that we can mess up our sleep hygiene, whether that’s consuming too much caffeine or alcohol, or using blue-light emitting devices just before bed. 

ge with the world like I want without my rest. I’m not always successful, but I acknowledge that and there’s a reason that I’ve slated sleep into its own category. It’s way too important for me to ignore. 

Connection With Family and Friends 

As you likely know, healthy connections with family and friends are pivotal for supporting mental health. In the same way, deliberately taking care of mental health allows me to better tend to my relationships, whether that’s with my kids or people I interact with on a daily basis at HubSpot. 

As with sleep, this pillar of mental health is essential. The most shocking evidence of this can be shown by the correlation between healthy relationships and mortality rates. There are a few studies that show people with the lowest engagement in relationships generally tend to die before people who have healthier social ties. One of those studies revealed that people who were socially isolated had a risk of cardiac death that was 2.4 times greater than those who had a stronger network of social connections.

There is also evidence that social ties can trigger beneficial physiological responses, such as lower blood pressure, reduced heart rate, and lower stress levels. Lower stress also helps prevent risky behavior that often tempts people who want to mitigate those feelings through unhealthy means. Healthy relationships also help people foster a 

I’m trying as best as I can to keep sleep sacred, because I know I can’t engagreater sense of purpose, which is a major factor in improving mental health outcomes. 

As with sleep, there’s a reason that this is one of the primary segments of my daily life. While I try to prioritize it, I realize I can still improve how I engage in my relationships and not let work bleed too much into this sacred cornerstone. On days when I’m not feeling my emotional best, it can be hard to do my relationships justice, but I try to stay as mindful as possible so I can still engage in a meaningful way.      

Final Reflections

Each of us have our own methods for self-care, especially when it comes to mental health and general well-being. For me, those methods have been: 

• Daily exercise (I am a gym rat -- and am religious about working out)
• Morning and evening walks with my dog Grizzly
• Spending time with family after work (I do block it off on my calendar)
• Being transparent about my mental or emotional state

While exercise is definitely important for my daily mental state, the walks in particular are a helpful “reset” time. They help me stay creative and remove me, if only for a moment, from the cooped-up environment that I associate with work, sleep, play, and everything else. I can’t tell you how important that’s been for a better state of mind. 

When it comes to relationships with my family, I try to always stay mindful of my mental state and let them know if I’m not feeling 100%. After years of working at it, I can tell when I am mentally off my game. If I’m grumpy, I’ll let them know so that they understand that I’m not at my best that day. Even on those days, though, I try my best to stay engaged. Still, my daughter’s drawing remains emblazoned in my mind, and a reminder that I can still achieve a better balance between my three pillars of sleep, work, and relationships. 

I wrote this in part because I’m also curious about the community’s thoughts on mental health. Especially during these challenging times. At Hubspot, we pride ourselves on being a place where people can come together to build each other up, and that doesn’t just mean helping learn the nuances of a tool or a new marketing strategy. Mental health is such an essential part of being a successful professional, and I hope I could stimulate some thought towards this. 

Let me know in the comments or the Community forum what you think about some of these points and your own self-care techniques. I think we can all benefit from each other’s perspective and knowledge. After all, we are all on this together.