Lifestyle Psychiatry: How Everyday Habits Shape Mental Health

In an age marked by constant work and burnout, prioritizing mental health can feel daunting and burdenful. However, the emergence of Lifestyle Psychiatry is paving the way for more holistic approaches to mental and physical health. The president of the American Psychiatric Association, Ramaswamy Viswanathan, advocates for this new vision and declared the year 2024-2025 to focus on the theme of “Lifestyle for Positive Mental and Physical Health.” Additionally, the APA recognizes that “80% of healthcare spending in the US is used to treat conditions directly attributable to unhealthy lifestyle choices,”¹ demonstrating the pressing need to address these health issues.

Lifestyle Psychiatry helps to “prevent and treat chronic diseases through modification of lifestyle behaviors.”² This field emphasizes practical, sustainable daily habits that holistically support mental health, recognizing the profound impact of everyday decisions on emotional and cognitive well-being. By addressing and modifying these lifestyle behaviors, the goal is to create a balanced life that fosters a preventative barrier against mental health disorders and can also encourage physical health.

Douglas Noordsy, Lifestyle Psychiatry pioneer, recommends four core lifestyle behaviors– Nutrition, Movement, Sleep, Social Interactions, and Mindfulness³:

• Nutrition: Research has shown that eating whole, non-processed foods and having healthy diets and eating patterns can inhibit the risk of negative mental health disorders, like depression and bipolar disorder. In fact, food has been proven to have significant impacts on mood and emotional regulation.
• Movement: Exercise is crucial to a healthy lifestyle as it not only improves mood and attention, but also has shown to improve memory and cognitive performance. Additionally, regular physical activity that is paired with treatment has been found to improve symptoms that come with PTSD, ADHD, and depression.
• Sleep: Healthy sleep hygiene is important for emotional regulation and maintaining wellness. Noordsy finds that sleep and mental health are complementary as irregular sleep patterns can increase the risk of developing mental disorders. Creating healthy routines can help maintain sleep hygiene and improve circadian rhythms. 
• Social Interactions: Support through social interactions is key to mental wellness as research shows that social connections and relationships can help prevent poor outcomes of mental disorders. Not only can connect with community release oxytocin and reduce stress, individuals feel a sense of belonging and confidence through bonding and building relationships.
• Mindfulness: Incorporating mindfulness practices into your life is beneficial as it helps eliminate symptoms of depression and reduces stress. Through strengthening the mind and body connection, it can help strengthen self awareness and increase attention and emotional regulation. 

Owaves: Your Key To Wellness

In today’s fast-paced world, the lack of time in a day often leaves mental wellness as an idealistic afterthought. However, the problem is not rooted in a lack of knowledge or inaction towards a healthy lifestyle, it is finding the time to implement these lifestyle changes in our lives.

With Owaves, time is now your greatest asset and the key to unlocking an abundant, healthy life! Owaves recognizes that life is multifaceted, so it intuitively expands from the original five pillars of Lifestyle Psychiatry and adds three more to better fit the rhythm of a modern person’s day. Among these added categories are work, play, and flow, which reflect essential aspects of life. The Work category acknowledges the universal need to fulfill responsibilities, whether through a job, school, or caregiving. Complementing this is Play, emphasizing the importance of balance with time for leisure and joy, while Flow offers a flexible space for errands, hobbies, and other miscellaneous tasks. Together, all eight categories create a realistic framework that helps maximize time through planning and meaningful allocation of each day. By incorporating each category into their schedule, Owave users can effectively balance work and wellness, ensuring that every moment contributes to both productivity and well-being.

Now let’s get into how Owaves specifically helps boost each core lifestyle behavior:

Social Connections and Emotional Support

The importance of community and social interaction in lifestyle psychiatry cannot be overstated. Human connection fosters a sense of belonging, which is essential for mental resilience. As Dr. Madison Piotrowski and her colleagues find, social connections can help one feel socially supported and increase feelings of self-esteem.⁴ Traditional calendars often overemphasize work and overlook the more informal, menial activities that are still essential to life, like eating dinner with the family or Facetiming a grandparent. Unlike typical calendar apps, Owaves acknowledges the importance of social connection and uniquely empowers its users to actively plan meaningful social events through their “Love” category. This category lets users easily plan the necessary time for building new and nurturing existing relationships that lead to better wellness.

❤️Lifestyle Medicine Rx: We recommend planning at least 1 hour of face-to-face time with your loved ones to boost mental health and fight depression!⁵

Movement as a Mental Health Booster

Exercise is more than just a means to physical fitness; it is vital for mental health. Lifestyle psychiatry recognizes physical activity as a natural antidepressant, improving endorphin levels and boosting mood. A study in Australia even “rated exercise as the most effective intervention” in clinical depression patients, demonstrating that even simple movements like walking have great positive impacts on mental health.⁶ Additionally, timing your physical activity with your inner circadian rhythm has also shown to be incredibly effective in boosting physical health and beating metabolic disease.⁷ Owaves makes planning and prioritizing these crucial physical activities fun and easy with their colorful visual calendar. The “Move” category helps you seamlessly integrate exercise into your daily routine, and the “Vitals” category helps track the hours of exercise directly.

👟Lifestyle Medicine Rx: We recommend 30 minutes of daily exercise for adults and 60 minutes for teens to help mood, energy, and focus!⁸

Unlocking Sleep Hygiene

Sleep is a pillar of lifestyle psychiatry, emphasizing the necessity of sleep hygiene practices. Many people have poor sleep routines which are often directly caused by a lack of melatonin secretion in the body due to irregular exposure to light throughout the day.⁹ Irregular sleep patterns can exacerbate anxiety, depression, and cognitive difficulties. Owaves actively helps regulate sleep hygiene as they provide sunrise times, to help remind you to energize and start the day, and sunset times, to remind you to wind down and relax for bed. Additionally, Owaves’ integration with Apple Health further enhances its functionality as it helps you track sleep hours and patterns. By actively planning each day and knowing when it’s time to rest and sleep, it can be easier to improve sleep quality and hygiene.

💤Lifestyle Medicine Rx: We recommend 7 to 9 hours of sleep nightly for adults and 8 to 10 hours of sleep for teens.¹⁰ Learn more about optimizing your sleep.

Food as Fuel 

The food we consume directly impacts our brain function, mood, and can impact future mental health diagnoses. Previous research found that a healthy diet has improved outcomes in patients with depression and specifically following a Mediterranean diet has been linked to positive impacts on sleep and inflammation.¹¹ Owaves encourages healthy choices through the “Eat” category as users are more likely to maintain sustainable eating habits through the planning of regular meal times. Research has shown that adopting an 8-12 hour eating window improves metabolism and fights obesity.¹² Thus, by planning regular meal times, Owaves helps curb unplanned meals outside of the eating window, creating healthier eating habits.

🍴Lifestyle Medicine Rx: We recommend an 8 to 12 hour eating window, roughly sunrise to sunset.¹³

The Mind-Body Connection

The mind and body are more connected than you think. Mindfulness, as researchers Ranya Srour and Daniel Keyes state, is the practice of “nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment.” Srour and Keyes observe that incorporating mindfulness, through yoga, meditation, or journaling, can help the body naturally regulate emotions, stress, and pain. Moreover, mindfulness has also been shown to improve mental health disorders and symptoms like depression, anxiety, and stress.¹⁴ Purposefully dedicating time for deep breathing exercises and self-awareness can help ground the body and will eventually train the mind to self-adjust and adapt to tense situations. Owaves integrates the opportunity for daily mindfulness through the “Relax” category as it reminds users to take time to unwind and destress. In fact, planning time for relaxation helps reset the body for more productive periods of work and has been shown to increase blood flow and lower blood pressure.¹⁵

☯️Lifestyle Medicine Rx: We recommend at least 45 minutes of relaxation daily to regulate stress and increase quality of life!¹⁶ 

Staying Consistent: Creating Lifelong Habits

In an era where health is often overshadowed by the pressures of daily routine, lifestyle psychiatry emphasizes that wellness stems from the consistent practice of healthy habits. Whether it be regulating your sleep, tracking your exercise, and staying social, Owaves’ specific time increments, visually appealing categories, and intuitive design empowers individuals to align their routines with their natural clock and simplifies the path to a lifestyle rooted in health and balance. By integrating the core principles of lifestyle psychiatry into your daily routine, you can build the foundation for a long and healthy life—and using Owaves is the formula to make it happen.

If you’d like to dive into the deeper and more detailed science of Owaves’ eight default categories, we invite you to explore The Science of Our Symbols. By understanding the story behind each of these symbols and how they scientifically and intuitively align with lifestyle psychiatry principles, you can successfully begin to uncover new ways to create harmony in your daily schedule and optimize your mental and physical potential!

References

1. Lifestyle Psychiatry Prevention and Wellness Campaign | APA Foundation. (2023). Apaf.org. https://www.apaf.org/ways-to-give/lifestyle/
2.  Piotrowski, M. C., Lunsford, J., & Gaynes, B. N. (2021). Lifestyle psychiatry for depression and anxiety: Beyond diet and exercise. Lifestyle Medicine, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/lim2.21
3.  Noordsy, D., Abbott-Frey, A., & Chawla, V. (2024). Special Report: Lifestyle Psychiatry Emphasizes Behaviors Supporting Mental Health. Psychiatric News, 59(03). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2024.03.3.19
4.  Piotrowski, M. C., Lunsford, J., & Gaynes, B. N. (2021). Lifestyle psychiatry for depression and anxiety: Beyond diet and exercise. Lifestyle Medicine, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/lim2.21
5. Oregon Health & Science University. (2015, October 4). Research: Face-to-face socializing more powerful than phone calls, emails in guarding against depression in older adults. OHSU. https://news.ohsu.edu/2015/10/05/research:-face-to-face-socializing-more-powerful-than-phone-calls-emails-in-guarding-against-depression-in-older-adults
6.  Marx, Wolfgang, et al. “Lifestyle-Based Mental Health Care in Psychiatry: Translating Evidence into Practice.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 55, no. 7, 12 May 2021, pp. 641–643, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00048674211011250, https://doi.org/10.1177/00048674211011250. Accessed 15 Nov. 2024.
7.  Gabriel, Brendan M., and Juleen R. Zierath. “Circadian Rhythms and Exercise — Re-Setting the Clock in Metabolic Disease.” Nature Reviews Endocrinology, vol. 15, no. 4, 17 Jan. 2019, pp. 197–206, www.nature.com/articles/s41574-018-0150-x, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41574-018-0150-x. Accessed 15 Nov. 2024.
8. American Heart Association. (2018, April 18). American Heart Association recommendations for physical activity in adults and kids. https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/fitness/fitness-basics/aha-recs-for-physical-activity-in-adults
9.  Tähkämö, Leena, et al. “Systematic Review of Light Exposure Impact on Human Circadian Rhythm.” Chronobiology International, vol. 36, no. 2, 12 Oct. 2018, pp. 151–170, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30311830, https://doi.org/10.1080/07420528.2018.1527773. Accessed 15 Nov. 2024.
10. National Sleep Foundation. (2015, February 2). National Sleep Foundation recommends new sleep times [Press release]. OneCare Media. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/press-release/national-sleep-foundation-recommends-new-sleep-times
11. Piotrowski, M. C., Lunsford, J., & Gaynes, B. N. (2021). Lifestyle psychiatry for depression and anxiety: Beyond diet and exercise. Lifestyle Medicine, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/lim2.21
12.  Owaves. (2021, March 12). The Science of Our Symbols: Owaves’ Eight Activity Icons. Owaves.com. https://owaves.com/science-of-our-symbols-owaves-activity-icons/
13.  Tello, M. (2018, June 29). Intermittent fasting: Surprising update. Harvard Health Publishing. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156
14. Srour, R. A., & Keyes, D. (2024). Lifestyle Mindfulness In Clinical Practice. PubMed; StatPearls Publishing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK599498/
15.  Sioux Center Health. (2019, July 3). The importance of taking time to relax. https://www.siouxcenterhealth.org/latest-news-and-blog/the-importance-of-taking-time-to-relax/
16.  Sioux Center Health. (2019, July 3). The importance of taking time to relax. https://www.siouxcenterhealth.org/latest-news-and-blog/the-importance-of-taking-time-to-relax/