By Tricia Cherry —
This past week’s T.E.E. Time focused on wellness. The speaker was Mike McGovern, a mental health counselor at Miami’s Hamilton campus. He spoke about what he calls the “three pillars of well-being”—the three factors that most impact physical health, which is closely linked to mental health. These pillars are sleep, hydration, and exercise; the TEE time hour was spent on the basic impact these pillars have on one’s health.
The first discussion was on sleep. Humans spend roughly a third of their lives sleeping, or at least attempting to, which isn’t as lazy as it sounds. This is because while the body appears to be at rest, it and the brain are both hard at work. During sleep, the body is healing itself and the brain is filing away the day’s information in a more complete process than can be done awake. In this way, sleep is crucial for physical well-being, cognitive coherence, and memory processing. In fact, sleep is so critical that McGovern warned that pulling all-nighters to study for the big tests or writing big papers is actually hurting one’s chances of passing, since one is absorbing information, but not effectively processing it.
Mr. McGovern went on to discuss the various stages of sleep; the influence of light, natural and unnatural, on the sleep cycle; and the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk is the proper name for the sudden jerking motion that can suddenly pull people out of shallow sleep, usually associated with light dreaming, before the paralysis of sleep can properly take hold.
The second pillar McGovern spoke of is hydration. This discussion was brief, but equally as important as the others. The human body is roughly sixty percent water, and the brain is approximately seventy-five percent water. Hydration levels impact cognitive function, mood, performance, memory, and critical thinking skills.
How much water one should drink varies from person to person. Some people will say a healthy individual needs no less than eight glasses a day, others say exactly fifteen cups, and still others simply advise to drink water when one is thirsty. A bar graph displayed showed the level of hydrating capacity per drink, in which water was in the center of the graph, acting less as a starting point and more of a baseline, with some drinks like fruit juice, tea, and electrolyte-filled sports drinks above water, and caffeinated beverages such as coffee and soda below. Interestingly, about twenty to thirty percent of hydration comes from the food we consume.
The final pillar discussed is exercise, but this is often something that looks different for everyone. For some people, it’s going to the gym. For others, it’s a brisk daily walk. Mr. McGovern defines exercise as any kind of physical movement done with the intention of health improvement. Exercise improves immunity function, energy levels, and mood, and strengthens muscles.
Circling back to the other pillars, sleep and hydration are vital for the success of exercise. In order for muscles to grow, they need to be strained, which is technically hurting them. These muscles are repaired, and strengthened, in sleep, and only properly maintained by plenty of water or other hydrating agents. In particular strength training with heavy weights will do nothing if one doesn’t let his or her body get plenty of rest and water in the meantime.
Clearly, these pillars do not stand on their own, but rather rely on each other, with many of the benefits overlapping. Each are vital to the health of an individual. A person getting regular exercise is going to need better sleep and more water than someone who isn’t putting in an effort to exercise. On the other hand, excess hydration can disrupt sleep, so proper balance is the key, along with consistency.