The 6 Pillars of Health & Well-Being | Pillar #1 — Sleep | #85
What is essential to feel good and function well?
Hello friends!
We’ve had a bunch new folks join this list since my last issue, so I wanted to reintroduce myself and this newsletter.
I’m Connor and I run an education business (with my wonderful wife, Claire) that helps corporate teams sustain performance and productivity. We deliver live workshops and online courses around time management, sustainable productivity, mental resilience, and more.
My newsletter, One Percent Wisdom, is a personal playground of ideas and exploration where I (and occasionally Claire) explore the intersection of health, well-being, productivity, and try to uncover simple practices that leave us feeling more alive, present, and connected to our work and the world around us.
This week’s idea is around the essential ingredients to feel good and function well.
I’ve decided (based on Claire’s smart feedback) to break this post into six, smaller and more bite-sized newsletters, so please enjoy Part 1 below and look out for Part 2 next week.
Let’s hop to it.
The 6 Pillars of Health & Well-Being
Most of this is common sense, not common practice.
I don’t remember who said that, but it’s a phrase that has stuck with me for many years now, and it’s something I repeat often.
An area where this is clearly true is our health & well-being.
Despite the mess of information out there, I believe the basics are straightforward.
Now when I talk about health & wellbeing, I like to say health AND well-being, because for many people, their idea of health is still limited to the physical manifestation of health.
But the ancient idea that mind and body are connected (or simply “one”) is now more broadly accepted and understood by the Western, evidence-based scientific community.
For example, I love how the late Dr. Candace Pert frames the idea of a unified body and mind, or what she calls the “bodymind”:
Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely, physicians treat the body with no regard to the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other.
When it comes to health & well-being, we can’t treat the body and mind as separate wither.
Most people have a working understanding of health, but what about well-being? Probably not so much, as it’s quite a convoluted term and idea.
To begin with, well-being has about a million different definitions, but for the sake of this post, let’s simply define it as “feeling good and functioning well.”
If we’re talking about” feeling good”, we’re encompassing our emotional world plus our mental states of mind (which again, are inextricably linked).
If we’re talking about “functioning” well, we’re taking into account the overall health and vitality of the body and mind.
With this loose definition of health & well-being in mind, how do we go about improving or maintaining this very precious thing?
🏛️ Let’s Talk Pillars
When you peel back the onion of health & well-being, things start to get quite confusing.
Defining the words themselves is tough, and then when you try to break each concept down into it’s component parts, you start to realize that there is no singular, agreed-upon definition of what elements are to be included.
A quick Google will show you dozens upon dozens of different frameworks, models, and conceptions of what actually makes up a well-functioning human.
For example…
Johns Hopkins University posits 8 Elements of Well-Being:
Martin Seligman’s PERMA Theory includes 5 core pieces:
One of the most famous models was put forth by Carol Ryff in 1989:
Andrew Huberman speaks about 5 pillars:
So how do we simplify this complex landscape?
For me, I like how Huberman uses the word “pillar” as it feels foundational, structural, and gives a sense of stability and groundedness.
I also like to make the pillars are simple and practical as possible.
It can be easy to lose our grounding when talk of well-being gets overly theoretical, and I’m afraid that concepts like engagement, meaning, and purpose, while important, can obscure some of the very practical things you can do to feel great and function well.
I’m just kinda basic it turns out.
My current conceptualization health & well-being pillars centers around 6 pillars, which are the following:
Sleep
Movement
Food
Light
Connection (i.e. relationships)
Nature
Again, this isn’t *everything that matters in life* and we could of course add other elements like spirituality, purpose, wealth, community, learning, service, solitude, quiet, etc etc
And we could also split hairs over how to define each pillar (e.g. are personal relationships different to a sense of community?)
But I’m a simple man. And I appreciate the simplicity of this framework, and I suspect many of you reading this might as well.
Let’s unpack each in more detail.
😴 Pillar #1 — Sleep
Sleep is probably the most important foundational element to our overall health. It affects our relationships, our ability to recover and repair from movement, our mood, and practically every physiological system in your body.
But it’s fucking hard to get right.
What are the basics?
You need about 7-8 hours of sleep per night
Your sleep quality will benefit from consistency (e.g. following a similar bedtime)
You want to sleep in a cold, dark, and quiet place
What have I found useful in my own sleep practice? (and it is a practice…meaning you can get better at it over time!)
I aim to get outside right after waking, as early morning light exposure sets the circadian clock and helps establish your body’s rhythm for wakefulness and sleep
I try (but am nowhere near perfect) to catch some of the sunset hours as this specific type of light signals to your body and brain it’s time to wind down
I turn off all overhead lights after dinner, and I’m currently experimenting with wearing blue light blocking glasses to further reduce exposure to blue light
These three daily practices are simple yet powerful. If I just stick to those, I sleep pretty well.
There are a few other elements that you might play with to see how they impact your sleep and routine.
⌚️ Tech — using a sleep tracking device might help. I used an Oura for 2 years, which yielded some interesting insights (e.g. I overcompensate for end-of-week tiredness by over-consuming caffeine). I stopped wearing it because I think it has decreasing value over time.
📵 Tech Time — I think everyone knows this by now, but limiting exposure to screens before bed is really helpful. I try to stop at least 1 hour before bed.
😎 Sleep Mask — total gamechanger for me when traveling or whenever I sleep in a room without blackout blinds. Investing an extra $10-20 to get a mask with the contoured eyelid design is definitely worth it imo.
🥶 Keep It Cold — this is tough because Europe hates A/C but temperature is huge for my sleep quality. In the colder months, it means windows stay open. In the warmer months, we use fans. We are gonna bite the bullet and buy an Eight Sleep mattress this year, so will let you know how that goes
☕️ No Caffeine Past 2pm — everyone is different, but I’ve found this is roughly my no-go zone for coffee and caffeinated teas. I often stop earlier but this is my rule of thumb.
🕔 Eating Earlier — kind of tough in Portugal but most days we eat dinner at 6:30/7 which means we have 2-3 hours to digest before bed. If I eat within 1-2 hours of sleep, it can have quite a negative impact.
🛏️ Separate Beds - Claire will hate me for writing this but sometimes we sleep separately, and we both sleep better when we do. We still sleep together most nights, but if it’s been a bad couple of sleep nights, or there is a big workshop the day and I really want to optimize my sleep, I head to the guest room.
If you sleep well, my experience is that you feel better, you function better, and the other pillars (movement, food, etc.) tend to flow downstream from sleep.
If you do one thing this week, I’d encourage you to get outside and try to get 10-30 minutes of natural sunlight (even if it’s cloudy!) and see how that impacts your sleep.
Thanks for reading! Look out for next week’s newsletter where I’ll dive into Pillar #2 — Movement.
Making Time at Work
ICYMI, I was interviewed by the wonderful John Zeratsky (of Sprint and Make Time fame) about the work we’ve been doing to help teams focus on what matters most.
You can read the interview over on the Make Time blog.
The Freelance Mindset
I was also interviewed in Joy Batra’s upcoming book exploring the different ways freelancers and free agents structure their lives and work.
You can check out the book and pre-order here.
Thanks for reading!
If you liked this post, leave a comment on Substack, share it with a friend, or simply hit reply and let me know what you think.
I always look forward to the responses I get so don’t be shy and say hey!
— Connor