Table of ContentsView AllTable of ContentsThe ConnectionPhysical Health’s EffectMental Health’s EffectTips
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The Connection
Physical Health’s Effect
Mental Health’s Effect
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A growing body of research makes it clear that mental health and physical health are deeply connected, with studies showing that an improvement or decline in one can lead to an improvement or decline in the other.But how exactly does one influence the other? What exactly is happening in the body to allow changes in one to change the other?
The Relationship Between Mental Health and Physical Health
To understand why mental health and physical health are so closely linked, it’s important to remember that the distinction between the two is less important than we may assume. Our thoughts, moods, and mental state may feel abstract or separate from the physical, but they are all happening as part of our brain activity.
A good example of how interconnected your brain and body are is the set of mental and physical changes that happen during the menstrual cycle. More and more research is showing thathormonal shifts throughout the menstrual cycleimpact far more than just the reproductive system.
How Does Physical Health Affect Mental Health?
One complex interaction between physical changes and mental health involved the interaction of estrogen and dopamine. Dopamine, sometimes known as the “happiness hormone” is associated with motivation and reward among multiple other functions in the brain. Estrogen downregulates dopamine transmission, mimicking the effects of certain antipsychotic medications. Postpartum, when estrogen levels dramatically drop, there is an increased vulnerability to psychosis in some individuals.For people with ADHD, that can make symptoms even worse. But for people with bipolar disorder or other conditions involving psychosis, that can make psychosis symptoms better.
Another example of hormonal changes impacting mental health involves estrogen and serotonin, in some women the drop in estrogen at the end of their menstrual cycle leads to drops in serotonin in the brain, contributing to emotional symptoms.
Reproductive hormones aren’t the only ones to be linked to mental health. Metabolic hormones—insulin, cortisol, leptin, and so on—have been found to impact a wide range of mental illnesses, from ADHD to schizophrenia to eating disorders.
Research shows that interaction is a two-way street. Metabolic problems like diabetes, hypertension or even just prolonged periods of poor nutrition can cause stress-induced changes to the brain that lead to mood and neurodevelopmental disorders. Likewise, certain mental health disorders can cause stress that triggers metabolic changes that, over time, can develop into those same metabolic diseases.
How Does Mental Health Affect Physical Health?
A number of studies have found that mental illness may accelerate biological aging, manifesting as increased rates of cardiovascular and other age-related diseases. One psychiatric condition, schizophrenia has been associated with up to 10-20 years shorter life expectancy.
It’s important to clarify that there is a lot of nuance to those findings, so being diagnosed with, say, depression does not necessarily mean a shorter life expectancy. These studies are largely based on epigenetic clocks, an algorithm for predicting biological age based on a process called DNA methylation.
But there’s a lot more involved in aging than just DNA methylation. So it’s more useful to think of your epigenetic clock as a risk factor or predictor, similar to how a person with a genetic predisposition for breast cancer is at higher risk but not guaranteed to get cancer.
What the research shows is that mental illnesses may be linked to premature aging in a few different ways:
For people with mental illness, this can put them at risk for a range of medical conditions, including:
The Connection Between Mental Health and Physical Health
Tips for Maintaining Mental and Physical Health
There is a silver lining to all the research on the interactions between mental and physical health: it shows that the body and brain are both extremely responsive to change.
That adaptability is partly what can cause a snowball effect of mental and physical health symptoms. But it’s that same adaptability that will allow anything you do to take care of yourself to have power to trigger a snowball effect of positive changes in your body. Here are a few places you might start.
Make Regular Exercise a Lifelong Habit
The physical andmental health benefits of regular exerciseare hard to overstate. It improves muscle mass and function, improves metabolic function, reduces inflammation, strengthens the immune system, improves cardiovascular and respiratory health, and even contributes to better gut microbiome diversity.
All of those physical health benefits will, in turn, improve mental health because they’re interconnected. But exercise also has direct benefits for the brain as well. Those benefits include improved cognitive function; improved executive function, including working memory and impulse control; reduced depression and anxiety symptoms; and reduced stress.
Many of these benefits are cumulative, meaning you’ll have to stick with an exercise routine for a while before you notice a difference. But exercise may also have some useful immediate benefits, including anelevated moodfor several hours after exercise, improved energy levels, and mild pain relief.
For optimal short and long-term benefits, follow these tips:
How to Set SMART Goals
Eat a Healthy, Balanced Diet
Diet is one of the most important risk factors of illness,but it can also be one of the most confusing lifestyle changes to make. There’s so much conflicting information out there about what you should and shouldn’t eat. Plus, a lot of diet plans ask you to meticulously track things like fiber, protein, and micronutrients. It’s overwhelming.
Instead of trying to follow any optimized diet plan or figure out which trending superfood you should be eating, just follow a few basic principles of good nutrition and then don’t stress about it:
If your current habits aren’t ideal, don’t worry about getting them perfect right from the start. Pick one change to focus on at a time so that you can turn these into lifelong habits.
Make Time for Doing Nothing
A lot of health advice, including the tips above, center on things you need to do or change. But it’s also important to remember that stress is a major factor in the harmful interactions between mental and physical health. So part of your healing process should include finding time to not worry about whether you’re eating the right thing, exercising enough, or being productive enough.
This is often referred to as mindfulness, but don’t let the label pressure you into putting criteria around what you should be doing or how to optimize this time. The goal is to just check in with yourself and take a break from the noise of life for a bit. You can try a more defined mindfulness exercise once you’ve made a habit of carving out this time for yourself if you want to.
13 Sources
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
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