A. lose your sense of shame and accept your imperfect self.

B.？ Attention should be paid to both drug therapy and psychotherapy.

C.？ Develop a healthy lifestyle

I guess many friends didn't choose C, but in fact, life behavior is closely related to our physical and mental health and disease treatment.

Good mood signing physician Professor Jia from the Department of Psychiatry of Beijing Anding Hospital shared such a story:

One of his patients usually has a very good condition control, but it will recur in autumn. It is found that patients eat too many grapes every day.

You see, does lifestyle have a great influence on the treatment of diseases?

At present, many guides begin to pay attention to the position of healthy lifestyle in the prevention and treatment of mental disorders.

For example, according to the clinical practice guidelines of the Royal College of Psychiatry in Australia and New Zealand, improving four life factors, such as diet, exercise, sleep and smoking, should be listed as "zero steps" in the treatment of mental illness and need to be solved before starting drug treatment and/or psychotherapy.

Therefore, if you want to recover quickly, you must keep in mind the following 20-word policy ~

0 1

Healthy diet

Do you know that?/You know what? Do you know that?/You know what? What we eat every day, how much each food we eat and the proportion in our diet will affect the occurrence, severity and duration of mental illness.

Take chestnuts as an example: the high-fat and high-calorie diet in western countries will increase the risk of depression and anxiety, while the Mediterranean diet has a protective effect on mental health, which can alleviate the symptoms of mental patients and improve their cognitive function.

A friend wants to ask: What is the Mediterranean diet?

It is a diet pattern with vegetables, fruits, fish, whole grains, beans and olive oil as the main body. You can know how to eat this diet by comparing the picture below.

(Schematic diagram of Mediterranean diet structure)

As can be seen from this picture, the requirements of the Mediterranean diet are relatively simple: eat more plant foods and fish, eat dairy products and white meat in moderation, and eat less red meat and sweets such as pork and beef.

This diet can provide a variety of nutrients, and then they interact to achieve anti-inflammatory effect and improve mood and cognition.

In addition, plant food rich in dietary fiber has a great influence on intestinal flora, which has been proved to be related to the etiology of various mental disorders, and it can affect people's mood and state.

So is the Mediterranean diet suitable for China people?

It can be described as a very healthy diet, and it has been listed in the world authoritative diet list "American News &; World report), the champion of "overall best diet" for five consecutive years. You can DIY~ according to your own reality ~

02

Keep exercising.

Mental patients are often accompanied by emotional apathy, lack of interest in anything, avoidance of social and cognitive obstacles, so they are more likely to sit still.

What consequences will this bring? It makes mental patients more susceptible to physical diseases such as osteoporosis and cardiovascular diseases, and has psychological and behavioral problems such as depression and substance abuse, which increases the difficulty of treatment of diseases.

On the contrary, if people with mental illness can insist on proper exercise every day, the benefits will be multidimensional:

● For patients with depression/anxiety/bipolar disorder, exercise can reduce the severity and duration of emotional symptoms. The guidelines of the European Psychiatric Association on physical activity of mental illness even suggest that exercise therapy can be used as the first-line treatment for mild to moderate depression;

● For schizophrenics, exercise can improve their mental symptoms and cognitive function, and reduce the metabolic side effects such as weight gain caused by drugs;

In short, insisting on exercise is a blind "good medicine" to prevent and treat mental illness. Therefore, even if the mentally ill are reluctant, we should try to get them to move, but we should pay attention to the following two points.

Choose the right exercise:

We can choose popular activities of teamwork, such as square dance and playing basketball; Followed by cycling, aerobic exercise and gym exercise.

If the patient really doesn't want to do exercise, it's good to take him for a walk every day. We should remember six words: it is better to move than not to move.

Control the time and frequency of movement;

The relationship between exercise time and mental health is inverted "U", which is the best exercise frequency, 3-5 days a week, once a day, 45 minutes each time.

If you exercise too long every time, or exercise too much every month, it will not only have no gain for your mental health, but also have a negative impact.

What needs to be emphasized here is that although exercise can "cure diseases", it can only be used as an auxiliary treatment. Never take the place of medication directly ~

03

Pay attention to sleep

Some patients' friends feel that a good sleep has become my "luxury" since I got sick.

In fact, sleep disorder is a common problem of many mental patients.

Statistics show that the prevalence of insomnia in patients with mental illness is as high as 47%, which is much higher than that in normal people 10% ~ 15%.

There are two reasons:

First, because mental illness itself will destroy the quality of sleep, mental symptoms will also amplify or aggravate sleep disorders;

Second, some psychotropic drugs can also induce sleep disorders, such as monoamine oxidase inhibitors, 5-HT reuptake inhibitors and other antidepressants. (ps: the degree of influence varies from person to person, so don't give up eating because of choking ~)

Sleep disorder will not only significantly increase the risk of depression, anxiety, alcoholism and psychotic symptoms, but also make patients with mental illness have persistent negative thoughts, reduce their compliance with treatment, affect the treatment effect, and even make patients commit suicide.

Since taking medicine for a long time has certain side effects, is there any treatment with good curative effect and small side effects?

Don't tell me there is!

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT-I) for insomnia is a multi-dimensional psychological intervention. It can solve the problems of difficulty in falling asleep, easy to wake up in the middle of the night, short sleep time and poor sleep quality, correct unreasonable sleep beliefs and reduce daytime dysfunction.

More importantly, its curative effect is excessive. The research shows that the short-term curative effect of CBT-I is equivalent to that of drug therapy, and the long-term curative effect is better than that of drug therapy.

At present, the European Sleep Research Association and other authoritative organizations regard it as the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia. When this method alone does not work, it is up to the doctor to evaluate whether to use drugs.

04

Quit smoking before it's too late.

People with mental illness are also at high risk of smoking. Statistics show that there are about 654.38+25 million smokers in the world. Among them, people with depression or emotional anxiety are twice as likely to smoke as healthy people, and 88% of patients with mental illness such as schizophrenia are smokers.

Are you an old smoker too?

If not, then congratulations, there is one less stumbling block on the road to recovery; If so, I advise you to put out your cigarette quickly, because smoking will really bring many bad effects to mental illness.

● Smoking will aggravate the positive symptoms such as auditory hallucination and delusion in schizophrenic patients, and destroy the cognitive function of mental patients, especially the memory function.

●? Smoking will accelerate the removal of certain psychotropic drugs from the blood. In order to better control the disease, doctors inevitably need to increase the dosage of drugs, which increases the incidence of adverse drug reactions.

● Smoking is one of the main reasons for shortening the life expectancy of patients with severe mental disorders 15-30 years old.

So, if you are not a heavy smoker, try to divert your attention from cigarettes by some methods, such as increasing outdoor sports or developing other hobbies.

A doctor in a good mood reminds you that if you are already a heavy smoker, you will have symptoms such as scratching your heart and fidgeting if you don't smoke, which shows that you may have become a "substance addict". You'd better ask a doctor for help in this case.

At present, many general hospitals have "smoking cessation clinics". Quitting smoking under the guidance of professional doctors can greatly improve the success rate of withdrawal and minimize the withdrawal reaction.

References:

Prakash J, chatterjee K, Srivastava

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Journal of Psychiatry July 2020-1February; 29(2): 185- 190.doi: 10.4 103/ipj . ipj _ 126 _ 20。 Epub

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Zhang Qiuxiang, Xue Fen, Yan Fangfang, et al. Effect of smoking on cognitive function of hospitalized male schizophrenics [J]. Neurology and Mental Health, 20 16(2):4.

Wang Xueyi. Smoking also increases the risk of mental illness. Health Guide, 2016,22 (2):1.

Que, Chen Sijing, Deng Jiahui, et al. The application of cognitive behavioral therapy in the treatment of insomnia caused by mental illness [J]. China Journal of Behavioral Medicine and Brain Science, 2022,31(1): 7.

[5] Gao. Sleep disorder and treatment of mental illness [J]. practical geriatrics, 2007.

[6] Yang, Ding Weiwei. Research progress of improving psychological benefit of schizophrenic patients by exercise intervention [J]. China Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017,36 (10): 8.

[7]https://oldwayspt.org/traditional-diets/mediterranean-diet

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