The Mt Kenya Times 
The way we live shapes how we feel — and how we feel shapes how we live. Understanding that connection could change everything.
By Wanjohi P Mugambi
Mental health and lifestyle are not two separate conversations. They are the same conversation, and it is one that Kenya — and the world — urgently needs to have. Mental health is how a person thinks, feels and behaves each day. Lifestyle is how a person lives each day. The way we live affects how we feel, and how we feel affects how we live. That relationship, circular and unrelenting, sits at the centre of some of the most profound challenges facing individuals, families and communities today.
The first thing to discard is the misconception that mental health concerns only those with severe psychiatric illness — the person who has, as the old phrase goes, “lost their mind.” Mental health belongs to everyone. Every person has it, just as every person has physical health. Some days it is strong. Some days it is fragile. When it is strong, a person can manage stress, maintain relationships, concentrate at work and make sound decisions. When it is weak, small problems feel insurmountable, exhaustion becomes constant, hope fades, and anger surfaces without warning. Mental health is not a condition reserved for hospitals. It is the invisible architecture of daily life.
Lifestyle — the collection of daily habits covering sleep, food, movement, technology use, work, relationships and stress management — directly shapes that architecture, brick by brick.
Consider a young man from Mukuru, 23 years old. He grew up in a crowded house where several people shared a single room. After completing secondary school, work did not come. Days became weeks. He began waking late, spending hours motionless in bed, scrolling through his phone, eating once a day if at all, withdrawing from conversation, stopping going outside. Within months, a heaviness settled over him that he could not name. He lost interest in everything — in bathing, in seeing friends, in the future he had once imagined for himself. He could not sleep at night but felt crushed by fatigue during the day. He began to believe, with quiet certainty, that he was a failure and always would be.
What he was living through was depression. Not sadness — depression. The distinction matters. Depression is a clinical state in which a person loses energy, motivation, hope and the capacity to feel pleasure in things that once brought joy. It alters sleep, appetite, concentration and self-perception. It does not discriminate by age, income or ambition. This young man was not lazy. He was not performing. He was ill, and the texture of his daily life was making him worse with every passing day.
His story illustrates a pattern that mental health professionals recognise clearly: lifestyle and depression feed each other. Depression disrupts sleep, appetite, movement and social connection. The disruption of those things, in turn, deepens depression. It becomes a cycle. Breaking it requires working on both dimensions simultaneously.
Sleep is where that work often begins. During sleep, the brain rests, consolidates memory, processes emotion and restores chemical balance. Without adequate sleep, a person wakes irritable, foggy and emotionally brittle. Sustained sleep deprivation heightens the risk of anxiety and low mood significantly. In a world where screens dominate the evening hours — children watching videos, adults scrolling social media long after midnight — disrupted sleep has become epidemic. Depression compounds this. Some people with depression lie awake the whole night, their thoughts cycling without resolution. Others sleep 12 hours and still rise exhausted. The guidance is straightforward: seven to eight hours each night, consistent sleep and wake times, and screens switched off at least an hour before bed. Simple to state, harder to practise — but transformative when sustained.
Food shapes the brain more directly than most people realise. Fresh vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes and clean water support the production of neurotransmitters — the brain’s chemical messengers — that regulate mood, calm and energy. Diets high in processed sugars, excess salt and artificial additives promote inflammation that affects the brain adversely. Skipping meals drops blood sugar sharply, producing shakiness, anxiety and cognitive impairment. Depression typically distorts appetite in one of two directions: some people stop eating almost entirely; others overconsume, particularly sugary foods, chasing a brief chemical lift that deepens the crash that follows. Eating regularly, eating with balance and drinking sufficient water are not trivial habits. They are foundational mental health interventions accessible to most people at low cost.
Movement is equally essential. The human body is built for physical activity, and when it is denied that activity, stress accumulates in ways that are both physiological and psychological. Walking, digging, dancing, stretching and playing all trigger the release of endorphins and other chemicals that reduce cortisol and elevate mood. For someone with depression, initiating movement is genuinely difficult. The body feels weighted, the motivation absent. But the evidence is unambiguous: even 30 minutes of moderate daily movement improves mood measurably. It need not involve a gym. Walking to the market, tending a kitchen garden, playing with children, or moving through nature — where sunlight and fresh air carry their own quieting effects — all count.
The young man from Mukuru began to recover when a community health worker encouraged him to walk for 20 minutes each morning, without his phone, simply breathing and greeting neighbours. The first days were hard. Gradually, the heaviness in his body began to lift.
Technology deserves its own honest examination. Phones and social media are useful tools, but their unmanaged use carries a real psychological cost. Extended time on social media exposes users to carefully curated images of other people’s success, relationships and material comfort. For someone already struggling — particularly a young person without stable employment — the comparison is corrosive. Seeing peers post about jobs and income when one has neither does not motivate. It diminishes. Boundaries with technology are not a luxury: designated phone-free hours, keeping devices out of the bedroom, and prioritising face-to-face conversation over digital interaction all protect mental health in measurable ways.
Relationships, perhaps more than any other lifestyle factor, anchor mental health. Human beings are social creatures. The need to feel connected, understood and valued is not sentimental — it is biological. Isolation accelerates mental deterioration. Today, paradoxically, many people are profoundly lonely despite holding hundreds of digital contacts. Real connection requires presence: listening without judgement, speaking honestly, being physically there. Depression pulls a person inward, convincing them that they are a burden and that no one could truly understand. That withdrawal intensifies the illness. The young man from Mukuru began to heal in earnest when he joined a small neighbourhood youth group that met to talk, clean their surroundings and play football. He did not need to speak much. Simply being among people who accepted him without conditions gave him something depression had stripped away — the feeling of belonging.
Work and the absence of work both carry mental health consequences. Long hours without rest erode wellbeing. Unemployment and financial insecurity carry their own sustained stress, particularly in informal settlements where social pressure from family and community is unrelenting. The key protective factor, regardless of employment status, is daily structure: waking at a consistent time, having defined tasks, building in periods of rest and play, and making space for human connection. Routine is not monotony — it is a scaffold against hopelessness.
Finally, how we manage our inner lives matters profoundly. Across many Kenyan communities, particularly among men, the cultural instruction has long been to suppress emotion — to be strong, to cope alone, to not cry. Suppressed emotion does not disappear. It migrates — into headaches, stomach complaints, explosive anger, excessive drinking. A genuinely healthy lifestyle includes learning to identify emotions, name them accurately and express them constructively — through trusted conversation, journaling, prayer, physical activity or creative work.
Mental health is not separate from life. It is woven through every hour of it — through what we eat and how we sleep, through who we talk to and how long we stare at our phones, through whether we move our bodies and whether we allow ourselves, quietly and without shame, to feel what we feel. The young man from Mukuru did not need a diagnosis to begin recovering. He needed a walk, a meal, a group of peers and someone who took the time to notice. Sometimes, that is precisely where healing starts.
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