Health Is a Jenga Game: Start With the Foundation

Health Is a Jenga Game: Start With the Foundation

Zlatoslava (Z) Karga, PMH NP DNP

I often think about health as a Jenga game.

In Jenga, we build a tower from many individual pieces. As long as the foundation is strong and the pieces remain reasonably balanced, the tower can tolerate some movement and stress. But start removing important pieces—especially from the foundation—and eventually the entire structure becomes unstable.

Our health works in a similar way.

There are many things that contribute to physical and mental well-being, but some are foundational. I think of four basic pieces:

Sleep. Nutrition. Exercise. Rest.

These may sound simple, but they are physiological necessities. When one of these pieces is chronically missing, the rest of the structure has to compensate. When several are missing at the same time, we may begin experiencing physical symptoms as well as anxiety, depressed mood, irritability, poor concentration, low motivation, and difficulty coping with everyday stress.

Let’s Look at One Jenga Piece: Sleep

Sleep is not simply a period when we stop being productive. Sleep itself is productive.

While we sleep, the brain continues important work involved in memory, learning, emotional processing, and regulation. Good-quality sleep helps us wake up better prepared to read, comprehend, make decisions, solve problems, and respond appropriately to what happens around us.

Now imagine repeatedly sleeping only four or five hours a night—or sleeping longer but never feeling rested.

You wake up tired. Your concentration is worse. Ordinary tasks require more effort. Your patience becomes shorter. Your anxiety may increase.

Then something interesting can happen: the world itself may begin to feel different.

Imagine opening an email from your supervisor in the morning. On a well-rested day, you may read it exactly as it was intended: a simple question or request.

After weeks of inadequate sleep, the same email might feel critical or threatening. You may read negativity into a neutral sentence, become anxious, react defensively, or spend hours thinking about what the person “really meant.”

The email didn’t necessarily change.

Your exhausted brain’s ability to process it did.

When this happens occasionally, we usually recover. But when inadequate sleep becomes chronic, it can contribute to a cycle of fatigue, emotional reactivity, anxiety, impaired concentration, and worsening mood. Sleep problems can both contribute to mental health symptoms and be a symptom of mental health or medical conditions themselves.

This is why, when we think about mental health, it is important not to look only at diagnoses or medications. We should also look at the foundation supporting the person.

Before asking only, “What is wrong?”, it can be useful to also ask:

How am I sleeping?

How am I eating?

Am I moving my body?

Am I giving myself enough time to rest and recover?

Medication and psychotherapy can be extremely important and sometimes essential. But they do not make our basic physiological needs disappear.

So every once in a while, take a look at your own Jenga tower.

Sleep. Nutrition. Exercise. Rest.

Are all four pieces still there?

If one has started slipping out, perhaps that is where some attention is needed—not because fixing one piece will solve every problem, but because a strong foundation gives everything else we do for our health a better chance to work.

Protect the foundation. The rest of the tower depends on it.

Share your thoughts