Adequate sleep and access to mental health resources are essential to soldiers, a panel of experts said at a recent Hot Topic hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army.

“For most of our warfighter history, mental health and sleep were hidden domains rarely talked about or misunderstood,” said Col. Tom Helms, a chaplain who is serving as commandant and deputy director of the U.S. Army Institute for Religious Leadership. “But today, in a modern U.S. Army that focuses on holistic health and fitness, we recognize that small, incremental improvements in our mental health and sleep domains can be powerful.”

Helms spoke during a panel focused on the mental and sleep domains during AUSA’s Hot Topic titled “The Foundations of Holistic Health and Fitness.” The Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness system prioritizes five aspects of wellness—physical, mental, nutritional, spiritual and sleep—to enable soldier and unit readiness.

Harnessing data from wearables to tailor a unit’s schedule has been successful, said Spencer Posey, director of human performance and strategic partnerships of Elanah.AI. When he served in the Army, Posey integrated the Holistic Health and Fitness program into the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard).

“When we put wearables on our first company, we immediately saw that the sleep of the leadership team was terrible,” he said. The team pushed morning formation from 6:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. “to allow folks to get more sleep. We empowered squad leaders to do [physical training] once a day. So, morale improved, sleep improved, cognitive decisions improved, and the leadership team of that company was in a much happier position.”

If a soldier is struggling with their mental health, peer support goes a long way, said Mark Casper, president and CEO of Tech for Troops, a nonprofit that aims to help veterans and their families gain digital skills through training and technology.

“It happened to me in the Marine Corps. One of my sergeants reached out, and I was just in a bad spot,” Casper said. “I was a heavy drinker, and I thought the world hated me. I hated the world. But, at the same time, he helped me to get through it just by pulling me aside and saying, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Because this isn’t you.’ And then I was able to talk through it with him.”

There is no one-size-fits-all wellness solution for soldiers. Instead, a tailored approach that takes every soldier’s individual ability into account is most effective, said Kate Colvin, a Holistic Health and Fitness integration team cognitive performance specialist.

“We expect our soldiers to do things above and beyond what they tend to expect is their norm, right?” she said. “We expect them to not just perform but to live above what basic human capabilities are. So, being able, from that leadership standpoint, to take self-report data,” including data from cognitive performance specialists or wearables “and using that to better inform our training times [and] better inform how we’re approaching things, I think, could really help shape things.”