Seven Things to Do to Improve Your Mental Health

In today’s world, a lot of people tend to prioritize their job or their daily errands before anything else. We tend to forget that our mental health is incredibly important when it comes to our everyday lives. If you are feeling good, that reflects on everything you do.

This is why self-assessment is important, you want to make sure to check in with yourself because improving your mental health can also improve your work, physical health, friendships, relationships, and overall quality of life. Here are some tips on how to improve your mental health:

Connect With Other People

In today’s fast-paced technology-driven world it is easy to get disconnected from people. Most of us tend to wake up in the morning and the first thing we do is check our social media or emails. Then we go to school/work, deal with difficult coworkers, and can’t wait until we can finally go home again. Once we are home, we go on our phones and check our social media while a TV show is playing on our laptops in the background.

This routine is seriously damaging to our mental health because we are exiling ourselves from human connection. People are social animals, we thrive when we are part of a group. In order to improve your mental health, you have to invite other people into your life. Connecting with others helps us build a sense of belonging and self-worth and provides us with emotional support.

Start making an effort and strike up a conversation with someone new or call up an old friend and invite them for a coffee. Make it a point in your life to interact with people and watch your quality of life rise.

Physical Activity

Our mind and body are interconnected, so our physical health can often reflect on our mental health. Being physically active not only raises our self-esteem but also causes chemical changes in our brains which help positively change our moods. Simple daily physical exercise raises endorphin levels which produce feelings of happiness and euphoria.

Daily physical activity doesn’t have to mean going to the gym and working out until you can barely walk. It can be as simple as taking a walk in the morning, practicing yoga, or doing Qigong exercises such as White Tiger Qigong. These give you time to be with yourself and help manage stress levels.

Healthy Eating

What we put into our bodies is incredibly important. If we eat well, we feel well. This is because our brains need a certain mix of nutrients in order to stay healthy and function properly. You want to eat three meals a day, stay hydrated, and avoid caffeine or soda as much as possible. A healthy diet includes:

fruit and vegetables
wholegrain cereals or bread
nuts and seeds
dairy products (in moderation)
oily fish
lots of water.

Part of consuming things that are good for you means that you want to stay away from things that are harmful to your body such as, too much sugar, fatty or fried foods, chemical sweeteners, excessive alcohol intake, smoking, or vaping.

Sleep

You’ve probably heard the expression “sleep is the best medicine”. This expression is not only common, but it is also true. One of the fastest ways for people to feel stressed, anxious, unhappy, drowsy, or depressed is by a lack of sleep.

Getting a full night’s sleep allows you to be present the next day, gives a fresh start to your day, gives you enough energy to handle all of the things you have lined up for the day, puts you in a better mood, and allows your brain to work clearer. Many people struggle with sleep and one way to combat that is to try to put yourself on a sleep schedule where every night you try to be in bed by a certain time.

Eventually, this will become a routine and your body will naturally want to go to sleep at that allocated time. You also want to make sure that your sleep environment is comfortable, dark, and quiet. Studies have shown that the use of technology before going to bed significantly inhibits people from being able to fall asleep. Make sure that at least an hour before you go to bed you are off all technology.

Sleep is very important to both our mental and physical health, it allows our bodies to recharge and it’s crucial that we allow that to happen.

Hobbies

Everybody has something that they love to do in their free time. Our hobbies make us happy and they help us relax, de-stress, and take our minds off of the pressures of everyday life. For these reasons, it is very important for us to have hobbies and to make time for them. Whether you like listening to music, reading, painting, cooking, gardening, or watching movies, you should make time for these things in your day.

The premise is quite simple, doing things that make you happy will make you feel happy. Taking time out of our day to focus on her hobbies is very important to her mental health and not only because it makes us feel good, but more importantly we are taking time out of our day and focusing on ourselves.

For most people, their world revolves around work, school, or their kids, and taking an hour or so out of your busy day to do something that you love will help you deal with stress and help manage your anxiety. It is the easiest form of self-care that we all should implement in our daily lives.

Learn a New Skill

Learning new skills is very useful and helpful to your mental health in a few ways. It helps boost your self-confidence and raises self-esteem. It also helps you build a sense of purpose and allows you to connect with others. We all have a list of things we wish we knew how to do. Whether it’s learning how to cook that certain meal or knowing how to speak a certain language, Learning a new skill doesn’t only widen out our résumé, but it also makes us feel a lot better about ourselves.

Self-Love

This is perhaps the hardest thing to do. In general, people are very quick to put each other and themselves down. We tend to be very hard on ourselves and criticize everything we do. All of this negative speech it’s toxic for our mental well-being.

People have to start practicing self-love because you are going to be with yourself every day for the rest of your life. We have to learn to begin treating ourselves with kindness and respect and lose all the self-criticism that we put ourselves through.

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