Everywhere you go, it seems people are talking about how poorly everyone’s mental health is doing. Couple all our regular problems with the financial and social burdens of the recent lockdowns and the panic surrounding the pandemic, and you have a recipe for sad, lonely people struggling with their mental health. The following will explore six things that you can do relatively easily to help improve your mental health.
Breathe Through Your Nose
Let’s start with the easiest one. Breathing through your nose instead of your mouth results in 30% more oxygen flooding your blood and making its way to your brain. This extra oxygen helps you focus and feel creative; it boosts your mood and reduces aspects of stress. It’s also good for all your muscles and tissues, and organs. If you can’t breathe through your nose often (meaning, it’s not that you have a cold, it’s something you regularly struggle with), this is a huge health flag that needs to be addressed. It means that you are congested and likely, you are allergic to something that’s part of your daily life. Get your allergies tested and make appropriate changes. Yes, you can take allergy medication, but this should not be a regular thing as it damages your gut bacteria which are needed to help give your brain the building blocks of a good mood.
Help Spread Good Information
One of the great tragedies of our era is how quickly false information spreads. If you work in the field of mental health, you might be looking for ways to spread good information that can actually help people. Have the conversations you feel urged to have and share your experiences and research online. People often turn to the internet for mental health help more than people in their lives (especially now when so many are isolated). If you’re putting the information out there but aren’t getting the viewership, look into some algorithm techniques and marketing strategies. If you’re looking into improving the organic reach of your information, this URL can get you started. Of course, be careful of letting your own mental health suffer as you rush to post an insane amount of content to keep up with algorithmic needs.
Acknowledge The Bad Feelings
Yes, thinking positive can be a big help in some situations, but in others, it can be adding to the problem. If you feel bad, you feel bad for a reason. It doesn’t matter if other people wouldn’t feel bad if the same thing happened to them. Feelings should not be ignored. Imagine someone who got in a serious car accident. Would you tell this person to just think positive when they get unbelievably stressed at the idea of getting into a car? No. You’d acknowledge that their feelings are completely appropriate to the situation, even though you don’t get stressed when you get into a car.
All of your feelings are like that. Given your life and your experiences, your body has adapted to send signals when it feels threatened. Acknowledging that you have a good reason to feel threatened or bothered is always the first step to healing.
Practice Meeting Your Needs
Learning how to perceive and address your needs is a critical part of improving your mental health. Many people with severe mental health struggles have ignored their needs for so long that they may not even be able to feel them. This can start in early childhood if a person is required to ignore their needs to get parental approval or to feel safe from parental frustration. It is often further complicated by experiences in the public school system where children need to ask permission to go to the bathroom and may experience extreme humiliation from admitting their needs either to teachers or classmates.
The second you need something, whether it’s sleep, food, a bathroom break, play, safety, or the like, pause what you’re doing and meet that need. In many cases, mental health struggles are the result of the body using more and more aggressive communication methods with you, hoping to be heard because you’ve been starving in one or more ways for so long. If you’ve been ignoring your needs for so long you can’t sense them, you might have to set a reminder on your phone that goes off every hour or two. When it does, ask yourself if there’s anything you need. Run through a list of common needs if you have to.
The above tips should help get you started feeling better today, right now. The world is filled with unhelpful or harmful advice regarding mental health. If you find something that works for you, share it with other people. The future can be a place where people are trauma-aware and ready to work with human needs rather than against them.
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