As it’s Mental Health Awareness Month, it’s a good time to share resources, tips and techniques about mental health and wellness. After over a decade of living with depression and anxiety, I am proud of how I have learned to manage my mental health challenges. However, chronic mental health issues can mean that I sometimes go through my day on autopilot, which is not good for my mental health. So I want to share again some things I turn to when I want to work on my health and build my mental well-being. While there are many more tips and techniques in this area, these are five things that work well for me. I hope you find this information useful!
Meditation
My journey with meditation has been a long one, but I’m finally at a place where I can confidently say it’s part of my mental health toolbox. Meditation has grown in importance and value in my daily life, and I would say that there are more days that I spend in a meditation session or two. What I love most about meditation is that I have stopped seeing it as a solution to my problems and more as a practice and a way of life. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that meditation is the perfect solution for everyone (I’ve tried it more than a few times), it doesn’t hurt to try!
Excercise
You may already know, but physical exercise can play a big role in improving one’s mental health. While it’s important to make sure people have a healthy relationship with exercise and training, I know it can also be detrimental to only do things when I’m properly motivated (thanks, depression!). Exercise, in any capacity, has the opportunity to give one a brief boost of confidence, get the heart rate up more than it previously could, and make us feel like we’ve accomplished something. There are many other benefits of physical exercise, but I have come to value the benefits to my mental health and well-being more than anything else.
Healing (There’s more than one type!)
Shocker, I know – a mental health blogger suggests therapy. But I want to go beyond the general “treatment is good for you” advice and take things a step further. Instead of suggesting people get more into therapy, I want you to question what your idea of therapy is. Yes, you’re sitting in a room with a therapist or on a Zoom call with a mental health professional. but healing is much more than that. There are several types of talk therapy, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Mindfulness-Based Therapy (MBT), and many others. And even beyond that, there are types of therapy that involve activities and movement, beyond talking and trying to meet the needs of other parts of who we are. I’m not here to say that therapy will solve all your problems, but it’s often a safe place to figure out where to start.
Getting to know myself
An important part of building my mental well-being is improving my relationship with someone very important – myself. We spend our whole lives getting to know ourselves, understanding who we are and how we see the world. But there are some things about ourselves that are hard to come to terms with. Maybe it’s part of our personality or an experience we’ve had, but it all includes who we are and why we act the way we do. When I think about my mental health challenges, I know that there are aspects of my personality that don’t play a major role in why I deal with anxiety and depression. But these aspects make up the person I am, and understanding how I see the world helps me understand how it affects me. I know this may sound a little corny, but the more I focused on understanding why I do things, the more I understood my mental health challenges.
Reflection
Whether I’m journaling, talking to people, or just sitting and thinking, reflecting on my mental health journey has done some amazing things for my mental well-being. When I think back on the journey I’ve had, I can see my growth. I can see the improvements I’ve made and the ways I’ve gotten better at managing stress and depression. On reflection, I can also look at the ups and downs with a softer lens that I previously had. I’m not perfect and I never will be. But instead of chasing perfectionism and “getting rid” of my mental health challenges, reflection leads me to gratitude. To be proud of who I am and what I have experienced. And it is this attitude that has made me stronger, braver and better equipped to face the challenges I know lie ahead. And I know that after thinking about what we’ve been through, many people reading this may feel the same way.
While these are important ways to build mental health and wellness, they are far from the only ones! What do you do to create mental wellness in your daily life and what helps you work on your mental health? Let me know in the comments below!
