Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late to Adopt These Mental Health Strategies
We are the result of not only our actions, but our inactions.
In a world that rewards being busy and doing more in less time, spending time on anything that isn’t immediately productive feels like a waste of time. This always on culture comes at a significant cost — a cost to us emotionally and mentally. If unchecked, these unseen costs become visible both in our behaviors and in our physical health.
Since stress started being tracked in 2007 by the American Psychological Association (APA) stress levels have increased from 4.9 to an average of 5.9 on a scale of 1 to 10. Individuals with children reported a staggering 6.7 for their level of stress in May 2020. Even as levels of stress have subsided, more people are reporting feelings of frustration, anger, and being scared — all factors that greatly influence our mental well-being.
Focusing on our emotional and mental well-being provides us not only a sense of well-being but also:
- Increased mental cognition
- Higher executive function capabilities — decision making, complex problem solving
- Better control of emotions and emotional responses
- Faster return to homeostatis — that tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium
- Improved management of chronic conditions
- Decreased blood pressure
- Improved self-esteem and self-worth
- Improved resiliency — the ability to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions
- Improved adaptability — the ability to adjust to new conditions or purpose
- Stronger immune system
For too long, our mental health has been something that we downplay. We put on a brave face that says, “Nothing to see here. I. Am. Okay.” when the really we are struggling with a series of micro-stressors that when left untouched can coalesce and overwhelm even the strongest of individuals. It isn’t until we reach the breaking point that we finally pay attention.
If you are starting to find yourself more frequently anxious and short-tempered, you need to focus on your mental well-being. If you repeatedly ignore problems with the hope that they’ll disappear, you need to focus on your mental well-being. If you are tired of always feeling at the mercy of your emotions, you need to focus on your mental well-being. Put another way, if you are breathing, you need to focus on your mental well-being. If you hadn’t previously been focused on caring for yourself mentally, 2020 has shown how important it is to focus on caring for your mental health and those you care for.
This year has been a challenging year for us all. What was a new decade and year filled with possibilities turned into a year that most of us would not recommend. We went from facing not just our personal challenges and demons to facing a global pandemic, widespread fights for racial justice, and divisions in mindset that we had not seen for decades or even within our lifetimes.
Adopting strategies that improve your mental well-being makes you stronger and ready to better handle anything that comes at you. As a quick PSA, let me be clear, if you are facing a mental crisis or already know that you have a mental illness these strategies will not be enough but should be part of an integrated mental health plan put in place with a certified mental health professional.
It is important to to recognize that by taking the time to practice caring for yourself mentally, you aren’t being unproductive Here are several strategies that can improve your mental well-being and foster mindsets that improve your resiliency and adaptability.
Journaling
Yes, the act of writing down your thoughts and feelings can have a powerful impact on your ability to self-regulate. Journaling helps get you out of your own head and in a place where you can thoughtfully contemplate the challenges you are encountering and find new ways to navigate them that were previously invisible to you.
Box Breathing
Used in the military, this a a great strategy for getting regrounded. Breath in for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds, breath out for four seconds, and repeat for four minutes or until calm. An alternate to this is to repeat the same pattern, but plugging one nostril as you breath in and then switching to plug the opposite nostril while exhaling. These approaches interrupt the fight, flight, or freeze process allowing you to re-engage your executive functions (decision making, complex problem solving, etc.).
Take a Mental Health Day
This is a HUGE problem for so many of us this year. We aren’t taking time off because we can’t really go anywhere and/or don’t feel comfortable doing so. Instead, we continue to push ourselves to keep going and not let off the gas. Even if you do nothing but lay on the couch, you need a day (or even a few hours) to mentally decompress. Slowing down allows us to process feelings and emotions that we might have been suppressing and to rebuild our energy levels.
Practice Gratitude
Taking time to appreciate the good things in your life does amazing things for your mental and emotional well-being. When you take time to think about the good, it is easier to look for more of the good in the world around you and see the silver linings in negative events. Practicing these moments of gratitude builds your resiliency and helps you appreciate what is good in your life.
Take a Nap
The things that we used to fight when we were kids are the luxuries we beg for as adults — and napping is definitely one of them. I know not everyone has the luxury to do this during their day, but if you do, DO IT. Taking a short 20-minute nap can substantially improve your energy levels, increases your performance, and increases alertness. To be clear, there are wrong ways to do naps and I recommend checking out the do’s and don’ts of napping from the Mayo Clinic.
Avoid the Toxic
This goes for technology, news, and people. When you are constantly bombarded by negative, toxic information and feelings it is hard to maintain and achieve homeostatis. You are more likely to engage in negative thinking yourself and continue focusing on the negative. This takes a substantial toll on your well-being and decreases your resiliency.
Unfollow accounts or people that are constantly posting negative information. Limit how much you watch or read the news. Talk to friends or family that are constantly unloading their negativity on you.
Bite the Pencil
This is a very simple strategy and doesn’t necessarily fit in the self-care area, but I got this from an Olympian who used the technique to kick herself free from negative thought cycles. Grabbing a (clean) pen or pencil and biting it between your teeth causes your face to move into a smile and in the process release dopamine, that lovely feel-good hormone. It is enough typically to interrupt the negative thinking that you are engaged in and reset.
Follow the Light
This technique is also a strategy that can help you calm down. Researchers, using a laser moving in random patterns, asked participants to follow the movement with their eyes. The outcome? People found themselves to become more calm and their pulse rate to slow down. The lo-fi version of this is to grab a pen and move it around to different places in front of you, again following with your eyes. Not as effective, but still distracts your brain and allows you to refocus.
Meditation
Meditation is one of those skills that sounds easy, but can take some time to really feel the benefits of — hence why this is further down the list. Is it simple? Yes, in theory. Is it effective? Absolutely! Is it easy? Yes, but not immediately. I recommend using an app like Headspace or Muse to help you get started.
I struggled quite a bit getting comfortable with and feeling the benefits of meditation until I recognized that “calming the monkey mind” wasn’t a helpful strategy for me. Thinking of myself in a busy European train station watching the trains go by did. I just imagined each thought that popped into my head was a different train coming into the station that I would see, acknowledge as there, but not as a train I was getting on. It helped me feel more in control of how to deal with all the feelings that inevitably flooded my head the moment I sat down.
The consequences of not practicing self-care is your ability to navigate your days effectively, show up for yourself and others when its needed, or to handle challenges you encounter. You’ll be more susceptible to becoming overwhelmed, less able to think clearly, and less able to make decisions — all of these increasing your stress levels.
Prioritizing your self-care is no longer something to do when you have the time, but something that you need to actively do each day. Putting a few of them together in a habit stack can take less than 15 minutes and will have profound impacts on your life — performance, emotions, productivity, self-regulation. You owe it to yourself and to those you love and interact with to take the time to practice these behaviors.
