Improving your mental health is important for your wellbeing and your everyday happiness. Here are some top tips on looking after your mental health in 2020…
We all have bad days or tough times. No matter if you are having any issues with mental health or just want to prevent any, gaining healthy habits is always good. Atop of our personal issues in 2020, there is a global pandemic weighing even more pressure on our lives. We will explore some simple ways you can stay or become more mentally healthy. These tips are simple to do once, but the goal is to make a habit out of them and that requires time and persistence. You’ll need to stick with them and it will pay off immensely.
All the tips are perfectly safe for everyone to try, and these habits improved the quality of life for a lot of people. But sometimes it is not enough. If you sense that your mental health didn’t improve for some time, you should talk to a professional. Recently I had an anxiety attack, I will not reveal the reasons because they are personal. Just a few chats with a professional at BE Psychology Center helped me a lot. Those talks didn’t just make me feel better they gave me a strategy to prevent and battle anxiety in the future.
How to relieve anxiety caused by COVID-19
For most people, the main source of that kind of anxiety is the news. The media companies love the tension and make every disturbing event much worse than it is. The constant flow of negative impulses received from the news can damage your mental health. To battle this you should limit your exposure to the news. Turn off notifications from time to time and take a break. Don’t read every article that pops up in your newsfeed. Most of the articles are sensational and don’t have relevant information for your safety and your loved ones. Often those toxic articles are not just sensational but also completely untrue.
Choose only the relevant and important news. Seek only accurate information from a trusted source in order to be safe. The best place to start is the World Health Organisation (WHO), for the USA specifically visit this site.
Physical Exercise and Meditation
Both activities are advised for good mental health, but when practiced mutually can provide much greater benefits. Find the right exercising method for you, if you like running go for a run or if you like swimming go for a swim. Regular exercise not only releases certain chemicals in our brain that will make feel good it also gives you more energy and better sleep. More energy means that you will do all of your daily activities with greater ease. Good quality sleep is not only related to mental wellbeing but also to physical health.
There are a lot of different approaches to meditation. Same as for physical exercise try to find the meditation that works for you. One of the basic ones is breathing meditation. It is a simple meditation that everyone can start with. The goal is to sit in a relaxed position and focus your thoughts only on your breathing. Acknowledge that you are breathing in, then out. Focus only on that and let the other thoughts just pass through your head. Don’t cling to any of the passing thoughts just let them go and continue to focus on the breathing. Meditation if practiced regularly has been proven to relieve symptoms of depression and anxiety, also it greatly improves your focus and ability to concentrate.
Talk
It may seem obvious, but most people forget the importance of talking about our feelings. Talking about feelings can be hard, but rewarding as well. Sometimes we can feel much better after only one chat with a good friend. The feelings that remain unexpressed can linger on for a long time and cause much more damage than they should. The main reasons that make us avoid talking about our feelings are (i) because we don’t want to be judged (ii) because we don’t want to burden the listener with our problems and (iii) because we are afraid to tell how we fill. We must trust our beloved once and those problems will go away. Acknowledge that you need to be honest about your feelings.
