Mental health is extremely important, yet it’s so often neglected. Although there are no sure-fire ways to ensure that your mental health remains in a good state, there are steps that you can take to assist your mental wellness. These things aren’t always easy to do, but they’re achievable with the right provisions in place. The strategies include adjusting your mindset, nurturing your relationships, overcoming perfectionism, and practicing mindfulness. With each of these in mind, you place yourself in a much better position to combat your mental health struggles and move forward in your wellness journey.
Nurture Your Relationships
The first thing to consider when working on your mental health is to nurture your relationships. This doesn’t mean that they have to be perfect, as perfection simply isn’t achievable. Instead, you should work on your relationships being both imperfect and loving. You can help yourself achieve this by staying connected with loved ones; although everyone leads a busy life, a thoughtful text goes a long way. Similarly, you should allow yourself to be vulnerable with others and drop your guard from time to time by sharing any struggles that you’re currently going through. No form of human interaction will ever be perfect so make sure that you don’t torture yourself over what could’ve been.
Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is hugely important when it comes to shaping your mental health. This includes being mindful of others, such as those in need. This is something that is prominent within Islamic culture, with compulsory charitable donations, such as Zakat, being required of every Muslim. As well as being mindful of others, it’s also vital that you’re mindful of your own feelings, particularly the difficult ones. Therefore, if you’re feeling sadness, shame, fear, or anger, you should work to understand these and discover what you can learn from them. You should accept anything you’re feeling as a feeling, rather than trying to rationalize it as a fact. Acceptance is a huge feature of contentment.
Remember Self-Care
It’s not selfish to put your needs above everyone else’s and you should take the time to put yourself first always. Self-care comes in many forms, with exercise being one of the primary features. Therefore, you should make time for physical activity each day, even if this is only a 20-minute walk. As well as this, you should take the time out to relax and do things that you enjoy; you shouldn’t feel guilty about relaxing. It isn’t lazy and you don’t need to be productive 24/7. Additionally, you should get between seven and nine hours of sleep each night, as this ensures that your body is rested and ready to take on the day.
Focus on Communication
Keeping things bottled up is one of the biggest causes of stress; however, conflict can also contribute to feelings of stress. Therefore, you should work on healthily communicating without raising your voice or offending anyone. On top of this, you should also work on voicing your positive emotions, as this will strengthen your relationship with others. Furthermore, social media can be detrimental to one’s mental health, which is why you should implement settings on your phone to limit your interaction with social media. It’s important to remember that people put the best versions of themselves online and you shouldn’t beat yourself up if you don’t look like a heavily filtered and photoshopped person. You’re real and we all have our own imperfections and insecurities.
What do you do to help your mental health? Is there anything that you could recommend to anyone that is struggling?
