Improving Your Mental Health: Professional Advice to Feel Mentally Healthier‍

Improving your mental health is one of the best gifts you can give yourself. That’s because your mental wellbeing affects your overall health, wealth, and life satisfaction. So, by taking good care of your mental health, you’ll be healthier, wealthier, and happier. You’ll get to enjoy life to the fullest, and have more meaningful relationships with the people around you. 

In this article, we’ll give you professional advice on how to improve your mental health, based on our years of experience of helping people feel mentally healthier. 

What is Mental Health?

Mental health is a blanket statement used to describe our emotional, psychological, and social wellness. It’s what we use to measure how well (or unwell) we think, feel, or act. 

Since it reflects our mind’s overall health, it measures more than our cognition or intelligence abilities. Our mental wellness also includes our personal thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Hence, it plays a pivotal role in determining how we handle stress, interact with others, and make choices in our daily life. 

Our mental health is the most important pillar of our overall health because our mind’s state can directly affect how our body functions. This is why most mental health issues trigger physical issues as well. 

What are Mental Health Issues?

Mental health issues are challenges or illnesses we experience in our overall mental wellness. They’re like the cough, colds, flu, and injuries we get from our bodies. But unlike physical illnesses, most of these issues can be invisible to the naked eye. Often, it doesn’t leave marks, or create noticeable changes in our body. Which makes it harder to spot, especially to the untrained eye. 

There are a lot of mental health issues that affect people. From simple and easy to address challenges to complex conditions which need extensive and intensive treatment plans. Some of the most common mental health issues are: stress, anxiety, and depression.

Mental health challenges can affect anyone, regardless of age, gender, or background. And much like with any illness, these challenges can drastically affect a person’s everyday life. 

How do Mental Health Issues Affect a Person’s Daily Life?

Mental health issues are not confined to the mind. They have far-reaching effects on our daily life. Some people describe having a mental health issue as trying to swim with an anchor tied to your leg. It pulls you down, and makes it harder for you to move with your life. 

Left untreated, these challenges can impact your relationships, work, physical health, and overall quality of life.

For instance, people with chronic anxiety may lead to physical symptoms like headaches or digestive issues. This is on top of the constant stress from worrying about every single thing in their life. Moreover, if their condition is left untreated, it can turn into more serious health issues like high blood pressure, heart attack, or stroke. 

This is why it’s important to take care of your mental health. 

Why is it Important to Take Care of Your Mental Health?

Since our mental health is the most important pillar of our overall health, it’s important we keep our minds healthy. Doing so allows us to have a healthier body as well. Moreover, aside from having a healthier overall health, taking care of our mental health can also affect other areas of our life, like our relationships and career. This makes taking care of our mental health not a nice-to-have. But a must-have. Here are 4 reasons why it’s important to improve your mental health.

Better Quality of Life

When your mental health is in good shape, you can enjoy life more fully, savouring the positive moments and effectively coping with challenges. 

Better Physical Health

Our mind and body’s health are interconnected. Mental health challenges also create a lot of physical discomfort and challenges. Hence, keeping a healthy mind also leads to a healthier body. 

Better Interpersonal Relationships

Strong mental health allows you to connect with others more deeply, fostering healthier and more fulfilling relationships. Making living a more positive experience. 

Better Career Growth 

Being in a good mental state allows you to perform your tasks better. This makes it easier for you to be effective in whatever endeavour you choose to engage. And since being a high-performer is rewarded in our society, career growth is going to be easier for you when you have a healthy mind. 

How to Improve Mental Health

There are several components to our mental health – thoughts, feelings, actions, and social interactions. Think of them as gears inside a machine. All these things need to work well with each other, so you can be in a positive mental state. And if one cog stops working, it would affect the whole machinery’s functionality. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you’re doing something to nourish all these components. Here are some ways you can improve your mental health. 

Managing your thoughts

Our thoughts are one of the most fundamental building blocks of our mental health. That’s because our thoughts fuel our feelings. And our feelings fuel our words and actions. Then our words and actions influence the things that happen in our lives. So if we have good thoughts, we’ll have good feelings, and good actions. Ultimately, this leads to living a good life. 

But how can we manage our thoughts? 

Since most of our thoughts are automatic – and can tend to bias negative thoughts because of our survival instinct – we must first work on overriding this. Some techniques to manage our thoughts are: 

1. Mindfulness exercises. Performing mindfulness activities allow us to be conscious of our thoughts. Helping us know when we’re having negative thoughts that need to be reframed. 
2. Journaling. Keeping a journal of our thoughts gives us a record of our overall sentiment. It allows us to see what we’re thinking on a daily basis. This helps us monitor the kinds of thoughts we get. And by monitoring our thoughts, we’re able to work through them as well. 
3. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Simply put, reframing the thoughts we get. Once we recognize a negative thought, it’s important that we reframe it to a neutral or positive frame. For instance, when we think “I’m so weak.” we can better reframe it as “I’m not yet strong enough.” or “I need to get stronger.” This mindset shift takes us away from negative thought patterns that negatively impact our emotions and actions. 

These three simple practices can be used by anyone who wants to manage their thoughts better. Although it’s best to work with a certified Psychologist, they can properly guide you, and help you perform these effectively. 

Keeping a healthy body

We mentioned earlier that your mental health affects your physical health. But did you know that your physical health also impacts your mental health. Yes, they have a cyclical relationship – good mental health turns to good physical health, and good physical health turns to good mental health. 

This means that when you’re struggling to get your mind right, you can start with your body. And once your body breaks out of the negative state your mind has put you in, your mind will slowly shift towards a more positive state. 

Some of the things you can do for your mind are: 

1. Engaging in physical activity. Regular exercise and physical activity releases a lot of positive hormones like serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins. These hormones are important for our bodies to feel better.  
2. Getting enough sleep every night. Sleep is our body’s way to recover from both physical and mental illnesses. Getting high quality sleep helps our minds recover from stress and other mental challenges. That’s why getting high-quality sleep matters to our mental health.
3. Eating a healthy diet. Our diets play a large role in our overall mental wellness as well. The nourishments we put in our body are our mind’s fuel. So if we keep on feeding it junk like processed food, our mental health will suffer as well. So aim to eat healthier food to improve your mental health. 

These three things are the most fundamental things you need in your life to improve your mental health. Consider including these 3 things in your daily routine and see how much it impacts your life. 

Maintaining health relationships

Our relationships with the people around us are important in keeping a positive mental health. That’s because us humans are social creatures. And not feeling part of a tribe or group makes us feel bad. Being an outcast makes us feel lonely and unworthy, which triggers a lot of different mental health challenges. 

Having a strong social support group helps us feel belongingness – an important feeling for our brains to feel safe. This is why spending quality time with our families, friends, and colleagues is important to improving our mental health. 

Just make sure you’re spending time with the right people because being around negative people can do a lot of harm to your mental health. 

Seeking Professional Help 

If you think you’re experiencing mental health issues, and you want to improve your mental health, it’s important you seek professional help. And don’t just seek our woo-woo or mystical help. It’s better if you consult with a licensed Psychologist or Counsellor. They’ll be able to give you the correct diagnosis, and improvement plan that’s tailored to you. 

If you’re having a hard time seeking help, working with an online counsellor can be a great first step towards improving your mental health. Our team at MeHelp is ready to help you navigate your mental health challenges and help you improve your mental health. 

Online Therapy/Counselling as an Effective Way to Take Care of Your Mental Health

Thanks to technology, accessing healthcare, including mental health services is now a lot more convenient. Innovations like online therapy and counselling made it a lot easier for people who need help with their mental health to get access to professional Psychologists. It has removed location, scheduling, and other key barriers to getting help.