WHY SHOULD YOU PRIORITIZE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH?
Promotes a healthy lifestyle
Being happy promotes a healthy lifestyle. It may also help combat stress, boost your immune system, protect your heart and reduce pain.
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Living happy = more productivity, less stress, & better relationships!
Strengthens Mindset
Living a happy life is extremely vital to personal growth and mindset. This comes into play when personal goals are set. Happiness allows one to better achieve goals and impact the lives of others.
Mood Stabilizer
Being happy is more than just an emotion. Living an overall happy life helps stabilize everyday mood and affects the way you react to stressors or certain situations.
What Can You Do?
Feeling stressed or anxious and can't particularly tell why? Regardless of how you answer that question, keep reading for some suggested tips to consistently take back control of your mental health.
The Facts
You're certainly not alone.
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1 in 5 Americans experience a mental health problem each year
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6.9% of adults suffer from major depression in the U.S.
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18.1% of adults suffer from an anxiety order in the U.S.
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74% of adults said they had a physical or emotional symptom due to stress in the last month
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1 in 5 adults feel they do not do enough to manage their stress
Exercise
Physical exercise can release endorphins, peptides or "feel-good hormones" in the brain which reduce the perception of pain and releases euphoric effects. Exercise has entirely altering effects on struggles from anxiety to ADHD to PTSD.
Regular exercise will boost your self esteem. It is an investment in your body and mind and a commitment to bettering yourself.
Similarly, exercise, is a way to challenge yourself and accomplish goals. By setting daily or weekly goals and executing them, you gradually gain confidence through the likes of consistently challenging yourself and going through with them.
Take a look at our take on exercise
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Sleep
Everyone knows it is recommended to get 7-9 hours of sleep a night. Good, consistent sleep can be linked to weight loss, stronger concentration and productivity, immune function and so forth. A lack of sleep falsely increases your appetite so be warned. Mental health issues and disorders are greatly linked to poor quality or too little sleep. If one poor night's sleep can make you irritable and moody, it's not hard to connect the dots to the effects of consistent, poor sleep. Do yourself a favor, sacrifice an hour of phone or TV time and put that towards your sleep. If you practice this consistently, you will never undermine sleep again.
Meditation
According to the National Center of Complementary and Integrative Health, meditation is proven to reduce blood pressure, help cope with severe anxiety, depression, and even insomnia.
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Yoga and intuitive stretching is a very useful type of meditation that has benefitted millions of people nationwide. The NCCIH declared that yoga can help people who suffer from obesity, mental health issues, and promotes blood circulation while also improving overall health.
Yoga is not a strenuous workout that needs to be done at a gym or a yoga studio. Fortunately, you can practice mindful stretches and poses in your own home!
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Talking to someone
Among the most effective ways to fight back against mental health is talking to someone. See a therapist. If you feel uncomfortable doing so, call your mom or a trusted friend. By expressing how you're feeling out-loud, you are relieving your mental of at the very least, some of it's stress.
The technical term for relieving strong emotion is, Catharsis, coming from the Greek, "katharsis", referring to purification or cleansing. In modern terms, it references "discharging negative emotions to relieve intense anxiety, stress, anger or fear."
Regardless of if you're struggling with a mental health issue or not, talking to someone is an excellent way to relieve your mind of some of its burden. Make yourself a priority and go find someone you trust.