Why You Need to Care About Your Mental Health as Much as Your Physical Health
Feb 23, 2023
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Photo from Matthew Ball
There’s always been a huge focus on improving health; from eating better, to dieting to exercising and increasing muscle mass. However, there’s an important section of health that is often overlooked: mental health.
In this ever-demanding world where many feel expected to respond to everything immediately and always be active, mental health is often not given the attention it needs. It is sometimes dismissed as less important, or simply ignored because of the perceived stigma. Mental health, however, is always critically important, and maybe now so more than ever. In fact, more than one in five people are thought to have some form of mental illness or mental health problem every year.
Can Lead to Health Problems
Even if you are doing everything right physically, you may still see your health declining or not improving. By not working on the mental aspect, you run the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and even stroke. Some chronic conditions like autoimmune disorders can also result from not taking care of your mental health.
And since these conditions, especially chronic ones, can lead to you feeling poorly, it can create a dangerous cycle. As you feel worse physically from these chronic conditions, you also risk your mental health declining further, which impedes the effort to take care of your body, which can then make your mental condition worse.
Learning to improve your mental health won’t magically fix you. You likely won’t be able to get completely rid of chronic ailments, or the risks of heart disease and strokes once past a certain point. However, you can reduce your chances of them recurring again, which can help you feel better overall.
Can Increase Your Self-Esteem
Improving your mental health can also improve your self-esteem. By taking care of yourself and how you think about yourself, you can feel better about your body and who you are as a person. Even if physical changes don’t come as fast as you might like, you are still changing who you are inside.
Improving mental health leads to you being able to think more clearly, and see more of the positives about yourself and your life. Staying active physically is also super-important. You may or may not lose weight, but it will likely help you feel better about yourself and feel like you are deserving of someone else’s love for you.
This can improve your relationships and your overall mood, as well as give you more of the confidence to fight for what you deserve and do what you think is right in your life, instead of what everyone else wants you to do.
Allows You to Think Clearly
When you have poor mental health, it can be difficult to focus, and your brain may be overwhelmed with stress and anxiety, which can lead you to make poor decisions. Even if you make the right decision, you may constantly question yourself and wonder if there was a better option, so you never feel truly confident in your choices or ability to make them.
Having these types of stress responses can also negatively affect your brain. As with chronic conditions, it might create a cycle where you lose your resilience to stress, so you experience stress more frequently, which damages you because you are experiencing even more stress, which further reduces your stress tolerance.
By learning to control your anxiety and stress, you can be more confident in your decisions. You can also see situations clearly without the haze of stress or anxiety making things look different than they are.
A good example is when hanging out with friends or family members. Remember that while they may seem irritated, it could be that they just have their own problems to deal with and are a little distracted when they hang out. By learning to master your mental health, and consider other peoples’ perspectives, you are better equipped to manage doubts and concerns so they don’t affect your self-esteem.
Ways to Improve Mental Health
Hang out With Friends
Studies show that even communicating with friends on a daily basis can improve your mental health. It can help you to realize that there are people that care for you and remind you that you have someone to talk to, even if it is about silly things. It also doesn’t matter if these friends are online only, or people you can hang out with in your vicinity.
However, being able to hang out with your friends in person can boost your mental health even more. Not only can you talk together and joke as you would online, but you can also do activities together that boost your mood, such as playing games, getting fresh air and sunlight, or going on a trip together.
Planning an outing with friends is a great way to give you something to look forward to. To make it even less stressful, you can hire a car service in your area, such as Los Angeles group transportation to take you and your friends around town. That way you don’t have added worry about renting a vehicle or not knowing where you are going.
Do Things You Enjoy
Sometimes, in the busy modern world, it is hard to remember to take time for yourself. You will often be too tired after work to do things you enjoy. However, learning to have balance in your life is a key way to improve mental health.
Take time to just sit and relax, watch your favorite TV show, go see your favorite band live, or curl up and read. We are often taught to only do things that improve our life or earn us money, to the point that we may feel that our hobbies need to generate income as well, but just doing things for the sole purpose of enjoying them is absolutely fine.
For example, if you enjoy reading books, you don’t have to go and leave detailed reviews, create a blog, or become a social media book reviewer. You can just read and enjoy, and you can do this without guilt.