5 ways to improve your mental health

Our collective preoccupation with ‘success vs failure’ sets us up to feel ashamed when the hard times hit. The suggestion is that we should be in total control of our emotional health. If we simply do all of the ‘right’ self-care rituals, we can keep the ‘bad’ feelings at bay. So, if we are having a hard time, then we must’ve dropped the ball.

This kind of judgement only serves to make the hard times harder, so it’s essential we take a more realistic and compassionate approach to our mental health.

We will wobble. We will get angry. We will get anxious and we will cry. These emotions are a completely normal part of being human but, because they aren’t pleasant experiences, we’ve come to believe that we shouldn’t experience them at all. Our knee jerk response is to shoo them away as quickly as possible. But in doing so, we rob ourselves of these natural outlets and inhibit our healing process.

Letting Our Feelings Be

This sounds so simple but it’s actually incredibly difficult. In aspiring to perpetual calm and contentment, we’ve ended up pathologising all other emotions – creating mistrust and resistance to any feelings that are seen as unfavourable.

And so, simply letting our emotions be is rarely our initial instinct. We’ve learned to hide how we feel in order to appear a certain way to others, (strong, nice, fun, etc). In service to this performance, our sadness, anger and fears are shut down to the point that we don’t know what to do with them when they bubble to the surface. Our feelings have become our enemy and we fear that if we give them any space at all, they’ll take over us entirely. For good mental health to be possible, we must first reacquaint ourselves with our feelings – so we can learn how to take care of ourselves when the more difficult ones arise.

None of our emotions are malign. They are not out to get you or ruin your day. They are simply messengers; here to tell you something about what’s going on. Sometimes they have information about a here and now situation, like: ‘there’s trouble in the air’, ‘don’t trust this person’ or ‘something needs to change in this relationship’. Sometimes, they’re letting us know that an old wound needs to be addressed so we can move forward. In this way, they can be great guides – helping us to better navigate life and supporting us to maintain our emotional wellbeing.

Be Flexible

The more we come to understand our emotional experiences, the more we can learn how to take care of ourselves when different feelings hit. There’s a wealth of advice out there about how we can promote positive mental health through exercise, nutrition and support seeking. Tuning in to what works for you will help you to create a toolbox of self-care options.

Whilst these strategies are great to have, it’s important that we remain realistic about their limits. Life can throw challenges our way that either mean these tools aren’t available, or simply don’t make a dent in the pain. Taking care of our mental health, therefore, has to be both an adaptive and compassionate process.

Be Body-Led

We’re inclined to believe that the head has all the answers. But in situations like this, it’s the body’s wisdom that we need to tap into. Our head might have strong ideas about what we ‘should’ be doing to feel better, but if they aren’t in alignment with what our body needs, they’re just going to make us feel worse.

At times of extreme suffering, it’s often the case that we have to get out of our own way to allow ourselves to do whatever the body is asking of us – for example, take time off work, stay in bed all day, don’t do anything ‘productive’ for a while, get on our knees and wail. What the body needs will vary and so, again, it’s about being compassionately attuned to yourself.