Have you taken care of your health lately, your whole health? Even your mental health? I’m here with life advice, tips, and gentle reminders for how to care for your mental health and why it’s important.
What is mental health and do I have mental health?
There are different aspects of health. There is physical health, financial health, spiritual health, social health, environmental health, and mental health. These aspects of health play an important role in every person’s life and often times there is a big connection between them. For example when our physical health is not that great we don’t usually feel the best mentally either. When we are doing not so well mentally we can also feel physical symptoms as well.
Since it is mental health awareness month I wanted to do a blog post about mental health to do my part. So here we go. The reason this post is so late in the month is because I was finishing my bachelors degree then taking a bit of time to care for my own mental health.
First I want to bring awareness to some information I found from the World Health Organization. They cite the following facts.
- 1 in every 8 people in the world live with a mental disorder
- Mental disorders involve significant disturbances in thinking, emotional regulation, or behaviour
- There are many different types of mental disorders
- Effective prevention and treatment options exist
- Most people do not have access to effective care
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders
Life Lessons about Mental Health
- It is not weak to ask for help or to need some time and space to feel all of your emotions like sadness. Instead it takes strength to show your true emotions and bravery to ask for help when you need it.
- The wounds and trauma invisible to the outside world are just as real and deserving of care as any physical wound.
- Healing is not linear but rather a life long process where one day you may feel great and ready to take on the world, but the next day you may not feel so great and may need extra time, space, and compassion to recover.
- Having a positive mindset even in dark times can go a long way to help us stay mentally healthy, but it’s important to not ignore our less pleasant emotions either.
- Sometimes we just need to acknowledge our sadness without judging our selves for feeling sad and let the feelings pass naturally.
- Once you recognize that there is a problem you are struggling with, you have to be willing at some point to face the trauma and do the work to fix the problem
A final message from me:
It may seem like all of the life lessons I just shared are just stuff people say to sound like they understand the struggles people with mental health challenges face, but I have honestly only added advice that I learned over time the hard way.
Some people, like me just have to learn the hard way before they’ll believe any of the things I’ve shared above, but I hope if you are still reading this that you will at least consider what I’ve said and try to incorporate it into your own life.
This has been my very late post for mental health awareness month, a post I should have dedicated so much more time and energy to, but join me next month as we get 10% gayer for Pride Month, and as we take time for an important observnce day that I never learned about until I was an adult (Hint it’s Juneteenth).
Mental Health Blog | Fight4mylife | United States 