Are you looking for habits to improve mental health? I’m here to provide you with top 10 habits that can transform your mental well-being dramatically.
Have you ever wondered if the new-age developing technologies and cultural developments are doing us favors? Yes, of course. It does, but only to some extent. To be exact, it’s doing us a lot of favors in our professional life. But what about our personal life? What about our mental health? What about our peace? Have you considered the impacts of technology on these parts of our lives?
Let’s dive deep into the topic. With the technological and cultural developments, we are seeing a lot of improvements in life, we’re doing tough things with ease. But when it comes to our personal life, we are unaware of what’s happening in our lives. Without our knowledge, we’re getting lazy, we’re getting stressed, we’re losing the quality times we had with people and family, and it goes on. But the most dangerous part is that we’re not even realising that we’re getting rid of so many good things in our lives.
Every new technology has its advantages connected with professional life and its disadvantages directly connected with our mental health. For example, food delivery apps can save us time, but reduce our physical activity and encourage unhealthy food habits. Video conferencing reduces in-person communication, which leads to weakened social connections. AI increases efficiency, but it reduces our ability to think critically and remember things since we’ve become more dependent on technology. It remains the same for all technologies, making our professional lives better and our personal lives worse without our knowledge.
So we’re in a position where we have to gain our mental happiness just by putting less effort since we can’t avoid using the new-age technologies. So the best way is to add habits to our routine that give us peace and mindfulness and keep us away from stress. Since habits don’t need new efforts, it’s easier for us to keep going on. So I’ve come up with the 10 best habits to add to our daily routine to boost mental health.
Contents
Ten habits that improve your mental health:
1.Self- care
“When you take care of yourself, you are a better friend, partner, and person.” — Unknown
Prioritizing self-care is one of the most effective ways to improve mental health. Living in 2024, we keep running from the moment we wake up to the moment we crash into bed. How can we lead a better life if we don’t even have time to think about ourselves? This is where the real problem kicks in: we fail to take care of ourselves, which in turn makes our lives worse. When we can scroll through social media for hours, why can’t we take time for ourselves.
Taking care of ourselves ain’t a big deal. It just starts from giving ourselves time to think about ourselves, to making little changes for ourselves. From there begins the real care which goes on till it makes us feel better in this busy world. You can’t care for others in the long term when you can’t care for yourself. The whole Earth becomes a better place to live when everyone starts looking after each other. And it starts from caring for yourself.
2.Fitness routine
“Exercise not only changes your body, it changes your mind, your attitude, and your mood.” — Unknown
Engaging in regular fitness activities is a powerful strategy to improve mental health. Technology has given us everything at our doorstep. Travel have become easier, and we don’t have to go through books to learn or to get information, we get everything with just one click. Voice assistants like Alexa and Siri have completely minimized our efforts. We can get everything without any effort. This makes us lazy. Being lazy is not as common as we think, we never get motivated, we never feel fresh, we go through a lot of negative thoughts, also leading to procrastination, which ends in stress, irregular sleep patterns.
We must come out of these things to stay away from mental illness. We can overcome all these drawbacks just by starting our day with exercise. This is where the concept of consistency comes into life and we follow this through in all aspects of our life. When we learn to be consistent, we can achieve everything we desire for. That’s why regular exercise has a big impact on our lives. More than that, it has a lot of impacts physically like being active, fit and good sleep.
3.Proper Diet
“The food you eat can have a profound effect on your mood and mental clarity.” — Unknown
Maintaining a proper diet is not only good for health but also to improve mental health. Food determines a lot of our mental mood. When the food is good, it makes people’s time pleasant, and if not, it makes the time unpleasant. A proper diet is something that sets the tone for our routine, when you are clear about your whole day’s diet, it gives you clarity for the entire day. This has a direct impact on your biological system, which keeps you active and focused, which is obviously needed to boost mental health. Having a proper diet also has a lot of advantages, including improved focus and concentration, healthier skin, enhanced mood, etc.
4.Family Time
“Spending time with family can be the best therapy for mental wellness. It’s a reminder of where our true strength lies.”
Spending time with family can significantly improve mental health by providing emotional support. Having evolved from our ancestors’ form, the sense of belonging can make big changes in our mental health. We can have that sense of belonging when we’re with our family. People will be there to guide us with their experiences in our hard times of our life, which gives us support to confront the situations with guts. We can blindly rely on family members, because they all have committed themselves for the well-being of each other, and with that belief we can show confidence in all domains of our life. Because our brains are hardwired with the thought that “our families always have our back.”
5.Regular Sleep
“Sleep is the greatest natural healer, restoring both body and mind.”
Getting consistent and quality sleep is the most essential habit to improve mental health, as good sleep can make your thinking clear. Sleeping has a direct impact on all the other habits of our life. Without enough sleep, everything can fall apart. Waking up after a good night’s sleep in the morning is like charging your mobile to 100%, you don’t have to think about it the whole day, or at least till the evening. Good sleep reduces stress so that you can approach challenges with clarity, enhances physical recovery, and enhances moods so that you can have a more positive mindset and better relationships with people.
6.Being Kind
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” — Mark Twain
Being kind is one of the best ways to improve mental health. It gives you a sense of purpose in life by helping others and being kind in their hard times. Most importantly, this can make you happy. Happiness plays an important role in improving your mental health, which is why being kind is always a good therapy.
7.Exploring
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the exploration of the world.”
Here comes the most exciting part among the ten habits to improve mental health. We leave everything behind when we explore new things like travelling, hiking, engaging in groups and learning new skills. While doing all these, we become new people steering clear of all the stresses in our lives at the moment.
Exploring lets you completely focus on new things, though we have a lot on our plate to handle. we take on new experiences in this journey, we learn new things which will give us clarity in life when we get back to our routine. Exploring new things will always teach us new lessons, which we can relate to our actual life; that’s why it’s always preferred to take on vacations every now and then to wipe away all the mental stresses we have in our life. Exploring is an most essential thing to advance mental health.
8.Learning
“Learning keeps the mind active and reduces stress.”
Engaging in the process of learning and growing throughout life can improve mental health. Learning is not just about studying new things, everything in our life has something to do with learning. The more we learn, the more we handle life with guts and clarity. With each day passing in our lives, we go through a lot of experiences, we understand how the world works, how we can handle it with ease without suffering much. Everyone’s life is a learning journey, where we go through a lot of experiences that are good for our personal growth and self-discovery, it doesn’t matter whether they’re a positive or a negative experience.
9.Leadership/Taking Responsibility
“Leading with integrity and compassion fosters a positive environment, benefiting both the leader and their team’s mental health.”
Leadership can create supportive environment, where the followers feel valued, which can improve mental health of the followers as well as the leader’s. Leadership is not just about a designation, it’s an option that every one of us can choose. Everyone of us can be a good leader looking after the people around them, it just takes the right attitude. Leadership skills can make the environment around more supportive and motivated. This attitude gives the sense of purpose to everyone, which can be turned into satisfaction at some stage, which is good for everyone’s mental health.
10.Social Connections
“Connecting with others can lift your spirits, soothe your mind, and boost your overall mental well-being.”
Social connections can improve mental health by providing a sense of belonging and emotional support. Engaging with the friends, mentors, well-wishers, team members, can help you get rid of loneliness. Establishing personal connections with good and motivated people can keep you stay motivated and stay focused. They can provide you with life advice as well as guide you in your bad times of your life. Building those connections for long term can give you more advantages in life like balancing life’s challenges, having a happier mindset and feeling the sense of belonging. Additionally, you can feel more supported and valued.
How to add all ten habits to your routine?
It’s not so easy to add all ten habits to your routine at once. Even if you do so, you can’t keep doing it consistently. We always get motivated but it vanishes after a while. It’s common for everyone. Big things are achieved by doing small things every single day. The best way to add all ten habits to your routine is by starting to do one thing at a time until it becomes your routine, only then it won’t be harder for you to do. A habit may take up to 30 days to become a routine. But you don’t have to do it 30 days.
Better, start doing a habit for 6 days regularly, take a day off, then add another habit to your routine, give it six more days. take a day off and add another one. Keep doing it till all ten habits become a part of your lifestyle. You cannot stick to one habit and expect your mental health to be improved immensely. You must stick to all ten habits to achieve bigger results. These all habits are connected to each other in some ways, so you’ve to add all these to get better results in life. To learn more about habits and ways to stick to them, check out summary of Atomic Habits book.
To Wrap Up
It’s an important thing in this new-age generation to improve mental health. The purpose of living is to live it yourself to its fullest extent, rather than letting the technologies do all the living for you. It may not be necessary to add these habits to your routine. But you must do it for a better living so that you can feel fulfilled in life.
All these habits are connected in some way to boost mental wellness, so better stick to all the habits for better results. The habits I’ve mentioned above are from my perspective. You can have different perspectives in life too. If you have any other better habits in mind, comment below I’ll consider it while writing my next blog. Check out our website Jeeva Ramesh Blogging to stay posted.
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