Our lifestyle choices play a huge role in our mental and emotional health and resiliency. Over time, poor lifestyle choices and unhealthy coping mechanisms can become habits. While it’s never easy to break a bad habit, it’s more than worth it to improve our quality of life and find daily joy.
A lack of exercise and sleep can cause significant issues with mental health.
Lifestyle habits can have a major impact on one’s mental health. For example, as Health notes, inactivity can be incredibly damaging to one’s physical and mental health. Exercise can reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety and it can stimulate mood-enhancing hormones and brain chemicals. It can be difficult to embrace exercise when one is struggling mentally, but even just a moderate amount of physical activity every day can have a significant impact.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness explains that quality sleep is also essential to balance when it comes to mental health. When one sleeps too little or has regularly disrupted sleep, issues related to depression and anxiety, as well as other mental health issues, can escalate. Creative types may be especially likely to lack quality sleep, and while it can be difficult to prioritize this in a busy, artistic lifestyle, it is critical for feeling more balanced.
In connection with sleep issues, being addicted to technology can be a big problem and difficult habit to break. Social media can distort reality and become consuming and utilizing smartphone and computer screens late at night can lead to disrupted sleep. It can be helpful to step back from electronics and technology and focus on real life to improve your mental health.
Negative self-talk and isolation can be highly detrimental.
Psychology Today informs us that many people are intensely critical of themselves. Furthermore, if you are already struggling with mental illness issues, negative self-talk can make issues even more difficult to resolve. Huffington Post suggests that working on meditation and mindfulness to shape one’s thinking toward the positive may be a useful strategy to utilize when one is struggling.
Isolation is also a common concern, particularly for single people and especially during the pandemic. When people are feeling lonely, unhappy, or unwell, they push away friends or loved ones and retreat. Unfortunately, this isolation can make one’s issues worse. Reaching out for help can be difficult, but ultimately quite helpful.
Diet has a significant impact on mental health.
The Mental Health Foundation details that solid nutrition is critical for one’s mental health and numerous issues can be made worse by poor dietary choices. For example, eating fresh fruit and vegetables has a very positive impact on mental health while junk food and fast food can be quite detrimental. While this certainly comes as no surprise, taking a step back to recognize this and make conscious changes can significantly improve symptoms and challenges related to mental health.
Making lifestyle changes to ditch bad habits related to exercise, sleep, and food can lessen symptoms of discontent and improve your mental health, and taking time to focus on the positives in life is essential.