7 Habits to Help Protect Your Mental Health

It’s the small things we do that can have a massive impact on our mental health.

Daily habits have a positive or negative impact on our mental health:

• If you’re warm and nurturing to yourself in difficult moments, you’ll likely feel strong and empowered, which is great for your mental health.
• Instead, if you’re constantly thinking you could’ve done better and you’re useless, you’re going to feel like crap.

Many of us will look for things to do to help us cope when we’re not feeling great.

However, the key is to develop habits that we utilise every day to help stop these low moments from happening.

That’s not to say we won’t have difficult periods where our mental health is tested. But, we can choose to cultivate habits that will strengthen our mental health — so, when it is tested, we’re in a much better position.

1. Counteract Your Overthinking

We’ve all had the experience where one tiny thing happens and we start to overthink the whole situation. For example:

• You’re writing gets rejected so you think you’re a terrible writer.
• Your partner says they want some time to themselves as they’re feeling overwhelmed from work but you think they don’t like you anymore.

Studies clearly show overthinking contributes to a variety of challenges with our mental health, including anxiety, depression and the generation of poor solutions.

Because of this, it’s vital to learn how to counteract our overthinking to protect our mental health:

1. Identify when you overthink — sometimes we do it more in certain situations. Is it with your writing, in your relationship, with your friends?
2. Write down your ‘overthinking thoughts’ — draw attention to these thoughts so you can build awareness of them. You need to know what you’re overthinking about to change it.
3. Now replace these thoughts — “Telling yourself not to have a certain thought is not the way to not have the thought. You need to replace the thought,” says Clinical Psychologist, Dr Catherine Pittman. If you tell yourself AND come up with more positive scenarios, you’re going to think of positive thoughts which will reduce your overthinking.

2. Use The Power of Self-Compassion

Our inner critic is a massive contributor to poor mental health:

• If you fail at something, you might say you’re incapable, not worthy of success or that you should give up — of course, that’ll make you feel like crap.

Countless studies have found self-criticism to be linked with reduced wellbeing, increased negative emotions relating to weight and a decrease in goal progress.

The relationship you have with yourself is so important. So, you need to work on this to protect your mental health:

1. Treat yourself as if you’re speaking to your friend — it encourages an empowering and gentle approach because that’s how we often respond to others’ difficulties.
2. View difficulties as shared experiences — be aware that many of us go through similar experiences. Self-compassion expert Dr Kristin Neff encourages saying phrases such as, “Suffering is a part of life,” “We all struggle in our lives,” or “Other people feel this way.”
3. Stand up to your inner-critic with empowering phrases — a phrase such as, “I can’t get anything right. I’m useless!” becomes, “I’m trying and I know I can do this. I can use my strengths to overcome this.”

3. Learn to Generate More Positive Images

The mental images you create have a drastic impact on your mental health:

• If you picture yourself messing up an interview, you’ll likely feel upset and anxious.
• In contrast, if you picture yourself going in there with confidence, nailing the questions and having enthusiasm, it can make you feel great.

Research even shows this. One study found stronger negative emotions are brought on by negative mental imagery. Another study found when individuals are probed to generate positive mental images, there is an increase in positive emotions.

It’s clear to see the images we create impact our mental health. So, it’s important to generate a habit of creating positive images to stop you from feeling low.

You can do this by:

1. Using guided imagery — have an instructor or recording to guide you through the process of imagery. Use guided imagery videos on YouTube, apps like Headspace or listen to guided imagery podcasts like A Healthier Michigan Podcast.
2. Imagine your worries flowing away from you — picture your worry as a dried leaf that flies off into the distance.
3. Use all your senses — What can you see that’s more positive? What can you hear that’s more friendly? What can you smell that will make you feel good?

4. Reframe Your Thoughts

A simple story highlights how our thoughts affect our mental health:

• Both Jill and Sam are asleep. Suddenly, they hear a loud bang at night, waking them both.
• Sam thinks someone is downstairs and starts to panic. He becomes worried someone is in the house and thinks he’ll be hurt. Because of this, Sam now constantly wakes up at night in fear.
• Instead, Jill wakes up and thinks it’s nothing — simply a noise from outside. She looks out the window calmly and goes back to bed.

The same event happened to both. However, because Sam thought someone was in the house, that caused him to become scared. In contrast, because Jill thought it was nothing, she remained calm.

Often, it’s simply our appraisal of events that affect us rather than the situation itself.

Research has found changing how we interpret situations has a positive effect in reducing anxiety.

So, another habit to try and cultivate is to reframe your thoughts:

1. Identify automatic thoughts — what are the instant thoughts that come into your mind?
2. Identify your emotions — what emotions are you experiencing at that time? It draws your attention to how these thoughts can make you feel horrible.
3. Develop alternative thoughts— write down alternative thoughts that you can say in the same situation.

5. Schedule Relaxation Periods

We schedule a lot of things in our daily lives:

• We schedule our meetings or calls with others.
• We schedule appointments into our day, such as going to see the doctor.
• We schedule meeting up with family and friends too.

What we don’t do enough is schedule designated time in our day to relax.

Studies have found a common relaxation tool — yoga — resulted in a decrease in anxiety, depression and an overall improvement in wellbeing too. This shows us just how important relaxation is.

Also, it’s important to schedule you’re relaxation periods because you’re factoring it into your day, making it more likely you’ll stick to it. To do this:

1. Plan your relaxation time a week before — it takes 10 minutes of your time to schedule into your calendar when you’re going to relax. So do it before the new week starts.
2. Plan what you’re going to do — are you going to lie down, have a bath, go for a walk? Have something to look forward to.
3. Set and enforce boundaries — to make sure you stick to your planned relaxation, be sure to set boundaries and enforce them with others who threaten your relaxation period.

6. Look At What’s Affecting You

It’s important to be curious about your thoughts and your emotions.

By doing so you can protect your mental health as you’ll know something is bothering you or why you’re not feeling great.

Because you know this, you can address it right away, rather than let it continue to affect you.

Studies show mindfulness — which is a great way to be more curious about what’s affecting you — can result in positive psychological effects, improved wellbeing and better emotional reactivity.

To examine what’s affecting you:

1. Pause when you notice something isn’t right — you need to take time to address why you’re feeling this way.
2. Ask yourself — what’s happening in my mind at this present moment? This helps you draw awareness to your emotions and thoughts.
3. Practice being mindful — it’ll help you notice in the present moment what’s going on. A YouTube video can always be a massive help for this.

7. Learn How to Forgive

Holding grudges is one of the worst things for our mental health.

We’re constantly thinking about this grudge and trying to remind ourselves of why we hold it. For example:

• Imagine you find out someone close to you has said some bad things about you whilst you weren’t there.
• It’s easy to be so angry with them — which is fair. You end up reacting angrily with them and continue to do so for months, even though they apologised.
• Now, every time you see this person or hear their name, it fuels you with more anger and hatred.

In this scenario, of course, your mental health will be adversely affected.

Instead, if you take the time to forgive them, you won’t spend time and energy getting wound up by this person.

A wealth of research shows forgiveness is linked to reduced anxiety and depression. It helps you let go of chronic stressors that are bad for your mental health.

Make forgiveness a habit. To do this:

1. Take your moment to be annoyed or angry — it’s important because you need to enforce the boundary and if you don’t, it can feel incomplete.
2. Think about the other person — we all make mistakes. Whatever it is you’re angry about, you could’ve done the same thing in the past. These moments happen. And, realising we share this commonality can make forgiving so much easier.
3. Ask yourself — if that was you, how would you like to be treated? Chances are you’d want to be forgiven. There could be a perfectly good reason why this person has done something to upset you. So, take a moment to put yourself in their shoes.

Final Comments

Habits are fundamental to our mental health.

They’re things we engage in daily, so it’s important to cultivate habits that can protect our mental health.

After all, our mental health is tested in so many ways — we need to know how to protect it. Cultivate these seven habits (as many as you can) to protect your mental health:

Counteract your overthinking. Use self-compassion. Generate positive images. Reframe your thoughts. Schedule relaxation periods. Look at what’s affecting you. Learn how to forgive.