A mental health routine is a list of daily activities and tasks that you do to ease and improve your mental well-being. If it sounds like a strange notion, that’s because we’re used to thinking of health as a solely physical characteristic.
If you think about it, you definitely have a physical health routine, but your mental health routine might be a bit vague. Luckily, both routine sets overlap, as what benefits the body often benefits the mind and vice versa.
Your physical health routine might look something like, getting enough sleep, eating properly, exercising daily, drinking enough water etc. All of these sorts of activities are both good for your physical health and for your mental health. When constructing your own mental health routine/check-list, it’s essential that all of these activities are included.
However there are some things that are exclusive to your mental health routine. Spending time with people you care about it a huge one. Making effort to see and spend meaningful time with friends and family is absolutely fundamental to maintaining your mental health. This is why we tend to get low when we spend prolonged and unwanted time alone.
I like to emphasize the importance of mental health routines because they consist of simple things we can do every day to ease our minds. In the same way that we have physical health routines – exercising daily, getting enough sleep, eating right etc. – we can also have mental routines. The problem is, we have never been encouraged to make these routines, and so it has become difficult to understand that mental health is something which needs to be worked on every day. Just like we must engage on a daily basis to keep our physical fitness up, so to must we engage with our mental health on a daily basis to ensure we maintain positive well-being.
My mental health routine is a simple check-list consisting of getting enough sleep, enough water, enough good food, enough facetime with friends, enough exercise, and finding time to read or be still during the day. If I can nail these down I usually maintain a consistent mental state. If I do all of these things and I still feel off, then I know more investigation is needed, and so the routine also acts as alarm system for when my mental health is deteriorating.
Other aspects of my own mental health routine include activities that are specific to my interests which induce a sense of flow. Flow is that feeling you get when you’re totally immersed in something, where you don’t think about anything else and time seems to zip by.
Some of these activities include reading, writing, and meditating. Because I know these things ease my mental health, I try to spend time doing each every day. Everyone will have different activities that induce flow for them.
What’s important is that you try and incorporate them into your daily routine, so that you can benefit mentally from them more often.
Your physical and mental health routines overlap in a lot of ways. This is because health isn’t a dichotomy. You don’t have one part of your brain for mental well-being and one part of for physical well-being. They’re intertwined and one in the same. This is why you feel good when you exercise, and why you feel like crap when you don’t.
‘Self-care’ is misconstrued as this notion that we should allow ourselves excuses and take the back seat. Although days-off are essential, this is the not the premise of real self-care.
Self-care is doing things that you know you ought to do. Going to the dentist is self-care. Exercising every day is self-care. Being accountable for yourself is self-care.
You should approach your mental health the same way you’d approach having to take care of another person. If you saw a person that you’re responsible for suffering, you wouldn’t just allow it to continue. You’d make sure that you did everything you could to better their situation.
Self-care is treating yourself the exact same way, even when you don’t really want to. Most days, I don’t want to go running, but I’m always glad I made myself do it when it’s over.
A mental health routine can be a simple but highly effective way to look after your mental health. When you take the time out and actively structure a routine for yourself, it can bring a sense of comfort in times of distress. When you have a list of five or six practices which you can fall back on, it makes bouts of anxiety and low mood less daunting, because you’ve give yourself the tools to weather the storm.
Start simple. Start with the obvious. Write down the things you enjoy doing and include them in your routine. Then move to the things which you know keep your mental health in good shape. When you have a list made out, set aside time each day for each item, even if it’s only five minutes. If you can do this consistently, you’ll notice a sense of control. You’ll notice that you have the power to affect your own mental health, and once you feel this, it helps you to feel a little more confident, a little bit stronger, and ready to take on whatever life throws at you.
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