best mental health activities

Best Mental Health Activities

Mental health is the part of general health that we sometimes don’t pay the necessary attention to. We tend to pay more attention to physical health, and as a consequence, some problems may appear.

But how do you have good mental health? We’ll start with the idea that general health encompasses physical, mental, or psychological health and the social network that we have. The three go hand in hand, they are related to each other, and their healthy level provides us with personal well-being and, therefore, quality of life.

If we maintain healthy lifestyle habits because they improve our physical state, we must know that they also improve mental. Therefore, these habits are positive for our general physical, psychological and social health. In this way, we can prevent problems such as anxiety from appearing. That when it is not adaptive, it can interfere in our daily life in our daily functioning.

How to have good mental health?

As we explained at the beginning, most of us are attentive to our physical health, to our state of health. However, we are not aware that mental health is as important as physical health and that if psychologically we are not well, this will affect our body.

So it is essential also to be attentive to our mental health and try to maintain a balance of our general health, asking for help if necessary.

The following are some tips and activities that answer the question How to have good mental health? Some recommendations that you can adapt to your interests, tastes, and pleasant leisure activities.

1. Boost resilience.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity, trauma, or stress and come out stronger. It is the conviction that an individual or team has to overcome obstacles without thinking about defeat, even if the circumstances are adverse.

This resistance capacity is tested in situations of excessive and prolonged stress, such as the loss of a loved one, layoffs, misery, physical or mental abuse, diseases, and natural disasters.

Examples of this attitude are unemployed people who fight at the limit of their possibilities to find employment, troubled marriages who face all obstacles to avoid a breakup.

2. Be active.

Exercise has multiple benefits for our general health and, therefore, also for our mental health. 

If you do physical exercise daily, you secrete dopamine, in addition to keeping you in shape, reducing the level of physiological activity that is associated with stress, anxiety, or anger and therefore increases your well-being.

Physical activity has a significant effect on your psychological well-being. Studies show that just 200 minutes of walking per week (about 3.5 hours) can prevent and reduce symptoms of depression.

3. Try to be more optimistic.

Being positive with a tolerant attitude to adversity and challenging situations, and having high self-esteem will help you overcome these difficulties and project dreams and set goals in life. Learn from mistakes, valuing things in their proper measure.

4. Eat well.

If we maintain a healthy diet, it will keep our body in good health. It makes us feel good, and therefore, our overall well-being increases.

If you choose the foods in your diet well, limiting fats, sugars, alcohol, increasing the consumption of fresh products, such as vegetables and fruits, legumes, oily fish, you protect the health of your brain and, therefore, your mental health.

5. Make a social life.

Caring for and nourishing relationships with others or making new affiliations are helpful for certain problems such as anxiety or stress, avoid isolation, and keep our brain more active.

People who have resilient social ties with family, friends, and co-workers feel happier and tend to be more positive. 

Selfless helping others will help you feel better about yourself. It is necessary to relate to others since isolation and loneliness are one of our greatest evils.

Social support, and healthy contact with people who enrich, and to know with whom to share, in addition to improving your well-being, delay the deterioration of cognitive abilities such as memory.

6. Manage your thought.

Properly managing excessive and continuous worries and negative thoughts can help you maintain good mental health.

These types of thoughts make you act in a certain way. They can make you act desperate for no reason or encourage you to abandon a task. Being aware of them, what triggers them, or what is real in that thought that never let us sleep are some of the strategies to put into practice. Undeniably, a health expert such as a psychologist will be able to guide you to carry it out.

7. Schedule fun activities, and you will improve your mood.

Fun activities are a decisive blow in the battle against social distance.

Putting fun things on your schedule is a potent blow in the battle against depression. Therapists call it “behavioral activation” or “enjoyable activity scheduling,” and research shows that it is effective in preventing and decreasing depression.

Again, something “fun” may require a bit more creativity than usual, as your options are limited. But maybe planning to see a movie you’ve been wanting to see or scheduling a time to bake something special is all it takes to boost your mood.

The trick is to put it on your schedule. Planning beforehand and putting it on your calendar will give you a powerful psychological boost.

8. Change your language, an activity that helps your mind.

The change of language is fundamental among the activities that can help improve your mental health.

The language of the victims affects your mental health. However, learning a new language will help you feel good.

9. Take care of your body.

Taking care of your body is an essential step towards good physical and mental health. 

A good rest, enough sleep, a correct diet, and enough physical exercise are recommended to relieve stress and lift your mood. 

A good dose of sunlight daily, being in the sun for 10 to 15 minutes.

10. Creative relaxation.

It includes physical and mental relaxation exercises intending to improve our well-being. 

It consists of the practice of progressive relaxation of all our muscles (arms, legs, chest, guts, back, head, and neck), accompanied by deep breathing. It is necessary to practice this technique 15 minutes a day. 

People who have difficulty falling asleep should practice it at bedtime. Other effective relaxation techniques are yoga and meditation.

11. Leisure.

Enjoying free time efficiently and pleasantly is very important for health. Psychologists recommend that we spend free time on pleasant activities (which we like to do and which we don’t have time to do), thereby opening ourselves to positive experiences that give us a vision of the world around us. This entertainment generates positive feelings for us.

Enjoying nature is pleasant, starting with the neighborhood park and ending with any corner of nature in our community. 

Traveling is one of the best enriching activities that we can do. It is convenient to leave our usual environment to get to know other places and people.

Find a hobby that we like, like modeling, dancing, hiking if we don’t already have it. Read books, study, artistic activities such as literature, painting, sculpture, music, ceramics, work (dressmaking, knitting, etc.). 

Elaboration of manual work with the children or grandchildren such as origami, construction of models, and simple toys.

12. Practice gratitude to improve your mental health.

Being happier depends on many things, but being grateful will certainly help.

Do you want to be 25% happier? Practice gratitude. A 2003 study found that counting your blessings, as opposed to your burdens, can give you an instant 25% increase in happiness.

Gratitude has a long list of other benefits as well, ranging from increased self-esteem to better sleep.

And the good news is, it’s one of the quickest and simplest ways to feel better. Whether you write in a gratitude journal or share the things you are grateful for with your family over dinner, being more aware of the good things in life makes you feel better.

When to seek help!

It is important to know how mental health influences both energy and daily activities. Since maintaining mental balance and calm helps to ward off other types of alterations that damage health, such as stress, anxiety, anguish, among others, producing emotional and physical affections.

In order to have good mental health, it is significant to understand emotions and how they influence one’s personality or expectations of oneself, which can be reflected through self-esteem.

If you find yourself tumbling into depression despite your best efforts to prevent it from happening, seek professional help. Know that depression is not a symbol of weakness. Just as you can’t always prevent physical health problems, you can’t prevent mental health problems either.

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