From the age we learn to walk and talk, we are told about the importance of looking after our bodies – why not our minds?
Whether it is parents telling us to eat our greens or adverts that stress the importance of a fit and healthy lifestyle, we are bombarded with information from a young age about keeping our bodies as healthy as possible.
Yet we are very rarely encouraged, in the same way, to take regular care of our minds.
Only in recent years has society become better at encouraging people to seek help if they are struggling with mental health issues – let alone advocating that we incorporate care for our minds into our daily lives as we would with our bodies.
As a result, many people only think to look after their mental health when they feel at crisis point, and by that stage it can be a lot harder to feel able to do so.
Though these are not substitutes for seeking help from a medical professional, therapist or counselling service if you feel that you are struggling with your mental health, there are several ways that we can support our minds in our everyday lives – just as we would look out for our bodies:
Write down a list of go-to support networks
Just as we keep packs of paracetamol or Lemsip at the back of the bathroom cupboard to reach for if we are feeling under the weather, it can be a good exercise to write down a list of your go-to supports that you know always make you feel good – whether this be people who make you laugh or cheer you up, professionals who support you, or just a favourite film, song, food or form of exercise.
If you have set supports to turn to in an accessible word document or notebook, it can feel easier to be proactive about trying to minimise these feelings when they come around rather than letting them fester.
You’d pop a painkiller for a headache, so no level of low mood is too small for you to take seriously enough to turn to one of your supports for.
Try keeping a mood-log
Whenever you can, but particularly if you’ve had an especially good or bad day, try to take a few minutes in the evening to jot down several key things about the day in a journal or word document that you can refer back to.
Firstly, take note of factors that played into the day such as how much sleep you had the night before, how much work you had on, what you ate or drank, if you did any exercise (if so when and what), how your sex/relationships/social interactions were, how you spent your free time, and – for those with uteruses – what stage of your menstrual cycle you are at.
Secondly, document how you felt: how was your mood, and how were your energy levels?
This should not become an obsessive exercise, and certainly shouldn’t be one intended to count calories or guilt-trip ourselves for doing or not doing certain things.
Instead, it can be a useful way to track any patterns between your mental well-being and day-to-day life, and make adjustments accordingly.
For example, if you notice that the days you had more energy are often days you exercised in the morning, or that days you felt very anxious were also days you drank a lot of coffee, it gives you factors to experiment with when it comes to trying to improve low moods or energy levels.
Of course, persistent low mood or poor energy levels are not always caused by anything in particular and could also be attributed to mental illness.
But it can make you feel more in control if, after trying a mood log for a while, you do find some correlations between how you feel and other factors of your day that you can adjust.
Take time out
This one is so important, yet often neglected in practice.
Making sure that you are taking breaks during the working day to walk around and look away from your screen, spending time on your days off doing things you enjoy unrelated to work, and getting enough sleep are fundamental to our mental well-being.
If you feel like your work, school, or university doesn’t accommodate time for this, you have every right to voice your concern with an appropriate manager or teacher and explain why this is unsustainable and detrimental to your well-being and, most likely, the quality of your work.
Distance yourself from your negative thoughts and anxieties rather than thinking that they define you
One concept taught by many Cognitive Behavioural Therapists when treating depression or anxiety is ‘decentring’ – the idea that we are different from our thoughts.
When you have a negative thought or worry, it can often overwhelm you and feel like it defines you.
Yet often distressing worries are so distressing because they are actually very contrary to who we are and what we know – even though our minds may convince us that, because our thoughts were created in our heads, they must somehow represent us.
For example, a parent that suffers from anxieties that they might accidentally harm their child might experience such anxieties because they are, on the contrary, so conscious of protecting their child and care about them so much.
Yet instead of these rational explanations for anxiety, unpleasant thoughts such as ‘I’m not trustworthy’ or ‘I must be a dangerous person’, which in themselves can be distressing, can unhelpfully emerge in the mind to try explain this, otherwise irrational, anxiety that has occurred.
Professor Jason M. Satterfield’s guide Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Techniques for Retraining your Brain describes how, therefore, instead of believing every thought that pops into our head or thinking of them as ‘true’ or ‘false’, we should instead try to label thoughts as ‘helpful’ or ‘hurtful’.
If you are caught up in a spiral of anxious or negative thoughts, try writing them down.
It can be a useful way to distance yourself from them and rationalise them because it allows you to look at such thoughts objectively rather than letting them remain in your head – where passing thoughts or worries can easily be read as false ‘truths’ or beliefs.
The popular Headspace app advocates a similar practice it calls ‘noting’ – mentally taking note of thoughts as they interrupt or distract you throughout the day rather than trying to push them away, and labelling them ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling’ before continuing with whatever you were doing.
CBT Triangles
Cognitive behavioural therapy, often prescribed for anxiety or depressive disorders, is based on the so-called ‘CBT triangle’ that consists of cognitions (thoughts), behaviours and feelings/emotions.
The idea behind the triangle is that the three are all interlinked.
For example, somebody who suffers from social anxiety may experience a thought such as ‘I shouldn’t speak to anyone at work in case I say something embarrassing’, which will cause them to feel anxiety, and consequently alter their behaviour – for example, they may avoid interaction with colleagues.
Though a GP or trained CBT practitioner can best advise you on understanding and practicing this form of therapy if you believe you are suffering from a mental illness, CBT triangles can be a useful thing for anyone to think about in order to see whether unpleasant thoughts or feelings could be helped by challenging another point on this ‘triangle’ – for example by deliberately altering your behaviour from what your anxiety would have you do, or by challenging your thoughts.
Dipti Tait, Anxiety Expert and Solution Focused Hypnotherapist at The Cotswold Practice told metro.co.uk that one way to think of this exercise is to, ‘remember that you are the thinker of your thoughts and imagine you have control over the direction your thoughts take you in.’
‘Thoughts create a Feeling. Feelings create a behaviour, you behaviour has an influence on your experience and your experiences change your reality.’
‘So, if you want to change your reality, you have to change the thought that precedes it. Keep repeating to yourself that you are in control of your mind, and start to focus your thinking on a solution rather than a problem.’
Challenge your ‘what if’ worries
One of the biggest causes of stress is our hypotheses – we stress ourselves out by things that might happen, even if there is no evidence to suggest that they will.
Try writing down such hypotheses, whether it be ‘I don’t want to go out in case I embarrass myself’ or “what if my boss doesn’t like my work’, and pretend you had to argue the case against them.
Dipti Tait told metro.co.uk that, though it might sound obvious, we should consciously ‘focus on what you do want rather than what you don’t want.’
‘Think of your brain like a Google search. If you are looking for something on Google, you will type in what you want, rather than what you don’t want. So many people make the mistake of focusing on what they don’t want (the problem) and what they don’t want becomes the focus of their attention.’
We often guard ourselves from possible cons, but more time could be spent looking at the pros, how likely such cons really are, and what the worst consequences of such cons could be.
Meditation and mindfulness
Taking ten minutes out of every day committed to relaxing your mind can be a really positive routine.
Psychiatrists and academic professors such as Dr Elizabeth Hoge, a psychiatrist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, have noted correlations between meditation and mindfulness and a reduction in stress, anxiety and depression.
‘If you have unproductive worries,’ says Dr Hoge,’ you can train yourself to experience those thoughts completely differently.’
‘You might think “I’m late, I might lose my job if I don’t get there on time, and it will be a disaster!” Mindfulness teaches you to recognize, “Oh, there’s that thought again. I’ve been here before. But it’s just that—a thought, and not a part of my core self”‘
Talking to others
Talking to others – whether it be a friend, family member, partner, medical professional, or a barista in a coffee shop – can not only be a good opportunity to open up and express to others and ourselves if we aren’t feeling our best, so that we don’t feel alone.
Our sense of belonging and happiness can also be significantly increased by interactions with other people, even people we do not know.
If you are struggling with your mental health, there are many people who can help and it is worth speaking to your GP or a counselling service that can refer you to support. But regardless of whether you are currently struggling or not, taking care of your mental health is crucial.
We wouldn’t want to only care about our bodies when we were chronically unwell – so why do we allow ourselves to have this attitude towards our minds?
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