Mental health is a factor that can affect many different aspects of your life, so it is important to keep it healthy. I personally have suffered through mental problems before, so I wish to help those who are currently experiencing that hardship. While each person has different ways that suit them for keeping a healthy mental state, I will be sharing some of my solutions that worked for me! So here are my top five effective ways to improve your mental health!

 

Exercising

Exercising is one of the most basic ways to improve your mental health. You might’ve heard that staying physically healthy also helps you stay mentally healthy. I didn’t believe that at first, but it’s true! Exercising helps you feel accomplished, which boosts your level of self-confidence and reduces self-hatred. So, let’s exercise!

 

Keeping busy

This is something that worked very well for me. All the articles from my research said to “do your hobbies”, but when you’re at a depressing state of your life, you realize that those hobbies can’t give joy to you anymore. If it’s difficult for you to get over a difficult memory or experience, let’s try to push it away to the furthest part of our brains (since we can’t “forget” memories) by keeping busy. You can do anything to keep busy, but what I did was to work as a cashier, teach a few students, reorganize my notes and to study more for school! This is a win-win method, so I definitely recommend this one.

 

Staying cool

This one may be more difficult and definitely needs a lot of practice, but it helps if you keep it in mind throughout your whole lifetime. People with an unstable mental state easily gets affected by what others say. One thing I suggest is to keep cool with what people say. Not everyone in this big world can love or like you, but there are definitely people who will stay with you no matter what. So, focus on those people and stay cool with what the others say about you.

 

Getting off of social media platforms

Staying off of social media is something that worked very well for me, but others may be hesitant to put it into action. When I was suffering through mental problems, it lead to self-hatred and self-disgust, so being on social media worsened it even more. There were so many fake people on social media sharing their perfect lives, and even though I knew it was fake, I started comparing myself to them. So I stopped using social media for those purposes, and I now only use it for contacting friends and family. This method helped me stop hating myself even more, so it worked for me but it may not work for you.

 

Looking for the positive (not the negative)

Keeping busy, staying cool, and getting off of social media stopped my mental health from getting worse, but they never improved it. Exercising helped me start to love myself because it boosted my self-confidence, but my self-hatred still existed. So what is the solution for actually loving yourself? It’s to look for the positive, and not the negative. This is very difficult and not a lot of people can actually do it, but try to look at the positive aspects (about anything) rather than the negative ones. We humans get strongly affected by the small number of negative aspects, and minimally affected by the huge number of the positives. So let’s only look at the positive aspects, so that the negative ones won’t have room to fit in!

 

From my personal experience, these five ways were the most effective methods of improving my mental health. But remember, everyone is different and have their own preferences. These methods worked for me, but they may not work for you. What’s most important is to try different solutions and find the one that improves your mental health the most! Let’s all stay healthy; physically and mentally! 🙂