What do drugs, murder, and robberies have in common? Yes, they’re all serious crimes, but there’s something more significant. They all stem from mental health disorders, which incentivize people to engage in these behaviors.
We can see the seriousness of mental health plaguing the younger generation today. Teens are becoming more susceptible to drug abuse, losing motivation in daily activities, struggling with low self-esteem, and gluing themselves to their smartphones.
If you’ve been fighting an on-and-off battle with your mental health, understand that you’re not alone. Millions of people are going through the same thing, and most don’t even realize it. How scary is that? They wake up every day feeling sad and overwhelmed but don’t even recognize it, so they continue to live the rest of their life in despair.
In this article, we uncover the seven best ways to improve your overall mental well-being.
1. Remove all sources of instant gratification
Instant gratification comes in many forms and includes activities that send an instant rush of pleasure, even though they aren’t good for us. Smoking, drinking, and watching porn make us feel pleasurable in the moment, but over time, too much of it overstimulates our brain and rewires our reward system. It damages our mental health because our brains become overly dependent on these activities for happiness.
Most often, we indulge in highly pleasurable activities to cope with our poor mental health. When we receive a failing grade in school, we consume junk food and spend hours playing video games to make ourselves feel better.
Removing all sources of instant gratification improves our mental health by putting us on a reliable path toward happiness. Instead of relying on social media for instant pleasure, we restructure our brains to find fulfillment in other meaningful areas of life, such as traveling, spending time with family, or working towards goals.
Here’s how you can start replacing instant with delayed gratification.
2. Become ambitious
Poor mental health reflects a lack of ambition because of the little motivation and discipline you have to work towards your goals. Ultimately, your poor mental health state makes it harder to get out of bed and do anything, such as brush your teeth, eat, and shower.
Having little ambition and not setting goals can make your life meaningless because you lack direction. As a result, it can negatively impact your mental health because you’re lost and aren’t sure of what to do.
To improve your mental health, start by setting goals, which could be financial, mental, or spiritual health goals. After that, don’t just stop there. Working towards these goals is what brings fulfillment and meaning to our lives.
3. Remove toxic people out of your lives
As we grow and change, so do the people around us. Knowing who we should and shouldn’t surround ourselves with is vital to the sustainability of our mental health. If we surround ourselves with people who gossip and bring others down, we essentially put ourselves in the center of hate and negativity.
Elizabeth Scott from Verywellmind wrote, “Constant drama in a relationship can distract us from the other relationships in our lives, leading to a sense of social isolation—which may cause other issues like depression or worsened sleep quality.”
Removing toxic friends, spouses, or family members from our lives isn’t easy, but our mental health heavily desires it. By doing so, we free ourselves from the drama and toxicity that’s been plaguing our mental health for the longest.
4. Go outside
Although it sounds counterintuitive, going outside continues to receive neglect because we tend to overlook its significance. Many people enjoy trapping themselves in their rooms, scrolling through social media, and being able to “escape” from the world.
However, this contributes to poor mental health because we drain our energy on worthless activities. Sitting around a desk or lying in bed all day makes us inactive, contributing to poor health and tiredness.
By being outside, we receive natural sunlight that improves our sleep while moving our bodies, which improves our health. Spending time outdoors brings peace to the mind because of the beauty and calmness that awaits in nature. Instead of trapping ourselves in a room of four walls, stepping outside brings openness, which benefits our mind
5. Don’t be too hard on yourself
We’re all ambitious creatures wishing to achieve x, y, and z. However, we might be putting too much pressure on ourselves to accomplish these things without realizing it. We create a perfect image of how we want things to go, and when we fail to live up to these expectations, we engage in negative self-talk.
Putting too much pressure on ourselves can lead to poor mental health because of how much we stress over perfection. Ultimately, the fear of failure makes it difficult to be at peace with ourselves.
To improve your mental health, give yourself more breathing room and understand that not everything will always go according to plan. Tell yourself that it’s okay to fail because nine times out of ten, you will end up failing.
6. Face your problems head-on
No matter how hard we run from our problems, they’ll always fall back into our laps. Failing grades in school, expensive rent, and losing our jobs are some examples. The more we try to run away and deny the problem, the more serious the issue becomes. Running away from our challenges puts a tremendous strain on our mental health because that problem will always remain in the back of our minds, making it harder to be at peace.
To improve your mental health, you must take action. All financial, physical, and academic problems you’re facing are resolvable once you’ve taken action. Recognize all of your problems and come up with a solution. Ultimately, this will eliminate all stress and worries plaguing your mental health.
7. Change the way you think
An effective way to improve your mental health is to surround yourself with positivity. Physically, you can do this by hanging out with supportive friends and being outside in nature. Internally, you can surround yourself with positivity by replacing negative thoughts with uplifting thoughts.
