How to Take Care of Your Mental Health

Personally I see mental illness as a sort of mental and physical clutter. Our thoughts and emotions become disorganized and chaotic overtime and it’s difficult for us to discern the overall meaning of the present moment. When your body and mind are not in tune with one another completely, they are bound to work against each other.

Maybe your body will pick up feelings of anxiety and your mind will try to run away from them as quickly as possible. But if your mind runs, the feelings only become worse. They have to meet somewhere in the middle.

You have to learn how to both take care of them and process them completely because the faster your mind runs away, the more the feelings build up overtime. They won’t go away on their own. They yearn to be expressed fully and appreciated no matter how uncomfortable they may seem.

I choose to process my thoughts and emotions through writing and creating art. Writing attempts to explain my thoughts in an organized manner and art helps me to express my feelings in a more abstact fashion. By letting them out and analyzing their meaning, I am able to take control of them and effectively organize an otherwise cluttered mind.

I like to take care of my mental health by bridging the gap between my mind and body. Focusing intellectually on how my body is feeling in the present moment allows me to see where it may be holding negativity, and identifying the problem is the first step in solving it.

Yoga helps to engage my mind and body simultaneously, with different stretches serving to release toxicity that has built up overtime. Meditation helps me sit with uncomfortable emotions such as boredom, anxiety, deep sadness, or anger. I believe that nearly anything that engages both mind and body concurrently could help with organizing the chaos that is mental illness. This could include other forms of exercise, having sex, playing a musical instrument, etc. It really depends on your preferred method.

A few months ago, I read a book called The Body Keeps the Score, written by one of the world’s leading trauma researchers. He explains how when one experiences trauma in their life, the pain is stored in their body. It builds up over the course of time and eventally is wedged so deep into us that it’s possible to not be conscious of its impact on our daily lives.

By practicing methods I spoke about earlier, such as yoga and meditation, you’re able to bring these traumas closer to the surface. It’s difficult because the closer they get to the surface, the more painful they become, but they also cannot leave our bodies until we allow ourselves feel them fully and completely.

Sometimes I find myself crying randomly during yoga or meditation and don’t understand why. I’ve realized that these feelings stem from traumas coming to surface. I let myself cry because the feeling needs to be expressed. It’s finally reached the point in which it’s ready to leave and if I choose to push the feeling down again, I’ll need to go through the same process of bringing it to surface so that it can finally release.

I can’t say for sure, but from observing how people interact on a daily basis, I believe that nearly everyone experiences some degree of mental illness. Just as everyone experiences the occasional physical ailment, it’s likely that everyone experiences the occasional mental ailment.

This makes it vital to talk about matters such as mental health just as extensively as we discuss and normalize physical health. Taking care of ourselves includes the mind just as much as it includes the body. And understanding how the two interact with one another to create our human experience is a vital part of understanding ourselves and our own minds.