Mental Self-Care: The 5 Key Habits
Mental self-care is one of the key pillars of self-care. Its whole purpose is to help you take care of your mental wellbeing. It consists of habits and activities you practice in your everyday life to look after your brain and mental health.
Lives are often stressful and hectic, which can often affect the brain negatively and make it easy to forget about its well-being, so it’s important to focus on incorporating healthy habits in your daily routine and cutting toxic ones to avoid the negative consequences of stressful lifestyles.
In this post, I’m sharing with you the 5 key steps for a successful mental self-care practice. These 5 habits are simple and beneficial activities for the brain. Each one of them is practical and easy to sneak into your day without too much trouble.
Your mental self-care doesn’t have to be overly elaborated to be effective. The whole point of the 5 key steps is to keep mental self-care simple so that it can be put into action and remain sustainable over time.
The 5 key steps of mental self-care
1. Nutritious Foods
Eating healthy is essential, but especially so for mental self-care. The quality of your diet plays a direct role on your brain and mental health. So if your diet consists mainly of processed and ultra-processed food deprived of any nutritional value, your health will reflect this. The opposite is true too – if your diet consists mainly of healthy, whole and natural foods that are nutrient-dense and nourish your body with the proper fuel so that it can function optimally, this will be reflected in your health as well.
Eating a healthy diet has been proven to impact the health of the brain, which in turn impacts your mental health.
See: 5 Practical Steps To Eat More Nutritious Food
2. Exercise
Exercising and moving regularly influences your mental well-being just as much as the food you eat. So moving on a daily basis plays an essential role in how good you feel mentally.
There’s a reason you feel better after a workout or a walk. Moving boosts the release of endorphins and dopamine, which in turn improves your mood and how you feel. It’s also one of the essential steps to help with stress management, and help you feel better: more focused, serene, and productive.
See: 5 Practical Steps To Be More Active During Your Day
3. Adequate Sleep
Sleep is vital, and getting enough good quality sleep should always be a priority – no matter what goes on in your life. If you aim for anything, aim for no less than 6 hours of sleep. Proper rest is the basis of your body’s regulation and repair.
You know the difference in your mental well-being between a good night’s sleep, and a terrible night spent tossing and turning. Following the former, you’ll be focused, clear-minded, and productive. While following the latter, you’ll be foggy, irritable, and impatient.
See: 5 Practical Steps To Improve Sleep
4. LIMIT ScreeN TIME
Spending too much time on screens has a direct effect on the proper functioning of your brain and mental well-being.
Observe the way you feel after one hour spent scrolling down on social media, and one hour after strolling in nature or reading a physical book. You’ll notice how much more relaxed and focused your brain feels after the last two.
Regulating your screen time is primordial for mental well-being. Try to spend at least three hours a day without any screens for two weeks and notice how you feel mentally, and the difference in attention, focus, productivity and stress.
The key here is not to detox completely (besides, it’s just not realistic for many people in today’s world). The key is to figure out how much is too much. Discover what amount of screen time is too much for you, and then try to limit your daily usage to this amount. For this, you’ll need to figure it out for yourself, so test and experiment and observe the results.
Try to reduce your daily usage for two hours, then three, then four, or however long you’d like to try, and record the results.
5. Soothing activity
This one step goes along with the previous one. Taking the time to come back to yourself, to return your attention inward is essential for mental well-being, and you can do this while you’re spending time away from screens.
Practicing soothing activities is always a nice and efficient way to achieve this. Spending time focused on calmer and relaxing hobbies helps slow down your mind, and release stress and tension so that you can feel calmer, peaceful, and balanced. You want to prioritize relaxing activities that you truly enjoy.
Some ideas of soothing activities that will help down slow down your mind:
Meditation
Just take a couple of minutes to turn your awareness within and focus on taking long and deep breaths as you bring your attention to the slow rise and fall of your chest and belly, and observe your passing thoughts. The key isn’t to try to control your thoughts, it’s to let them pass through.
Yoga
When you practice yoga, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a long or intense session with power flows. You can simply take ten or fifteen minutes to practice sun salutations or hold your favorite postures to connect your attention to your body as you breathe and release tension and stress from your mind and body.
Journaling
Journaling is always a great way to release mental stress and clutter. You just dump everything bothering you on paper – thoughts, feelings, reflections, etc… And often, you’ll feel lighter and less stressed after you’ve let it all out.
Mindful breathing
Just take around five or ten minutes to become present here and now, and bring your attention to your breathing. Focus on taking long, deep breaths, and notice how it feels in your chest, in your belly. And when your attention wanders away, simply bring it back to your breathing. Slow breathing will help turn on your parasympathetic nervous system, which has a natural effect of helping the body and mind relax and slow down.
Read a physical book
Fiction or nonfiction, it doesn’t matter which. Just opt for an enjoyable book, and read at least ten pages. Reading helps reduce mental stress, and focus your attention on an activity that won’t overstimulate your brain while you learn something new.
And I focus on physical books, not because I’m anti-Kindle or ebooks– but because physical books are proven to be less stressful for the brain because paper does not emit blue light (even though Kindle emits less blue light, it still emits some).
Have a bath
What better way is there to switch off your brain and slow down than to have a hot bath with scented candles and a bath bomb at the end of a stressful and hectic day? Warm water helps your muscles relax, and reduces mental stress.
Last tip
While this post focuses on healthy habits to incorporate into your everyday life to take care of your mental well-being, it bears saying that often, feeling overly stressed and overwhelmed or unfocused is an indicator of some unbalance going on. Thus the key is to identify the causes, which often can emerge from a stressful lifestyle and unhealthy habits that don’t support good mental health. So look at your general lifestyle habits and see if you can identify the potential cause (or causes).
Potential causes:
- Poor diet
- Not enough sleep
- Unhealthy work-life balance
- Too much screen time
- Too many stressful activities, and not enough soothing activities
The 5 key steps listed in this article are really just solutions to these habits that can have undesirable consequences on your mental well-being.
An effective self-care is not so much what more you could or should do, than what you should stop doing or change instead.
So try to identify the causes of unbalance that might cause you to be too stressed, overwhelmed, unfocused, unproductive, etc….
Reflection is always the best way to start because it gives you clarityon what’s wrong and direction on what you should be doing to help fix it.
FINAL WORD
So that’s it.
Here are the top 5 key steps for effective mental self-care. The whole purpose of the practice is to focus on healthy habits beneficial for your brain, because a healthy brain will be reflected in improved mental health and well-being.
Remember to be kind to yourself as you try to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. It might take you some time to discover how to develop a mental self-care routine that helps you feel better, but the results are worth it.
If you have any tips, tricks, and ideas for mental self-care that are effective for you, please do not hesitate to share them in the comments.
I hope you have a wonderful day, and remember to be kind to yourself. You deserve it.