It can be hard to balance your mental health, particularly stress and mental health. A lot of people feel that they simply don’t have time to think about this aspect of their life, working hard no matter how it makes them feel. Others are a lot more conscious of their mental wellbeing, though, and the idea of living with conditions for the rest of your life can be quite a daunting prospect for many. Working to improve your mental health can be achieved in a number of ways, though this post is going to be focusing on the work you can do to make life less stressful.
Identify The Cause
The first stage you will need to go through when working to reduce stress will involve figuring out the cause of your stress. For most people, this will be something quite simple, but can often still be a big element of your life. Work is one of the biggest causes of stress, followed by money, relationships, and even things like weight and appearance. Identifying exactly what is causing your stress can be quite difficult, with many people blaming the wrong parts of their lives for this sort of issue. Mindfulness is crucial if you’re going to overcome this, as you need to be able to get to the source of your emotions. If the thought of practising mindfulness seems overwhelming, why not start with fitting in five minutes of mindfulness here and there while you attend to your everyday things. Another idea that helps me immensely when I get stressed and have a mind that’s too full is to do a brain dump. This means putting every thought and idea out of your mind and writing it down on a piece of paper from which you then sort it into priorities.
You can learn more about brain dumping and grab a free brain dump printable here.
Research Solutions
Once you have an idea of what might be causing your stress, it will be time to start researching solutions. The way that you handle this will depend on the original cause of your stress. You need to make sure that you’re taking a targeted approach that won’t leave you in a bad position. For example, if your work is the element of life that is making you stressed, you could consider looking for other work or talking to your boss to make your current job less stressful. When you approach your boss with new ideas and alternatives, you immediately make the decision easier for them because they can visualise it.
Problems with money, relationships, and other aspects of your life have to be approached in their own way. If you’re stressed about the lack of money you have and the increasing expenses, a solution might be to start a side hustle that will cover your expenses. Maybe you might have to look at the number of times you have takeaway each week and start meal planning. Your relationships, whether it be your partner or friend, can be complicated and require a decent amount of dutch courage to talk about the issue. Or perhaps it might be that you need to spend more time with them which means cutting down on other aspects of your life like working long hours.
Taking Action
Finally, as the last and most important stage in this process, it will be time to take action. Your research will dictate the sort of action you take, but you need to make sure that you’ve explored all of the possible options to help stress and anxiety, to make sure that you’ve chosen the best one for you. You can click here to learn about some of the best ways to deal with financial stress, and there are resources like this available for just about every mental health problem you can experience. Of course, though, you need to make sure that you’re choosing the right path for you, and this can take some experimenting. Remember that part of the ‘experimenting’ may involve failure, and that’s ok. It’s ok because from failure and mistakes you will learn how to approach something differently and with that, you will also feel more confident.
With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to take on the challenge of reducing the stress in your life to improve your mental health. Most people have to go through the stress and mental health challenges from time to time, but one thing is for sure, the way that you handle it will always dictate the end result.
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. – Epictetus”
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