How to improve your mental health?
Mental hygiene is a concept that is used to define that set of activities that allow a person to be in balance with their socio-cultural environment. The behaviors that include mental hygiene have the objective of preventing negative behaviors in the social context, also, they try to contribute with emotional stability and to increase the quality of life of the people.
According to this concept of psychology, each person has individual control over his or her functioning that allows him or her to regulate his or her state of integration and well-being. Today, I want to present you 10 basic elements for the achievement of mental hygiene, perhaps some of these tips will help you become a person with a higher quality of life.
It's about finding a balance between those most primary needs and the behaviors we perform, eating a satisfactory diet, getting adequate rest, having sex when we need it, etc. All these activities satisfy a biological need, when they are repressed, both our physical state and our emotional state are destabilized, so the first requirement to be taken into account when reaching a state of total harmony, is to achieve an adequate internal balance. Try to harmonize these basic aspects with the objective of not diminishing your quality of life.
The satisfaction of basic needs will bring you a minimum of balance, but will not ensure that you are well with yourself, in fact in order to achieve this you have to accept yourself as you are, please yourself and above all love yourself. This aspect is highly important because if you do not love yourself, it will be very difficult to love others. Similarly, if you are not well with yourself, it will be very difficult for you to be in balance with your socio-cultural environment. Therefore, taking care of one's self-esteem consists of loving oneself, accepting oneself and valuing what one is.
Once a positive evaluation of oneself has been made and self-esteem has been boosted, it is necessary to evaluate others positively as well. If you value negatively the people around you, people will be affected and will gradually deteriorate. In this way, making positive evaluations about others will allow you to improve your image of them and facilitate the relationship. However, when negative evaluations are made, the relationship distances itself, worsens its quality and can become harmful. The fact of valuing others positively does not mean that they have to be idolized or that everything they do has to be rewarded, but it does imply a greater attention to the positive than to the negative of the people we appreciate.
Not only do we have to take care of the image we have about the people around us, but we also have to work to make the relationship satisfactory, in fact if those relationships are not taken care of they end up dying or even worse, they end up being harmful. Personal and social relationships are always two-way, that is, we have a relationship because in it we can give and receive, so it is very important to keep personal relationships in mind and dedicate time and effort to make them work properly.
The management of emotions implies the development of self-control, so that we acquire the capacity to modulate the sensations we experience. Learning to manage emotions does not imply eliminating them or not taking them into account for our functioning, in fact, there are moments when it is beneficial or even necessary to use them in order to act correctly. However, there are many other times when it is important to limit their intensity and avoid negative emotions from being exceeded. Without emotion management, it is likely that one will act badly on many occasions and this can take its toll on both a personal and a relational level. Therefore, exercising the insertion of the relationship every time an emotion appears in order to assess how it should be managed is a vital process of mental hygiene.
Despite the fact that all those actions are carried out that lead to a state of personal and social harmony, complicated situations can easily appear, in fact the appearance of complications is a situation that in many occasions cannot be controlled, in those moments the model of confrontation that is applied acquires great importance. People need to take a leading role in their lives, if the problems are not faced, the discomfort is often multiplied and personal balance can be questioned.
Often situations and events that happen cannot be changed, but what can always be managed is what we think about what happened. Negative thoughts often appear automatically and cannot be avoided, but you can decide how far you want to prolong them. In order to be well emotionally, people need positive thoughts to cover most of their cognition, when this does not happen negative feelings appear leading to a state of discomfort. In this way it is important to promote the positive thoughts to the maximum possible and above all to achieve that the negative thoughts do not acquire a main protagonist.
This is the objective of every person who wants to be well with himself and with others, to try that the negative things affect the less possible and to find always a positive aspect that allows to improve them or to mitigate them.
Goals can encompass any aspect of an individual's life, be it work, personal, social or relational, so you can continually set new goals in your life, regardless of their qualities or characteristics. It is important that the goals you set meet two essential requirements, first, they must bring something positive, ie that their achievement must convey some kind of reward or feeling satisfactory, otherwise the goal will be indifferent and will not fulfill its motivational function.
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Secondly, it is important that the objective is rationally achievable, imagine goals in an abstract way or with components that are interpreted as unattainable will automatically distance you from them and will not provide you with motivation in your day to day.
It is important that you know what activities are enjoyable for you and don't deprive yourself of them. Often a bad day, a worry or a situation that causes you discomfort can stop affecting you having a good time. In other cases, doing these activities can be your source of motivation to do other less rewarding tasks. In any case, enjoyable activities play a major role in achieving a good emotional state and an optimal quality of life.
Finally, the physical exercise is one of the activities that more well-being originates, in addition they provide gratification of a direct form. Multiple studies have shown how physical activity is highly beneficial in improving mood, reducing stress and anxiety, promoting self-esteem and improving quality of life. All these aspects are basic to achieve mental hygiene, and physical activity is one of the most useful tools to obtain well-being and personal balance. I recommend you, be one of your main focuses in the search for mental hygiene.
And you, what kind of advice do you think is the most relevant or important? Do you have any other advice for mental hygiene? I'm interested in your opinion, let me know in the comments.
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