self-care

Why I Work On My Mental Health

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I’m not sure how many other people do this, but I get hyper-fixated on what I do in my day-to-day life. I constantly analyze my habits, hobbies, and what I choose to do (or not do) during my day. Whether it’s for work or fun, I’m in a near-constant state of thought, lost in my head about my choices. But in all this thinking, I forget that I don’t always have control over what impacts my mental health, which is what I’d like to talk about today.

This post serves as a reminder of sorts, as I’m sure it’s something I’ve written about sometime in the last five years. But even if it is, it feels like a reminder I need every so often. When your life starts to find its rhythm, things are great. You feel comfortable like you’ve finally figured it out, and everything seems to flow. It’s a nice feeling, but it can often create problems when that flow gets interrupted.

When my mental health is in a good place and something comes along to disrupt that, I won’t lie: I get upset at myself. I get upset at the situation, and I get upset that I’m not in a good mood anymore. But upon reflection, this is a gross misunderstanding of why I’ve built up my mental health.

For a long time, I thought of mental health as a synonym for being happy. When people focus on their mental health they’re usually happier, right? This led me to conclude that focusing on my mental health would lead to a better mood and a happier life.

For several reasons, this assumption wasn’t helpful and didn’t work. Mental health is more than just trying to “be happy.” It’s not a hack, it’s not a secret, and it’s not a one-stop shop. Working on ourselves takes time and effort, and we don’t always see results the way we think we will. I thought improving my mental wellness would stop the storms from coming. The storms of anxiety attacks, days of depression, and all the ways mental illness challenges us. But I was coming at this problem from the wrong angle. Improving my mental wellness hasn’t stopped the storm from coming. Rather, it’s allowed me to weather the storm, to make it through until the sun shines again.

Sometimes, for reasons you can’t control, the world will put you in a bad mood. It will put you in a sad mood, or cause you pain and anguish. This might sound dramatic, but it’s the truth. And it’s in these moments that we can lean on what we’ve learned, and how we’ve grown. I often see my growth not because of the positive moments, but because of the difficult ones.

Whether this post finds you in a good mood or a bad one, I hope it provides the same reminder that it did for me. And even though we can’t control everything, the work we do on ourselves matters, because we matter. I can try and control every aspect of my day, and something can still come out of nowhere and create a challenge. That’s when I can lean on what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown to handle the situation in front of me. It doesn’t always work out, but this approach has brought more good than bad in my life, and that’s good enough for me.

"Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems." - Rene Descartes

When Mental Health Catches Us Off Guard

Nathan Smith1 Comment

Life has its ups and downs, and mental health is no different. There are times when I feel like my mental wellness is in the best place it’s ever been. Other times…not so much. Most of my time is spent bouncing somewhere in between these two extremes, but highs and lows are part of life. I’m used to dealing with these highs and lows, but part of that familiarity is what I’ve learned from previous experiences. However challenging some things can be, it’s comforting when you know it’s coming. Sometimes I can feel my mental health slowly deteriorating, which is when I know it’s time to make some sort of change. Other times, I get caught off guard with moments of anxiety or depression, which is what I want to talk about today.

It happens a few times a week; sometimes daily. I’m in the middle of something – at the grocery store, doing some cleaning or organizing, even sitting around at home – and my body tightens up. I’m panicked, and I don’t know why. It’s not always clear what direction this pang of panic will take me in. Sometimes it’s the onset of an anxiety attack or a panic attack. Other times, it’s a reminder that I need to do some deep breathing, or need to slow myself down.

When mental illness manifests itself in several ways, it can be a challenge to determine what might be happening in a specific instance. It might not seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things but for people who get stuck on specifics, it can feel like a moment that never ends. Is it my anxiety? Is it my depression? Some other third thing? Does it even matter? In the moment, that thought process can quickly evolve into feeling overwhelmed, exacerbating my existing feelings.

There’s a saying that goes something along the lines of, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” and that’s an apt description for my relationship to my mental illness. No matter how hard my mental health challenges get, I always feel slightly more hopeful when I know what I’m up against. When it comes to our health, we can have anxiety over fear of the unknown. If you’re already predisposed to have anxiety, that fear can run your life at times. When I don’t know what’s going on or how it’s affecting me, I can wind myself up even more – the opposite of what I was hoping to do.

I don’t enjoy when this happens but, like other aspects of my mental health, I grow in experience and knowledge every time it happens. Whether it’s grounding yourself or finding a way to get our of your head, you have options when it comes to being caught off guard. Wherever you are in your mental health journey, I hope you find what you need today!

Now, over to you! Do you ever feel like your mental health catches you off guard? What does it look like for you? Let me know in the comments!

Five Ways To Cope With Limitations

Nathan Smith3 Comments

As I wrote about earlier this week, it’s been a very interesting road to coming to terms with some of my limitations. Identifying my limitations (whether they’re physical, mental, emotional, etc.) is an important part of growth I’m coming to terms with. But the next step is more challenging: how do I cope with these limitations? How do I manage my feelings around them so they don’t make me upset, annoyed or depressed? I found five things I’m going to start trying in an effort to cope with some of my limitations, and I hope these offer some help to anyone looking to do the same!

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Digging Into the Mental Health Toolkit

Nathan Smith6 Comments

I’ve written about my dislike for wintertime before, but a new thought popped into my head as to why this time of year isn’t great for me. We know about seasonal affective disorder, shorter days and colder nights and all that, but there’s another big reason that I don’t love this time of year. I have several activities and hobbies that I do that relieve/help me manage my mental health challenges, and the winter is one of the most challenging times because it limits what I can do.

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On Prioritizing Your Mental Wellness

Nathan Smith1 Comment

I didn’t publish a post last Thursday, and that wasn’t planned. As someone who calls the DC area home, last week was extremely difficult to stomach. This week (and likely the weeks to come) will be difficult as well. I’ve been in and out of a fog, I’ve had trouble focusing on things and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out where my head’s been at. I know I’ve posted reminders about self-care before, but this moment felt different to me. It still does, and I have a feeling that might continue going forward. In these days and weeks ahead, prioritizing our mental wellness should be a top priority. Here’s why.

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Please Take Care of Yourself This Week

Nathan Smith4 Comments

Hello, friends. It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? Normally for me, this time of year is when things begin to calm down – my biggest work event of the year has just ended, the days get shorter, and I begin to figure out how to deal with my mental health during those rough winter months. But since 2020 is the year where stressors won’t leave us alone, I’ll be following along with the U.S. elections tonight along with millions of other Americans. Today will be a super stressful night (to say the least), and it is looking to be a super stressful week as well. So I’m here today to make sure that you’ve got a plan in place to try and take care of your mental wellness this week.

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Types of Self-Care and Ways to Practice

Nathan Smith2 Comments

While exploring my relationship with self-care this week, I realized something. It’s hard for me to practice self-care because outside of a loose definition, I don’t know what it looks like. I’m a person that needs examples of explanations – you can’t just give me a definition and expect that to be sufficient.

That’s where I struggle with self-care. Just practice physical self-care – take care of your physical self I would read. That’s a good idea, but what can I do that will actually accomplish those goals? So, I decided to select five of the most prominent types of self-care and not only provide a brief explanation but toss in a few activities you could do to put it into practice as well.

Physical Self-Care

This might seem like the most obvious one, but it’s obvious for a reason! You have to take care of your body if you want to live a long and healthy life. Oftentimes people see this and think it just means they have to exercise more (and that’s fine if you do!) but it’s also doing the little things throughout your day to make sure you’re feeling as healthy as possible.

Examples of practicing physical self-care: Eating more fruits and vegetables, drinking as much water as you can, getting enough sleep, going to the doctor when you need to

Emotional Self-Care

Emotional self-care is not simply ‘dealing with your emotions’ but dealing with them in a healthy way. We all have healthy and unhealthy ways of dealing with our emotions – in this case, it’s not just about being self-aware, but making a concerted effort to make sure we’re trying the healthy activities over the unhealthy ones even if we don’t want to. Especially if we don’t want to.

Examples of practicing emotional self-care: journaling and/or writing down how you feel, creating art (how you define ‘art’ is totally up to you!), going to a place that brings peace (park, lake, home, etc.), having a good cry 

Social Self-Care

This aspect of self-care is all about making sure you’re forming healthy relationships with the people in your life. That doesn’t just mean doing activities that you want to do, though, because social relationships are different for people. For example? Introverts, you’re probably going to need to get out of your comfort zone – just make sure it’s with people you either like or want to get to know. Extroverts, you might be so concerned with being around people that you’re less concerned with the quality of person that’s around you. But at the end of the day, healthy relationships should be the result.

Examples of practicing social self-care: learning how much energy you need to be around other people, having meaningful interactions, nurturing the relationships you currently have

Spiritual Self-Care

Practicing spiritual self-care sounds more complicated than it is because when people see it, they immediately think of religion. And while spirituality can be synonymous with religion, it does not have to be. Spiritual self-care is all about exploring your values and belief systems and trying to focus on something bigger than yourself. It might all sound vague but if you’re doing things that nurture your soul and contribute to a greater good, you’re on the right path.

Examples of spiritual self-care: contributing time or money to a cause you care about, attending religious services (if you’re religious), meditating, introspection and self-reflection

Mental Self-Care

When I looked up mental self-care I saw it being associated a lot with intellectual self-care as well, which helped clear up the definition for me. This one is fairly simple – keep your mind active! Think of this as physical self-care but for your brain. Yes, every now an then it’s nice to turn your brain off and just relax, as long as you’re making time to keep your mind sharp and challenge yourself.

Examples of mental self-care: solving puzzles, reading books, exploring arts and culture

So, is there an activity you see here that you’d like to do more? Something not listed that you think people should know about? Let me know in the comments!

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I’m Not Sure If I Practice Self-Care

Nathan Smith1 Comment

I know that headline might make you pause, but I’m trying to be as honest as I can. I believe in self-care and I would really like to implement it more into my life. But after doing some scouring of the Internet to get to the root of what this buzzword means, I was left feeling a little empty.

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Three Things to Remember When You Feel Guilty

Nathan Smith8 Comments

Guilt almost ate me alive last week – I’ll explain. I didn’t wake up on time for work and was about an hour and a half late.

That’s it! That’s all that happened. It wasn’t fatal to my job, and I got all my work done that day. But I felt very guilty about it. And it took much longer than it should have to make that guilt go away.

Why did I feel guilty? A more accurate question would be why did I not feel guilty? I felt like a bad employee and that I let my team down, which consequently led me to think about the worst-case scenario of the ramifications of my actions. I felt lazy and unreliable and perceived my lateness as a character flaw. I didn’t look at being late as a rare occurrence but as an indicator of who I am as a person. Is that true? As I came to realize, it is not, and that is not who I am.

I’m sharing this because I know I’m not alone in this experience. Guilt plays a much bigger role in our lives than I’m sure we want – at least, it does it mine. If guilt doesn’t affect you, please let me know how you’re able to exist in this way because I am all ears on that topic.

But let’s say you’re like me, and feelings of guilt are hard to get rid of. How do you get rid of them? I came up with three things I continued to repeat to myself until my guilt subsides.

This is not who you are – you are more than this

This is my favorite of the three things because, as I wrote earlier, my guilt comes from the fact that I believe my mistakes – even if I only make them once – are all character flaws. Reminding myself that there’s so much more to me than what I feel guilty about is a reminder that I am a complex person who is not defined by any one thing – good or bad.

Is it really that bad?

I’ll be honest; sometimes the answer to this question is ‘yes.’ Sometimes we do things that are just as bad as we make them out to be. But the reality is that our guilt permits us to make things out to be much worse than they are. Was being late to work one time, after not being that late all year, really all that bad? In the grand scheme of things, maybe not.

Who does this effect?

Another way my guilt becomes exacerbated is that I think that so many people will suffer from my mistakes. Did I miss a meeting when I was late? No. Did someone need me during the time I was missing? They did not. In reality, this situation affected me and my boss, who was wondering where I was, and no one else. The office didn’t come to a halt; people moved on with their day. Sometimes our guilt can make us think that our mistakes are the end of the world – oftentimes, the opposite is true. Most of my mistakes only affect me, if I’m being honest. That minimizes the impact of my mistake and gives me a good perspective to look from.

I don’t have all the answers. I continue to feel guilty about plenty of things – mistakes or not. But taking steps to assuage your guilt and remind yourself of who you really are, and that you’re more than one or two bad choices, is key to overcoming the debilitation that guilt can produce.

What’s something silly that you’ve felt guilty about? I want to know!

Why I’m Back in Therapy

Nathan Smith2 Comments

As I mentioned last week, I’m back in therapy. This decision didn’t come easy – it’s been almost two years since I’ve routinely gone to therapy. But I’m a different person than I was two years ago, with different goals. This time, I’m prioritizing self-improvement over self-love. Let me explain.

A common symptom of depression is not liking yourself very much. It sucks, but it’s true. On top of everything else depression threw at me, this was the thing I had the hardest time dealing with early on. I couldn’t stand the fact that I hated myself. I read book after book on loving yourself, learning to like who you are and accepting yourself as a human being. And it didn’t do squat for me.

When I used to go to therapy, I would obsess over this fact: how do I learn to love myself? This ever-present worry surrounded me and got in the way of any self-improvement. I was so fixated that the concept of ‘loving myself’ became foreign to me; I wasn’t sure what ‘loving me’ even meant.

This isn’t to say that those therapy sessions were fruitless. They helped me explore my mental health in a way I had never done before. But my own self-improvement, as a topic, was never on the table. I thought that I had to rid myself of my mental illness instead of living with it. But why does it have to be that way?

It’s taken me a very long time to realize, but I finally want to focus on improving myself in other areas. For instance, I have a tendency to be late for things and I have problems waking up in the morning. I used to chalk up some of these flaws as part of my mental illness, but I’m tired of that. I’m wary of when I use my anxiety and depression as a reason for not getting something done. I won’t lie, it bothers me sometimes. By attacking other aspects of myself, I am able to become a more complete version of myself – mental illness and all.

This has also changed my perception of who therapy can benefit. Like many people, I believed that only those who were mentally ill, who truly ‘needed’ help, needed to go. That’s why I went, right? Not anymore. Therapy is anything that helps you become a better version of yourself. And when I say anything, I mean anything. Exercising, yoga, meditation, writing in a journal..the list goes on and on. And yes, actually talking with a therapist is also a form of therapy.

I’ve been searching for ways to become the best version of myself, to learn how to live mentally well. I think talking with a therapist will help in that goal, so that’s what I’m going to do. But I also know that’s not the only path to self-improvement – there are many other things we can do. But it starts with us. And this time around in therapy, that’s finally something that I understand.

What is your favorite form of therapy? Let me know in the comments!

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