30 Minutes Daily Walk:
Establishing a 30 min daily walk time can help improve your mood and regulate your emotions. Walking can also help reduce anxiety and stress.
Walking does not only have positive effects on the mental side but also on the physical side.
Walking has been associated with reducing the risk of heart disease, preventing and managing type 2 diabetes. Walking can also help in weight management.
Walking is a physical activity that requires minimal physical efforts and it is performed naturally by the mere act of living and doing everyday activities.
But if your environment does not encourage you to walk more, it might be wise to select specific time in the day to just walk.
The best thing would be to walk in nature, and breathe the fresh air. However, any type of environment is still ok as long as you walk.
Learn to say No
Whether you label yourself as a people pleaser or not, learning to say No for unnecessary work can help you far better than anything else.
For a large percentage of people, saying No can be emotionally hard. Even if the activity or the work that the person is saying yes to, is non relevant and far away from his/ her goals.
Generally speaking, you do need to have some type of ground rules or principles you use to evaluate whether to say yes or no to something.
As long as the specific act that the person is asking aligns with your own priorities and principles, you can say yes.
If the act is non relevant or non urgent or both, and the consequences of saying no doesn’t harm you, just say no.
Well, it’s up to you as an adult to make this list of principles, priorities and ground rules.
If you are interested in an effective method that can help you decide which task to do and how to prioritize, you can try the SMART method.
SMART method when applied can clarify what tasks have the highest yield , and therefore what tasks should be prioritized first.
I have talked about the SMART method in this article.
Getting anxious and stressed can be highly associated with doing so much.
By saying No, you want to reduce the amount of work that is unnecessary, and therefore the time to be spent with such unnecessary work.
More No = Less unnecessary work = more free time
The more free time you have, the more you can use that time to actually relax more. Which takes us to the next habit.
Introduce Activities That You Like
As said earlier, by learning to say no, and therefore freeing more time in your schedule, try to fill it with what actually makes you happy.
I’m not talking about spending time with family. That will be discussed next.
The type of activities you do are those that you do by yourself, and genuinely like.
Activities like reading, watching, running, exercising, spending time in nature, hiking, swimming, playing games.
The idea is to have some type of activity to go to that can charge your mental energy.
It should be noted that the type of activity you choose can have different effects on your mental health.
Your best choice can be anything physical, with more hands on work involved, and less complex thinking.
If you don’t have any activity you like to do, you can keep trying a few things every time until you find what you like.
Spending More Time With Who You Love
This will revolve around being able to find free time in your schedule.
Your wife, kids, parents, brothers and sisters, and close friends can be your treasure to reduce anxiety and improve your mental health.
Speaking with them, spending time with them doing activities you like, can help improve your mood, lower your stress and reduce your anxiety.
It can also be because of the type of work you do. Some tasks that can be perceived to be harder and more complex depending on the type of personality you have.
For example being an introvert, and working in sales is a situation where the type of work itself introduces anxiety and stress to the person because of his/ her personality.
On the other hand, being an extrovert and working in sales will be a case where the type of work and tasks associated with it does not necessarily introduce a high level of stress, it can be precieved as low stress and easy by that person.
Understand and investigate why you feel the way you feel
When your mental state is low, there is a cumulative set of reasons for why that happened.
Grab a piece of a paper and ask yourself, what am I feeling?
Why do I feel like this?
When you know why you feel the way you feel, you can try to address each cause.
Sometimes, you are putting so much pressure on yourself to achieve something.
Other times you are trying to change and control what is basically out of your control.
The goal here is to know what are the reasons why you are feeling the way you feel. The more you understand them and you label them, the easier it will be to find a solution.
Accept and embrace your feelings
After you understand why you feel the way you feel, you will need to classify the reason if it is because something you can take action to change, or something that is out of your control.
Either way, the first thing is to accept the situation you are in, the feeling you feel, and embrace it.
It is about being ok with how things turned out. Being ok with how and where you are in life.
Ask yourself, is there anything, any action that I can take right now, or in the near future that can change the situation that is making me feel the way I am feeling?
If there is, make a simple action plan consisting of the next 5 actions to take to be closer to change the root cause of your feelings.
If there is nothing to be done, your only option is to breathe in deeply, accept and embrace the situation, event, or feeling you are sensing.
Someone might be in a low mental state because he/she is overwhelmed by something, whether it is the amount of work, responsibilities, shocking events, or a bunch of unexpected situations that the person has gone through.
The best and direct way to improve your mental health is to understand the different reasons of why you feel the way you feel, and then either accept it and take action if you can, or accept it and embrace it, and embrace the idea that not everything can be controlled, and some things can and will be out of your control.
Add 5 min of breathing sessions around your day
Your ability to destress and relax can be strongly correlated with improving your breathing habits. Breathing happens and is controlled by the unconscious mind.
However, breathing can be controlled consciously, while you might feel uncomfortable at first, it will help lower your anxiety and clear your mind when you practice relaxed breathing in sessions.
The idea can be practised such as breathing mindfully for 5 min every few hours, or one time in the morning, and one time in the evening. You can breathe in a pattern such as 5-5-8, 5 s breath in, 5 s holding your breath, and 8 s breathing out.
Practicing this for 5 min or 10 min a session, and spreading the sessions in your day can help improve your relaxation, and your ability to think clearly.