There are lots of ways to improve your mental health, and while some of them may feel pretty obvious, this isn’t always the case. Maybe you’ve been making attempts to figure out how to love yourself more but something just isn’t working.
Are you trying to figure out how to love yourself and improve your mental health? Are there just a few too many pitfalls or obstacles getting in your way? And are you willing to try anything, you just don’t know what else there is to try? It’s about time to learn a few new ways of how to love yourself.
Move Your Body
While you probably know that working up a sweat can be pretty helpful for your mental health, did you know that you don’t necessarily need to go to the gym and do the traditional workouts a lot of people tell you to do?
You don’t have to work out alone. You don’t need to use the same routine every day. And you don’t necessarily have to work on the things that you don’t care about.
For example, if the only exercise you’re familiar with is running, but you’ve always thought running was boring or even too painful for you in some way, running doesn’t have to be the only thing you do to work out. In fact, running shouldn’t be the only thing you do (remember to warm up properly before you pull something!).
You can actually take classes with other people, and they don’t even need to be regular workout classes. Have you always wanted to learn to pole dance or spin on silks like a circus performer? That counts as working out too! Move your body in ways that feel good and make you feel excited about moving, and you can choose many different focuses:
- learning a sport
- increasing your strength
- getting more flexible
- having a faster mile
- and more!
Learning how to love yourself and your body requires that you move, but how you move it is up to you.
Get Enough Sleep
While there is supposedly a small percentage of people who are at their healthiest getting six hours or less of sleep every night, the likelihood that this is you or me is pretty slim. Regardless, especially if you’re getting less than six hours when you hit the hay, that’s probably a sign that you need to change up your sleeping routine.
It can be really difficult to figure out how to love yourself if you’re waking up every morning and still feeling sluggish from your late night. And that’s mostly because your body still needs more energy to focus on itself and function at its greatest potential. So instead of holding your body back and keeping yourself feeling tired, really let yourself think about your sleep.
And if you’re certain that you’re getting the recommended eight hours of sleep each night but you’re still feeling sluggish throughout the day, it might be about time to talk to a doctor about what is going on. A number of factors could be impacting your quality of sleep:
- is your room as dark as possible?
- do you sleep with a partner who moves a lot at night?
- are you having a hard time breathing?
- could your stress levels be keeping you from relaxing?
- and many more
Do Something Social
Especially when a lot of work is becoming increasingly remote and we’re spending less time in school or at the office, it can be difficult to get out of the house. When is the last time you had a conversation with someone outside of your immediate household? When is the last time you spoke to anybody else at all?
Getting outside and spending time with your friends could really allow your brain to reset more easily. Remember that humans are social creatures and will generally require social interactions to feel at their peak and perform to the best of their abilities.
If you’re presently not in a place to be going outside, it can be as simple as playing a video game online with a friend, or even just talking over the phone or video call if you can’t focus on too many things at once.
Invest in Your Hygiene
If you’re anything like me, you know that you can improve your mental health has started to go wrong if you’ve stopped showering or cleaning up around you. And smelling bad or feeling dirty physically, can really make you feel worse emotionally and mentally.
The same can be said for the state of your home. If there’s a lot of mess around you, like undone dishes, piles of clothes on the floor, or just stacks of paper on every table-like surface, that could be enough to set your mind racing with anxiety.
In my experience, messes can make it a lot harder to concentrate, even if you’re trying to work on something you would normally consider to be fun. So allow yourself to clean up, both your space and your face (as well as the rest of your body).