Opportunities to understand and get involved in our healthcare have changed over time. We can now often make more informed choices about how to protect, monitor and treat our bodies. But despite there being some champions of mental wellbeing, it doesn’t yet feel like second nature to look after our minds in the same way. We all have mental health. And if mental wellbeing is a scale that balances our resilience against everything going on around us, what can we do when it begins to tip?

An apple a day…

Messages that promote a healthy lifestyle are all around us: eat 5 portions of fruit ’n’ veg a day, limit sugar and salt intake, get regular exercise, limit alcohol intake. Most recently this takes the form of monthly campaigns such as Stoptober, Dry January, Veganuary etc. Physical wellness can have a positive impact on our mental wellness, with a healthy balance of nutrients and hormones helping to regulate our mood, energy, and alertness. But do we know how to incorporate mental healthcare into our daily routine? Making space to build our emotional strength and become tuned in to how we feel can help to prepare for or reduce the impact of future dips in our mental health and challenges in our lives.

Checking in and spotting the signs

How do you measure your mental wellness on any given day? Aside from feeling down, low mood can be signalled by disrupted sleep patterns, low energy levels and tiredness, changes in appetite, difficulties concentrating, taking less interest or enjoyment in things and being more self-critical than usual. And aside from feeling on edge, anxiety can be signalled by reduced ability to control worrying, difficulty relaxing, feeling restless and becoming more easily annoyed or irritated than usual. We are prompted to take various health checks in our lifetime, prompted by our GP, insurance provider or gym. I wonder what a difference it would make to have a regular mental health check that helps us spot the signs that we might need some extra care or attention for a while.

Finding a helping hand

When we have a physical problem, we know that we can take it to a GP surgery, a specialist clinic, or to hospital. These services and the practitioners who work in them also provide hugely important support for mental health problems, but I’m not sure we always feel the same about accessing this. The occasional broken bone, strained muscle or nasty bug feels like an inevitable fact of life that we’ll experience at some point. The same could be said for common emotional challenges such as grief, stress, depression, and anxiety. Seeking help when we feel vulnerable for any reason can be challenging for many reasons. However, seeking support for mental wellness can often be linked to fears of judgement, of not being believed or of shame.  

Taking back control

Taking care of your mental health is about acknowledging its role in your overall wellbeing. It’s about giving yourself permission to notice changes in how you feel and preparing yourself with strategies and tools to support you. When you’re not feeling like your usual self, how easy is it to recognise what’s going on for you and what’s your usual course of action? You might have a medicine cabinet or box at home, but what do you have on hand to provide some relief from symptoms that aren’t physical? It might also be useful to notice under what circumstances you’d take a sick day and what the equivalent might look like if you took a mental health day.

Further information

Mental Health at Work produced a useful animation describing what mental wellness is below.  If you’re interested to find out if Counselling could be part of your healthcare routine the British Association of Counselling & Psychotherapists (BACP) has a range of resources.

Mental Health at Work - What is Mental Health?