Doctors say that the better your emotional state is, the healthier you are. No wonder. For centuries people had been ignoring their psychological well-being, which resulted in multiple emotion-driven diseases, increased probability of heart strokes, and early mortality. However, in the 21st century, emotional health has become the number one topic of discussion in the health industry. It turned out that a lot of illnesses could be prevented by people simply being thoughtful and caring about their state of mind. In this article, we will give you several practical ideas on what to do in order to stay well, happy, and sane.
Let us start with the fact that everyone knows that it is needed to follow the rules of psychological hygiene, but not so many people do know the actual rules. Well, in order to sustain your mental health, you need to keep in mind that you have to sustain 8 different spheres of your life. They are:
- Health: watching your sleeping routine, the food you eat, making sure you work out and walk, general well-being, and staying healthy in terms of not being sick.
- Work: having the pleasure of turning your skills into money.
- Family: seeing your parents, keeping close ties with your family, having a significant other, being married, or creating romantic ties that will potentially grow into a relationship.
- Friends: seeing them at least several times a week and growing new ties.
- Hobbies: having some pleasant to the heart activity that you do just for the sake of doing it. Hobbies bring sheer joy and peace to our souls.
- Self-development: reading, learning something new, growing your skills, travelling, watching movies.
- Rest: not to be confused with any of the four previous points. Resting literally means doing nothing specific. It can be just laying on your bed, meditating, walking in a park. It is a space for you to be alone not invaded by any external ideas or thoughts. That’s why meditation is perfect here.
- Spirituality: having a sense of meaning, mindfulness practices, prayers, etc.
As you see there are plenty of things to work on to make your life colourful and healthy from the psychological perspective. However, in the whole story of people striving to get better at their mental health, there is one funny part: Usually, they do it in order to increase their productivity at work. It looks amusing as we have already shown you that work is only one of the 8 spheres to develop.
Once you are really good at keeping up your psychological hygiene, the aspiration of being productive 24/7 will no longer remain a question. What we mean is that you will effectively spend your limited working hours on work, but a lot of stress will be gone as you will not perceive work as number one do-or-die importance in the first place.
Having such a position with focusing on a good psychological state helps you function effectively and do more. Think about it: If you are constantly tired and worn-out because of deadlines and never-ending issues you have to deal with at work, most likely with time your working day will become rather useless. You will spend most of the time trying to pull yourself together to complete the tasks that would take 20 minutes of your focused time under normal circumstances.
Many doctors and specialists talk about the need to have a life again and again, but we know it is super hard to implement once the routine starts to absorb you. That’s why we need mental resilience. It comes with maintaining psychological hygiene.
In case your work takes up all your time and does not allow you to live a healthy life, you might as well want to consider changing it. Nowadays, there are plenty of possibilities. The internet sphere is growing, there are dozens of courses on accounting, management, design blockchain courses, and many others. You can try getting a new specialization while still being employed.
For example, you can enrol in some free online blockchain courses, and spend several hours a week learning new information and obtaining new skills as a part of your self-development plan or hobby. This way a significant part of your time will be occupied with something interesting that will shift your focus from the office stress to creating of new neuron ties. Who knows, maybe your courses on the blockchain will grow into a profession that will bring less pressure and more joy. Moreover, the internet sphere and work from home cannot be more popular and profitable nowadays.
In any case, we hope that you will keep in mind all the 8 areas for improvement so that your life is happy, healthy, and balanced.