Your emotional health, mindset, and wellbeing are just as important to protect and nurture as your levels of physical fitness. However, most unfortunately, mental health issues are largely invisible, and many people seem to forget this simple fact. So, in an effort to help you readdress the balance, continue reading to discover four practical ways to improve your own mental health and wellbeing.
1. Take a Break from Social Media
One of the best ways in which you can enhance your mental health and even indirectly, your physical health too, is to ease off social media for a while (or even indefinitely).
There are, of course, a plethora of advantages to connecting with friends, family members, and like-minded strangers online. Still, the positives seem to be more and more outweighed by the negatives, which can include the following:
- Self-absorption
- FOMO (fear of missing out)
- Isolation and loneliness
- Self-loathing
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Cyberbullying
2. Keep in Touch with Close Friends
If you are fortunate enough to have remained close with your old school friends; or you have made lifelong friends with people you have met in your job, on the school run, or even at the local pub, you should try and reach out to them periodically.
Unfortunately, low mood and depression force the individual to isolate themselves and if you find yourself withdrawing from your friends and family, try and fight this urge and instead get in contact with them.
If meeting face-to-face is not an option right now, then you could alternatively remind them how much you love and appreciate them by sending one of the delicious and beautifully wrapped chocolate lollipops from Maple Gifts.
3. Keep a Gratitude Journal
Even if the last time you wrote anything down other than a shopping list was years ago, and you are not what you would describe as a lover of writing, it is still a great idea to invest in a new and brightly decorated notebook or journal.
For the next fortnight, every evening before you go to sleep, simply write down two points for which you have been grateful on that day—be that a friend sending a birthday card, a colleague lending you a dollar for the vending machine, or indeed, anything else that made you even temporarily smile.
After the fortnight is up, review your gratitude journal and try to remember those happy and grateful feelings you felt at the time.
4.  Rescue a Rabbit
The fourth and final piece of practical advice for improving how you feel on a day-to-day basis is to (should you have the time, the living arrangements, and the space) choose to rescue a pair of deserving bunny rabbits from your local shelter.
Instead of keeping them in a small hutch—and definitely not outside in the garden in an even smaller pen—spend time developing a strong, emotional, and multi-beneficial bond with your new house rabbits.
Rabbits, as is the case with other pets, provide a host of benefits to humans, including companionship, love, motivation, and lashings of entertainment to boot.
