Moving your mental health forward as life stops!

by Danny Greeves

Its important to keep moving your mental health forward as the country stands still with daily routines are disrupted due to COVID.

In the world prior to the pandemic, we were each in our routine, consistently doing the same actions .

Going to work, meeting friends, and doing the things important to maintaining our mental health (that might have been exercise, meditation etc).

As creatures of habit, when we find something that does a reasonable job, we tend to stick with it, even if it’s not the best possible option.

This is what marketing people call ‘satisficing’; where we take the first thing that we deem to be satisfactory for the problem we face, and we run with it.

With so many changes to our daily living, and a huge increase in time spent at home, the normal routine has been blown out of the water.

But what this does give us, if we use it wisely, is time and space to explore.

There will almost certainly be things you wouldn’t dream of giving up.

It could be that your morning meditation sets you up for a productive day, or an evening run helps you to clear your mind.

There is no need to drop them, but there is a chance to discover new options that ordinarily you wouldn’t have imagined.

As with anything new, it can be a little scary – new people, new environments, new things to learn, all of which can make experimenting with new things more daunting.

The best part of our current circumstances is almost every business has had to move online, or at least provide some form of online service.

This means you are free to try as many new things as you want from the comfort of your own home.

This is an opportunity to really go and explore as many different tools, approaches and methods to help you feel as good as you possibly can.

Although you can’t control the world on the outside, now is the time to optimise your world on the inside.

Have you thought dancing could be the energy and morale booster you’d love but have never quite made a class?

Have you heard arts and crafts help people to feel calm and grounded but didn’t quite get the equipment you needed to get started?

Or maybe you’ve wanted to stick to a 30 day yoga series but life kept getting in the way.

Regardless of the obstacles that prevented it in the past, if you act quickly, you can use this time to begin exploring new possibilities for how you can boost your mood and your body.

As well as pushing past the ‘satisficing’ barrier to discover alternative ways of keeping yourself feeling good, it also provides novel and interesting experiences.

So you get to find what feels good for you, while keeping yourself busy and your brain stimulated.

To get you started, all you need is to sit down with a pen and paper, and brainstorm as many ideas as you can.

Be creative, be unrealistic to start with, let your imagination run wild. As you do you’ll open yourself up to new thinking, and different, more practical ideas will flow towards you.

Once you’ve made your list, prioritise the most intriguing, and create a plan to start experimenting.

If one thing is for sure, you’ll be able to look back on this period and see it as the catalyst to moving your mental health forwards.

So as we approach the one year anniversary of almost constant disruption and uncertainty, we can all be forgiven for having some dips in our mental health.

Human beings are creatures of habit, and we really enjoy the feeling of certainty; from knowing you’ve bought the right house to picking your perfect life partner, that feeling of certainty helps us feel safe and comfortable.

How to keep moving your mental health forward