When a person has mental health struggles, the recommended treatment is therapy. Therapists reframe thoughts, help challenge existing beliefs, and can alter the way you cope with stress among many, many other things.
But therapists cannot do it alone.
It is also important to take a look at how you’re managing your life and review the decisions you make every day that contribute to your mental health.
Not just the big things, either, like where you work, how you manage finances, or the relationships you pursue. But also the small things.
How the Small Things Can Create Larger Issues
Part of finding relief from many common mental health challenges is breaking the cycle of symptoms. Anxiety often creates symptoms that create more anxiety. Depression can create symptoms that create more depression. When a person is stressed at work, they may be easily distracted by the stress, causing them to struggle to do their work and finding themselves more stressed.
Mental health has a way of causing symptoms that contribute to further mental health challenges. The best example is panic attacks. When a person has panic attacks, they eventually fear panic attacks, and when they go outside they have anxiety that can then trigger another panic attack creating a cycle.
Part of reducing panic attacks – and anxiety, and depression, and other mental health challenges – is going to require breaking this cycle, and to do that you have to remember that *anything* that can contribute to further mental health struggles can be a problem. For example:
- Listening to Sad Music – Some people find sad music to be cathartic. But the problem is that a lot of people don’t feel better when they listen to it. They feel worse or the same. Music has an effect on mood, so it’s always a good idea to consider whether your music choices are making you feel good/better, or whether they’re a reflection of how you’re feeling and allowing you to feel worse for longer.
- Watching/Engaging in High Anxiety, Low Fulfillment Activities – Activities like watching scary movies bring very little positive feelings into a person’s life, while increasing their experience of anxiety. Some activities that increase anxiety, like rock climbing, may still have benefits as they are a high fulfillment, physically healthy activity, but make sure your choice in hobbies is supporting your mental health.
- Phone Scrolling – Some people find themselves feeling relaxed as they scroll through a phone, but what’s really happening is the opposite. The feeling of relaxation comes from being overloaded with digital information, a phenomenon called “digital overload,” and evidence shows that this type of overload actually significantly *increases* stress and anxiety, despite that feeling of being relaxed.
- Refusing Sleep On Purpose – There are very, very few activities as effective as sleep for helping a person’s mental health. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to sleep with anxiety and depression, so many people with mental health challenges do not get enough sleep. That’s not always in your control right away. However, when you have an opportunity to sleep or feel like you can sleep, you have to take it. Staying awake on purpose to do unnecessary activities (for example, choosing to stay up later to watch a movie) hurts sleep further, which can harm mental health even more.
- Surrounding Yourself with Negativity – It’s difficult to say whether adjusting your friendships is a big or little change, but at minimum, it is a good idea to evaluate who you’re spending time with and how they influence your mental health. When the option arises to choose whether to spend time with people that make you feel positive or negative, choose the positive people, even if that’s not normally the social life you have.
- Being Alone – Similarly, there’s a temptation to be alone with one’s mental health, but human beings traditionally crave social interaction and need it to feel more positive and happier. There are times when being alone is useful, but choosing to be alone when a person can do activities can be harmful, and it is a good idea to be careful about making the choice to be alone too often.
Each of these are examples of relatively small things that can contribute to worse mental health. Part of our goal is to stop this cycle. These are all examples of fairly small lifestyle changes that can then reduce negative feelings, stress, and more.
On their own, they may not be able to make a significant change in a person’s mental health. But combined with therapy, small changes like this can have the potential to dramatically support a person’s overall wellness, and stop the cycles that create further mental health challenges.
Learn more or get started with therapy by contacting Long Island Counseling Services, today.