Mood and mental health; how do you manage yours?

How do you manage your mood and mental health? Life can be stressful, so feeling ok day to day is a challenge, let alone when major life events intrude, even ‘positive’ ones. Very soon your bucketful of stress can overflow. This can be difficult as while we have become quite good at managing our physical health, there is still a stigma around our mental health that can lead us to ignoring it.

Most of us use a range of ways to manage our mood. This might include socialising, sport, exercise, hobbies and interests that relax us. If we get to overflowing we might use harmful amounts of alcohol, work, food, drugs (prescribed or not), gambling or inappropriate sexual encounters.

There are other ways to manage your mood. From the East we have yoga, meditation, or Tai Chi. Participation in music, art, drama, dance or work in the garden can help. There are a lot of ways to keep yourself mentally healthy, provided you take the time and pay attention to what works for you.

My own favourites are meditation, gardening, walking and reading, with a bit of yoga on the side. If things get intense, it’s also good to talk to others, both friends and in the past professionals. I find it important not to ‘get on with it’ but to reflect on how I feel and then take action to keep mentally healthy.

With our physical health we seem to have got the message ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’. While the body is resilient, in the long term it helps to eat the right things and have enough exercise. For our mental health it’s the same. If you don’t nourish yourself with the right activities then eventually things fall apart. Reality TV and lager, while fine in small quantities to manage your mood, really don’t cut the mustard long term.

If you’d like to talk in confidence about this or other issues, please contact me at [email protected] I offer a free half hour telephone assessment to see if working together could be beneficial for you. If you’d like to understand more about Counselling and Life Coaching please watch my videos at http://www.creativedifference.org.uk/what-is-counselling/ and http://www.creativedifference.org.uk/what-is-coaching/.