What is your mental health and how does it affect you?
Mental health is an umbrella of emotional, psychological, and social well-being, which influences auditory comprehension, perception, and behavior. Now, what does this mean for us as individuals? The state of our mental health will affect, our sleep and eating schedules, how we handle stress, and our emotional well-being. Mental health quality and your emotional well-being are directly related, you can not have a good emotional state without good mental health. Bad mental health leads to mental disorders/illnesses such as depression and anxiety.

What are things that negatively affect your mental health?
Things that negatively affect your mental health are trauma, the individuals you surround yourself with, sleep schedule, stress, alcohol or drug abuse, stressful workload, and even genetic predisposition. Each of these things encompasses a variety of topics specific to each individual’s life, and even your own if your mental health is something you struggle with. The ultimate question, is what can you do to prioritize your mental health when everything around you is promoting you to do the opposite?

So how do you prioritize your own mental health?
The most important thing to remember when prioritizing your mental health is that rest is not a reward, rest is a necessity. When you find yourself getting stressed, take a second to breathe and reassess your current situation. Sometimes even when you are drowning in work it may be hard to take a second to put your mental well-being first, but in the long run, it will truly benefit you and your well-being. Some activities to help you improve your mental health include reading, social interaction, therapy, exercise, yoga, meditation, confiding in a family member, sleeping and eating well, and something that truly helps is improving the people you surround yourself with. Surrounding yourself with negativity will surely result in a negative mindset. Good luck putting yourself first!!