Hello reader, I welcome you to join me as we dive into a very important topic. I am very glad #HiveGhana has included the topic of mental health as part of this week's community engagement. I hope you have a wonderful time.
In this post, I will first of all give a general overview of what mental health is and its's importance in our overall wellbeing. Secondly, I will share some of my experience in relation to this. I shall discuss the importance of mental health awareness and wrap it up with tips from me for maintaining and/or improving your mental health. Let's dive in...
Mental health refers to our overall "mental" well-being. That includes our psychological, emotional well-being and how we affect our social environment. Our mental health affects how we think, feel, talk to other people, make decisions, relate to others, handle stress. It even sometimes dictate our eating patterns, our sleeping routines, our productivity at the workplace, etc. That's how important mental health is. It affects our entire being.
Personally, not unlike you or anyone else, I have faced challenges every now and then in life. Many of these experiences make up who we are as a person and, perhaps, we would not be who we are today without those experiences. I would like to share with you an experience that came close to challenging my mental health.
I had always been an above average student in school through out my basic school years through to secondary school. I did my best and I had very good grades most of the time. Some of my friends looked up to me for tutoring and guidance in school. I was doing alright. However, this changed when enrolled in the university. Suddenly, I wasn't good enough. I wasn't making the grades that I was used to. I didn't understand what was going on. I burned the midnight candle on several occassions. I just wasn't as good as I knew myself to be. Frankly, I was depressed most times in the university because people I thought I was better than, and perhaps working harder than, were making better grades than I was. It just didn't make a lot of sense to me.
It got a point I almost gave up, I stopped putting in the work, I stopped caring as much. I was just in school for the sake of being in school. And guess what? My grades dwindled even further. That was the worst time in my schooling history.
After much retrospection, I decided to just accept my fate. I came back, I began studying again, I joined a class learning group. We came together once in a while to study together. My grades picked up quite a bit but never to the level I envisioned for myself up until I graduated. I graduated mid-class not at the top and not at the bottom.
What could I have done better? What did you think was the missing piece in my uni life? I would like to hear your thoughts.
Your mental health needs to be managed and cared for like you'd care for your body hygiene or your pet. These are some of the ways to could maintain or improve your mental health.
- Establish a proper sleeping routine that works for you. Get enough rest. You might have a busy work schedule that demand that you put in a lot of hours. However, every once in a while get a nice, long, deep sleep when you can.
- Limit screen time and excessive social media use. Long use of mobile phones and computer puts a strain on our eyes and causes mental fatigue which can cause a disturbance to your mental health. Be mindful of this and try to limit this as much as possible.
- Regular exercising will also help reduce mental stress. A healthy mind resides in a healthy body
Images belong to me