Do you prioritise your mind?

How can you develop skills to help you prioritise your mental health and well-being?

This year’s World Mental Health Day is focused on making mental health and well-being for all a global priority. Our experiences of the Covid pandemic, and the current global economic situation is exacerbating the mental health and well-being challenges we are currently facing. There has been an increase in both anxiety and depressive disorders and alongside this, a shortage of accessible mental health services is adding to this problem. However, this does not mean that we can’t do anything to move our own or other people’s mental health and well-being up the priority list.

Adam Wright

Psychological Skills Mentor

Do you prioritise your mind?

How can you develop skills to help you prioritise your mental health and well-being?

Adam Wright – Psychological Skills Mentor

Making Mental Health and Wellbeing Your Priority

Where does your mental health and well-being fit as a priority for you? If it is high up on your list and you give it the attention it needs, then great. However, many people put their work, others, and their success before looking after and getting themselves in a good place. You maybe be asking, ‘how do I do this?’ or saying, “I don’t know where to start”. The key to looking after yourself is to be proactive and do something to start the process of getting yourself in a good place. If you don’t do anything, you will stay in the same place and could even go backwards. A starting point could be to get a blank piece of paper and write down what being in a good state of mental health and well-being would look like for you; this could include:

Being more confident
Interacting with others and having meaningful relationships
Spending more time with family and friends
Becoming more resilient to what life throws at you
Being happier
Having a career that you enjoy and gives you a sense of satisfaction

Everyone is unique. It is up to you to work out how your mental health and well-being could be better.

We all experience different types of unhelpful thoughts and emotions that can impact how we want to be. These are all normal and healthy but can be unhelpful. It is our job to work out what these thoughts and feelings are trying to tell us and then put a plan in place to manage our mind so we can move toward how we want to be. To do this, you could spend 5-10mins at the end of each day working out the thoughts and feelings that you don’t want and then develop a plan to deal with them. For example, if you have feelings of being unhappy, the plan could be to develop a list of what makes you happy and then do these things. These could be something you do immediately (having a cup of coffee, phoning a friend, reading a book) or things you plan for (holiday, meeting up with friends, learning a new skill, starting a hobby).

What is the first step, however small, you could take to give your mind and well-being the priority it deserves?

Helping others to prioritise their Mental Health and Wellbeing

Once you have started to get yourself in a good place then you are in a better position to help others move their mental health and well-being to a higher priority. What could you do? You could reflect on who to reach out to, check in on how they are doing, spend time with them to just listen to them, and give them a sense that you are there for them. The result they feel is that they have been heard, understood and then acknowledged how they are feeling. They may then want some advice on what might help them, or just the simple exercise of listening could be all they need to give their mental health and well-being some priority. Listening is such a key skill to develop when trying to help others. If you are waiting to speak, you are not listening.