Mental health is important. Anyone may have an awful day, but this does not indicate that life is bad. How you respond to everything and take good care of your mental health matters a lot. Mental health usually encompasses your social, emotional, and psychological well-being. Being emotionally healthy will contribute a lot to your effectiveness and productivity in activities.
There are some steps to improving your emotional health. Minors things like taking healthy food and exercising can boost your health. Issues associated with mental health may be affected by people in various ways. For instance, if you notice some changes in your relationships and happiness, there are various ways of getting support. You may connect with friends or family and talk to a psychiatrist.
Here are some of the things that mental health impacts:
Physical health
The body and mind are connected. Most of the mental ailments can result in stress that lowers immunity. This translates to more illness and incapability to fight infections. Anxiety and stress may have an effect on your physical health. Being worried will make your body produce stress hormones, which speeds up the breathing and heart rates.
Consequently, your blood sugar level will increase to send a lot of blood to the legs and arms. With time, this may affect:
- Muscles
- Blood vessels
- Heart
Family relationships
Mental problems may be traumatic and painful for families. They may also have a big impact on the emotional and financial components. As far as mental illnesses are concerned, behavioural and emotional consequences for families may go unaddressed. Basically, people with mental issues have consequences with their social network, and most importantly, their families.
Change
People deal with different transitory days in their lives. If you focus on maintaining good mental health for a long time, those changes will be easy to handle.
Transformation is always inevitable! Changing jobs, getting married, buying homes on movoto listings, starting a new job, and having kids are all normal things of life. Being optimistic and emotionally stable is important to move on with these transitions.
Education
Emotional issues may affect the academic achievement, life, and physical health of students. Some of these problems may have long-term sufferings that might affect their earning potential and future employment.
According to psychiatrists, depression is connected with low performance and school dropouts. Therefore, there is a need for schools to address these problems because:
- Mental issues are common and may develop during adolescence or childhood.
- Intervention and early detection work to improve the resilience of students.
- These problems are treatable.
Hygiene
The worst thing about mental issues is the way it affects mundane things, such as showering, brushing teeth, and doing your hair. Practising your hygiene is an integral thing because it prevents illnesses and may help you take good care of your body.
However, some people associate poor hygiene with homelessness, poverty, or laziness – meaning there is blaming and shaming. The shames and blames may fuel hygiene obsessions to make things hard for you to focus on basic hygiene.
Emotions
Anxiety and sadness are some of the normal emotions that can help you be alert when reacting. When you are emotionally healthy, you can handle stress and work productively. It may also help you give back to society and realize your potential in full. Though it may be unhealthy when these emotions become ongoing, irrational, distressing, and excessive. You can handle the feelings through:
- Expressing your emotions appropriately
- Managing stress
- Connecting with other people
- Thinking before acting
- Learning how your reactions and emotions work
Work performance
Mental illnesses can affect businesses and employers through negative impacts on profits and productivity. In addition to this, the condition may affect the morale of workers tremendously.
Stress that is related to work is a major problem that people go through, especially when there are excessive pressures. You can have office stress when you are working with a demanding boss, so it’s important to improve the communication skills between the two of you.
Weight
Chronic stress and anxiety can make people lead a sedentary lifestyle, use foodstuffs, and overeat. All these behaviours translate to weight increase. Depression may also induce sleep disorders that may cause weight gain by increasing appetite and decreasing the process of metabolism.
Say no to stigmatisation
The subject of mental health is stigmatised in society because it’s misinterpreted by people who know nothing about it. If you are mentally disturbed, there is a low probability that you’ll get assistance because of shaming and stigmatisation.
It’s upon everyone to advocate for the needs of mentally challenged people and shed light on others about those issues. The bottom line is that people should not ignore these issues; mental health problems are real and harmful, but they can be diagnosed.
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Image credit: Freepik
Peter Wallace has been an advocate for mental health awareness for years. He holds a master’s degree in counselling from the University of Edinburgh.
