At the beginning of the year, many people focus on assessing their goals or building new habits to improve their lives. Creating new habits could not only help you physically, but it could help you mentally. In this post, you’re going to learn how sustainable healthy habits can benefit your mental health, what type of habits you can create, and tips on how you could build and sustain these healthy habits continuously.
Why Improving Your Mental Health is Important
Improving mental health is vital for anyone striving to function in this world. We need our mental health to wake up and go to work each day. If we’re not in the right frame of mind, we won’t be able to function properly. It’s important to start cultivating good habits in our lives to better our mental health. Here are a few ways building sustainable healthy habits could impact us mentally.
How Sustainable Healthy Habits Influence Us Mentally
When we start building healthy habits, we want them to be sustainable for us. Healthy habits are good for our well-being. But if we make them more sustainable, they could become realistic, gradual, flexible, and rewarding. I just listened to a good webinar from the ADDitude magazine website that teaches us the importance of breaking our large goals into achievable bite-size steps. This helps our habits become more realistic to reach and gradual. Your habits must also be adaptable to any of life’s challenges or setbacks that may come your way. Our habits must be rewarding in that they could bring us immediate and long-term happiness in our lives.
Sustainable, Mindful Healthy Habits You Can Create
There are plenty of sustainable, mindful healthy habits we can incorporate into our daily life. These habits involve our physical health, social well-being, emotional health habits, and mindfulness and relaxation habits. Here is a list of habits we must develop to improve our mental health based on the various aspects of our health:
Physical Health
- Getting enough sleep.
- Eating foods that support our brain’s health.
- Engaging in regular exercise.
Social Well-being
- Joining a community or support group concerning your mental health disorder.
- Reach out to loved ones for support.
- Setting boundaries to protect mental energy.
Emotional Health Habits
- Seeking therapy or counseling from a trained mental health professional.
- Check in with your personal emotions.
- Develop a habit of journaling about your feelings. Create a gratitude journal.
Mindfulness and Relaxation Habits
- Meditate for 5 minutes a day.
- Engage in breathing exercises for stress relief.
- Go a few hours or a day without technology to clear your mind.
These lists of habits are just a few that you could incorporate into your daily life to better improve your mental health. Besides practicing them regularly, the other challenging part is building and sustaining them. Let’s learn about how we can motivate ourselves to do that.
Tips for Building and Sustaining These Habits
Building and sustaining better habits involves creating S.M.A.R.T. strategies. S.M.A.R.T stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Strive to make your habits, or goals focused, clear, and well-defined. Define your goals that allow you to measure how successful you can achieve them. Start with small steps to see if the plan for your goal is working for you. Make sure that your goal is realistic and possible for you to reach. Keep it time-bound by setting a target date for you to complete it.
It’s also okay to be aware that you’re going to experience setbacks while trying to practice sustainable habits. Some of these setbacks could be time and unexpected events that could befall us all. When you start to feel overwhelmed or feel like you’re losing motivation, consider taking some time to remember why you decided to create this sustainable habit. Did you want to improve your emotional health? Perhaps you wanted to learn how to manage your mental health condition. Take some time to figure out your initial “why” for building this healthy habit.
The Long-Term Benefits of Sustainable Healthy Habits
Building sustainable healthy habits for the new year could create some long-term benefits for you. You will find yourself reducing stress and anxiety levels. With sustainable healthy habits, you could be able to improve with coping with challenges and setbacks. Your personal relationships will also start to feel more enhanced and you’ll be able to go about your daily routine with a greater sense of purpose. So continue to build sustainable, healthy habits to improve your mental health. Take one day at a time to build these habits for you this year and beyond.
What are your sustainable, healthy habits you like to build for this year? Are these mindful habits that could improve your mental health? Feel free to share the habits and goals you like to build this year in the comments section below. If you need a little extra help in creating these habits and goals, check out my free printable planner to assist you in this. As always, be sure to like or share this post with the next habit builder you know.
