At the start of every New Year, people make resolutions to improve their lives. Whether it’s working harder to boost their careers, purchasing gym memberships to get in shape, or making more of an effort to spend time with friends and family members, the New Year is the perfect time to make some positive changes in your life. But it’s also important to focus on making positive changes for your mental health and your own personal well-being. Mental health resolutions don’t just impact your thoughts and emotions; they also have a positive effect on every other aspect of your life, including your career, professional relationships, personal relationships, and your own self-image.
The best way to help or serve others is by helping yourself first and ensuring that you’re in the right mental state to be a good friend, parent, partner, sibling, spouse, daughter, son, and whatever other roles you play in the lives of your loved ones.
Why You Should Prioritize Improving Your Mental Health in 2020
There’s absolutely no shame in choosing to prioritize your own mental health before taking care of others (we can’t give what we don’t have). Yet, for many years, there’s been a strong and seemingly impenetrable stigma surrounding mental health and well-being. More recently, organizations and people have been working tirelessly to bring down those barriers and talk about mental health issues in more open, safe, and judgment-free environments.
By taking care of your mental health and ensuring your own well-being, you can work toward leading the life you’ve always dreamed of and becoming the person you’ve always wanted to be. Focusing on your mental health and well-being can help you achieve those goals one step at a time. With that in mind, here are a few reasons you should prioritize your mental health in 2020.
Therapy Can Have a Positive Impact on Your Life
The better you start to feel about yourself, the more you set the groundwork to foster flourishing, happy, and well-adjusted relationships with other people. Having a positive outlook and the right tools to cope with the difficulties you may face in life gives you the ability to work through those challenging experiences.
There are different forms of therapy that are designed to help you overcome those difficulties. Talk therapy, cognitive therapy, professional counselling, and group counselling are all types of therapy that can help you deal with the specific difficulties you’re facing in life, help you better understand the root of the problem, and find healthy and effective ways of dealing with them.
You Can Address Mental Health Issues through Therapeutic Methods
Therapy doesn’t necessarily have to be an overly complicated system of dealing with your mental health. Sometimes, it’s really as simple as talking to someone who is trained to not only listen to everything you have to say but also guide you to finding the answers you’re looking for.
A good therapist will give you the tools to see and examine new unexplored perspectives into situations that you might not have otherwise discovered on your own. It’s not your therapist’s job to necessarily give you the answers; rather they’re there to provide you with the right tools to help you reach the right conclusion along the way. Therapy can be an ongoing journey that you embark on for the rest of your life or it can be a temporary method to help you cope with a particularly difficult situation or time in your life.
There Are Plenty of Benefits to Therapy
Whether you’re engaged in independent or group therapy, there are a lot of benefits to exploring different aspects of your mental health. Understanding your emotions and where they stem from can help you see each situation in a new light. Rather than resorting to typical feelings of anger and disillusionment every time your child, partner, or spouse does something you disagree with, discussing these situations in therapy can help you see things from their perspectives to better understand their behaviours and manage your reactions to them in a more constructive manner.
Managing Your Mental Health Resolutions for a Better Outlook on Life
How you view yourself greatly impacts how you view the world around you as well as your relationships with others. Through therapy, you can learn to actively take less of a quick reactionary stance in certain situations and instead assume a more contemplative approach that helps you see things from every imaginable angle.
Get Help Setting and Achieving Your Goals
A therapist can help you set small, but achievable mental health resolutions for 2020 and they can guide you toward reaching your goals by providing the right personalized tools to facilitate your journey. Achieving your goals won’t always be easy—in fact, it’ll be downright challenging at times—but your therapist will be there with you every step of the way celebrating your milestones and helping you cope with any setbacks.
Learn to Love and Appreciate Yourself
How you treat others is a reflection of how you feel internally toward yourself. If you have a low self-esteem or self-image, it’s important to face those feelings head on so you can get to the bottom of them and learn to love and appreciate yourself. Therapy can help you explore those painful emotions and discover their true source while also teaching you the proper coping techniques.
Live in the Moment and Partake in Activities You Enjoy
Arguably, one of the most valuable lessons you can take away from therapy is to learn to live in the moment and partake in activities you enjoy and that improve the quality of your life. This is what the concept of mindfulness is all about—relishing each and every moment, taking it in, and accepting it for what it is. If you can learn to do this, then you can vastly improve your life one day at a time.