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Self-Care Techniques for Taking Responsibility for Your Mental Health

By Brad Krause

When I was younger, I thought personal responsibility was all about paying bills, getting health insurance, and getting my car inspected on time. As a result, I worked too hard, slept too little, and ate too much. First, I noticed a decline in my physical health. I gained weight, and I was always sleepy. But then something much more troubling began to happen. I started to have chest pains. After a trip to the emergency room and a lot of tests, it turned out to be anxiety. I hadn’t been taking care of myself, and my lifestyle had taken its toll. That’s when I learned that personal responsibility wasn’t just about fulfilling your commitments to the outside world. It’s also about making — and keeping — commitments to yourself. 

Self-care is, essentially, your responsibility. It encompasses everything you do to improve and maintain your own health, such as your exercise routine, diet, and supplements you take to feel good. However, it’s also the smaller stuff you do for your mental well-being: the time you take to relax, the techniques you use to manage stress, and the positive interactions you have with people. These basic things are often overlooked, but they are just as crucial to good self-care as the bigger stuff. 

Keep Stress Under Control

According to a 2017 Gallup Poll, 79 percent of Americans experience stress every day. This figure is staggering, though probably not surprising. We lead stressful lives, but most of us forget stress management is our own responsibility. While we should all be considerate of the mental health of the people around us — including friends, family, and coworkers — no one else can manage our stress for us.

There are many small ways you can work to keep your stress under control, including:

• Taking time to slow down and focus on breathing when feeling overwhelmed
• Practicing mindfulness and meditation on a regular basis
• Getting enough sleep
• Eating healthy 

If you have chronic pain issues, you can relieve your symptoms (and stress) by getting a massage or seeing a chiropractor or acupuncturist. Many health insurance policies have started to cover these types of alternative treatments. But if you’re a senior, you’ll likely need to pay out of pocket because Medicare doesn’t cover these treatments yet. 

If you’re struggling to keep stress-related conditions — like anxiety, depression, and/or insomnia — to a minimum, ask your doctor about taking CBD gummies. Studies have demonstrated that CBD has potentially calming effects without the ability to intoxicate the user. First-timers should start with gummies, since they can be more pleasant than oils or vapes. After talking to your doctor, make sure you study dosage and concentration of various CBD gummy products before settling on a brand.

Relax (Properly)

Telling someone to “relax” is not usually a good way to achieve said goal, but hear us out. While stress management is about equipping yourself to deal with stress when it occurs, regular relaxation is about more than that. Making relaxation part of your schedule gives your brain the downtime it needs to function properly and can even help it be more productive.

However, you need to do it the right way. Most of us have transformed our relaxation time into content-consuming time. According to CNN, Americans spend an average of 10 hours a day looking at media. Let that sink in. This may feel like what you need at the time, but research has shown that passive entertainment like TV is not the best way to relax. Instead, active hobbies that allow you to switch up your brain activity — like art, music, or crafting — are much more likely to put you in the right frame of mind for better mental health.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with sitting down and enjoying a good movie every now and then. However, the trick is to avoid making this time unhealthy. So, find a flick you love, pop some popcorn (using a popcorn popper is much healthier than picking up pre-packaged bag), make some vegan nachos, and crash out. If those snacks don’t appeal to you, Fitbit has a list of other healthy alternatives that will make movie time a little less detrimental to your health. 

Watch Your Interactions

The ways we interact with the people around us are extremely important to our mental health. One self-care habit that is almost always forgotten is regularly evaluating our personal and professional relationships to see if they are negatively affecting us. It can be difficult or even painful to accept that our loved ones could be damaging our mental health, but letting it happen is even worse.

Just like with stress management, it’s on you to make your relationships healthy. You do this by setting healthy boundaries and establishing your expectations clearly. For example, if a coworker relies on you too heavily to help them, start politely saying no when you feel it is appropriate. If a friend is bringing you down with negative comments, make it clear the remarks are unhealthy for you; clearly set your own mental health needs. You will find people are generally willing to treat you the way you want if you tell them exactly what that is.

Mental health self-care is a relatively new concept, at least when it comes to mainstream discussions about health. This explains why many people are still unsure what it entails and how they can practice it. However, it’s actually deceptively simple: Self-care is about taking responsibility for your own well-being. In terms of mental health, this means not allowing the world to determine how you feel. You cannot always control the things that happen to you, but you can control how you prepare for and react to them. This alone can make a huge difference in your mental well-being.