Category: Mental Health

Your mental health is an encompassing system of emotional, psychological, and social factors. These factors help determine your mental well-being. Indicators of poor emotional health, psychological, or social health can affect your overall mental health and physical health. Mental health exists both as a subject and as a state. Your mental health can be poor or sound, and plenty of things in between. You can struggle with depression but continue to function at home and school. You can be confident in your athletic skills but feel deeply insecure about something else that affects your relationships.

Your mental health can suffer in some ways but remain robust in others. Mental health is often opposed to mental illness, but it’s never really a clear binary. We tend to distinguish between the mentally ill and those who aren’t, but the truth is that many people can struggle with symptoms of mental illness for years before others take notice or before they decide to seek treatment. It isn’t that some people are “crazy” and most aren’t. It’s that each one of us shares emotional, psychological, and social ups and downs and moments where we need help, whether it’s from a loved one, a close friend, or a professional. And sometimes, some of us require more assistance than others. 

What is Emotional Health?

Let’s consider mental health to be a conglomeration of emotional, psychological, and social factors. Emotional health consists of the portion of our well-being defined by feelings, as opposed to the portion of our well-being defined by thoughts(psychological) or our relationships with others and ourselves (social). 

One might think that all mental health is ultimately emotional. Or that all mental health is ultimately psychological. But there are differences between emotions and thoughts. How we feel might directly result from what we think or do. Feelings are often reactive. You can feel a certain way before you do something, but that feeling may be tied to previous thought, experience, or action. In that way, emotional health is deeply tied to psychological or cognitive health because our thoughts can help inform our feelings, and by changing the way we think, we can begin to change the way we feel. 

Does the Difference Matter? 

These granular differences aren’t that important. But the distinction might help you better grasp how mental health problems can be categorized and even treated. Mental health encompasses non-physical health, as complex as it is, from our relationships with others to the active thoughts we have and how we feel. 

Improving Your Emotional Health

By addressing the way we think, we can address the way we feel, and by improving how we behave and interact with others, we can change our relationships for the better, positively reinforce our healthier ways of thinking, and create healthier emotional cycles. Think of the way low mood traps people in cycles of sadness. Self-guilt and feelings of worthlessness become self-fulfilling prophecies as we become sapped of all motivation. People around us lose patience, and it becomes harder to find support. Our outward experiences and vice versa validate our emotions and thoughts. 

Therapy can help patients with depression address these cyclical thoughts through cognitive behavioral therapy, creating a plan of action to identify and contradict negative thinking. Breaking the cycle allows us to snowball in the other direction with positive affirmations, healthy relationships, better thoughts, and happier emotions. 

Coping Skills, Social Skills, and Self-Worth

Of course, there are many cases where people can’t think their way out of a mental health problem. But even so, mental health therapies can help people cope with their conditions in better ways, reduce their impact on their day-to-day lives, and improve their quality of life. Other modalities are also necessary, reducing unwanted thoughts, negative feelings, or anxious impulses through medication or experiential therapies.  Combining therapy with other forms of mental health treatment can create a compounding effect where a condition’s impact on the mind can be lessened through persistence, support, and reassurance. 

A person struggling with depression might struggle with low mood and self-deprecating thoughts for months, years, or decades. But they can learn to combat and deny these thoughts, suffocate them, and replace them through affirmations of the opposite, whether alone with the help of their coping skills or with the help of friends and family. Even addressing physical health can improve mental well-being – eating better, sleeping well, and getting enough exercise can reduce the impact of a mental health problem. But the problem goes both ways. 

Respecting the Cycle 

Your emotional well-being feeds into your physical health. Physical health plays an essential role in your mental health. One cannot do well without the other. 

Stress, both chronic or overwhelming and acute, affects the body.

• Our heart works harder and gives out faster.
• The Body’s metabolic processes change.
• Our fight-or-flight impulses remain active.
• Adrenal glands go into overdrive.

We get less sleep or oversleep with poor sleep quality. 

We overeat or undereat. Because of our mood, we experience pain differently: low mood means pain feels worse, and sensations that weren’t perceptible before turn into unexplained aches. We might turn to certain maladaptive coping mechanisms to feel better – things that help in the short-term but make things worse overall, whether it’s binge eating or avoidance behaviors or something more self-destructive, like alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse. 

Internal and external mental factors can significantly undermine our longevity and health. It isn’t just stress. Internalized anxieties that come and go without a trigger or warning or feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness tied with low mood can affect us mentally and physically, even when we aren’t under any significant pressure. 

Take Charge of Your Emotional Health Today

Metabolic health conditions are associated with poorer mental health. But it also goes the other way. Physical illness can exacerbate low mood and depression. Chronic pain often goes hand-in-hand with depression. Injuries and traumatic physical experiences can result in anxieties and PTSD. Trying to address only half the problem does not stop the cycle. Long-term treatment begins by asking for help from those around us – friends, families, and professionals alike – and by addressing our physical, emotional, and mental needs altogether in a holistic fashion. 

If you’ve been having a hard time recently, you will need someone to talk to. A friend, a sibling, a parent. But for many people, finding the courage to address their own mental health can be very difficult–especially when trying to figure out how to talk to parents about mental health issues. Some people feel guilty about being depressed or anxious. Some people feel it’s their fault, would become a burden to others if they mentioned it, and others think it might go away if they ignore it.

Ignoring Thoughts and Feelings

Sadly, most mental health problems don’t away on their own. And ignoring your thoughts and feelings can often make them worse over time. Talking to your loved ones is one of your best options for recourse, and it’s something they’d want you to do. A mental health condition can be difficult to address, but it does not ever make you a burden to those who love you, no matter how much that thought echoes itself in your head.

There are times when it might be important to prepare yourself before you talk to a loved one about how you’ve been feeling. Your parents might become upset if you tell them how you feel. They might become angry. But it’s crucial that you understand that these emotions are often because they’re upset with themselves, not with you. In the same way, we feel we’ve let our loved ones down when we feel bad, and our loved ones might feel like they’ve failed us, even if they did not.

Sometimes we Blame Ourselves

Mental health problems are often misunderstood in such a way that most people try to find out where things went wrong–even when there is no concrete cause or triggering event for a bout of depression or anxiety or for a history of substance use. No one chooses to struggle with their mental health, and it’s often not something that’s done to us.

When we don’t have anyone to blame, we tend to blame ourselves. But while it’s often very difficult to think of these things rationally, especially at the height of a depressive episode or anxious day, it’s usually neither your fault nor the fault of your parents. That is why it’s so important to start talking to each other.

The Importance of Talking

Before you find a way to talk to your parents about your mental health, it’s important to understand why talking helps.

Most mental health issues are treated through a combination of modalities, talk therapy, and medication. Cognitive behavioral therapy, in particular, is often the gold standard for treating conditions such as depression and anxiety, whereas other talk therapy methods, such as dialectical behavior therapy, exposure response prevention therapy, and psychodynamic therapy each have their own application in the treatment of conditions ranging from panic disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and personality disorders.

Talking to Loved Ones

Our friends and parents usually aren’t trained therapists or medical professionals. But talking to our loved ones about how we feel can bring us closer to the first step of therapy – learning to put our thoughts and emotions to words and sharing them with someone else. Even just acknowledging how you feel can be a cathartic experience and can be healing.

In many cases, our loved ones can even offer relevant advice and helpful affirmations. Many instances of mental health problems are hereditary, and the chances are that your parent might have struggled with similar thoughts when they were your age. Their experiences and coping mechanisms may help you find better ways to heal, as well.

Sadly, this isn’t always the case.

Dealing With Expectations and Disappointments

As we grow older, we begin to develop a concept of who we want to become while coping with the reality of who we are. Reconciling the two is important but difficult, especially if we become uncompromising with ourselves, and especially when our expectations for ourselves are set dramatically high.

The easier it is to fail your own expectations, the more often you will do so, and the more frustrated you will grow with yourself, creating a vicious cycle. In some cases, we begin to project these expectations of ourselves onto others.

If you hold yourself accountable to an extremely high level, ask yourself if these expectations are really set by your parents or if they’re something you’ve set for yourself.

Ask yourself if your parents, who love you, would really be disappointed to hear that you’re struggling – or if they would instead be worried and want to help as best they can. In most cases, the truth will be closer to the latter.

If your parents do have extremely high expectations for you, then it’s all the more important to talk to them about how you feel, especially how you feel about their reactions towards your struggles and thoughts.

Parents want what’s best for their kids, including wanting them to become the best versions of themselves. Understanding that their own approach and reaction to how you’re feeling might play a role in why you’ve been hiding how you feel might help them consider a better way to respond to you in the future.

How to Initiate the Conversation

We tend to know how our parents might react to most things, but when it comes to mental illness, it’s difficult to trust your own judgment because of how certain conditions can lead us to consistently fear the worst outcomes.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare yourself. Take the time to consider what your parents might say and, more importantly, what questions they might ask. And ask yourself what you feel comfortable addressing. Not everyone wishes their parents to know everything, and you are entitled to privacy, especially with regards to your thoughts.

Divulging only the bare necessities can present an altogether different set of problems, of course. Your parents might not know how to help you without a few more details. Some things you might want to consider bringing up when asked (or when introducing your problems) include:

• When it started.
• How you usually feel.
• How bad it gets.
• What makes it feel worse.

Review what you are comfortable sharing with them and what you might want them to consider. If you’ve done some research on how you’ve been feeling, you might already have an idea of what it is you’re going through.

Explaining how important it might be to you to see a professional and receive a proper diagnosis can help your parents recognize how to support you concretely.

This is especially important if your parents don’t believe you, perhaps because they’re struggling with something similar and have never acknowledged it, or because they consider your thoughts and worries to be a “normal” part of growing up.

Making it clear that you would still like a professional opinion, with all due respect to their beliefs, can be crucial to recognizing and addressing a mental health problem.

Seeking Resources

If your parents are part of the reason why you feel the way you do, it might be in your best interest to seek other resources for help. In most cases, your best bet would be to ask an older adult sibling, a school counselor, or seek official online resources for the contact details of local mental health professionals.

When social media first entered the public consciousness, it quickly became clear that this was as much of a revelation in the use of the Internet as radio media and TV news had transformed the way new telecommunication technologies entered our day-to-day lives. And as exciting as it was, it was unclear how social media and teen mental health would unravel in the future.

In tech parlance, social media and portable Wi-Fi devices became the “killer app” that elevated the Internet from being a vital background technology for knowledge sharing, to becoming the thing over billions of people wake up to and utilize nearly every day.

This technological paradigm shift has its pros and cons, especially for the younger generation of “digital natives” who use platforms like Instagram and Twitter even more than their parents and grandparents.

For one, it’s easier to communicate with one another. It’s one thing to spend a fortune to call someone across continents over the payphone for a few short minutes or send an SMS and hope for the best. It’s a wholly different story to be able to instantly communicate with one another, share our thoughts and memories in text, audio, photo, and video form, and form new connections completely virtually.

Secondly, social media is built on the idea that we can represent and tailor our self-image on the Internet and form connections with one another. It is more than just a big, cluttered community corkboard – these platforms are designed to connect like-minded people, share common interests, and make this vast world of ours feel smaller than ever before while giving each of us control over the way we appear online.

But there are stark downsides. The analogies between social networks and real-life relationships can lead us to place a similar level of importance on the relationships we develop and foster online and those we make in our day-to-day. The brain experiences joy from receiving Facebook likes and Twitter retweets the same way we feel validated and complemented to our faces. Yet the two are not the same.

The Link Between Social Media and Teen Mental Health 

Rather than a true reflection, social media is more like a funhouse mirror. Tweens and teens, who are in the middle of developing the capacity to digest and navigate these complex social relationships with their peers, are especially affected by the way attention and validation online can make them feel.

This is something these platforms knowingly exploit to encourage more interactions, farm more user data, and provide advertisers with a larger target audience. In more ways than one, this manipulative relationship can have a multitude of negative effects on teen mental health.

Yes, you can make new friends online. You can have genuine interactions with other people, share your experiences and memories, and form a bond before ever meeting. But there are also countless experiences of manipulative or false online relationships, catfishing, or dangerous online grooming rings.

On a less drastic note, the simple act of uploading daily experiences online for likes and interaction can affect a teen’s self-esteem, make them dependent on their online self-worth as per other people’s messages, comments, and validations, and leave them particularly vulnerable to online victimization, or more controversial content in the name of maintaining engagement. We’ve seen it happen on MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, and now more recently, on TikTok.

It’s fun to upload a vacation picture and share your experiences with friends. But on the more nefarious side, social media can become a place where teens with a fragile self-esteem equate their value with how they are perceived or received online, falling apart and becoming depressed when their content no longer inspires as many likes or comments as it used to.

Some teens do move past this in adulthood – others get stuck and are much more likely to develop serious mental health issues as a result of their online experiences.

Social Media and Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are not only one of the most common mental health disorders whose growth can be attributed to a rise in social media use among teens, but they are also the deadliest type of mental health disorder.

An eating disorder directly impacts a teen’s physical health, and it can often take several bouts of hospitalization for a teen to finally begin their recovery process. Therapy for an eating disorder is difficult, requiring the expertise of psychiatrists and dieticians, as well as the supervision of a physician.

Does this mean social media causes eating disorders? Not necessarily, but it can exacerbate them, trigger them, or contribute to their development in an unhealthy way. The largest cause of eating disorders remains hereditary.

Social Media and Anxiety

Teens are going through a rough time: adolescence. And yet, while every generation prior has survived the very same growing pains, anxiety rates among today’s teens seem higher than before. Some of it can be attributed to a better understanding of how common anxiety really is. Some of it is a result of a cascade of world events. And some of it can be attributed to the impact of social media.

In the early days of the Internet, many parents worked hard to impress on their kids the importance of anonymity and child safety online. Yet it has become harder and harder to monitor what kids do and see, especially with the invention of the smartphone. Teens today spend multiple hours a day on several different social networks, whether it’s to consume content on YouTube or TikTok, or make content of their own.

It’s not all negative. Social media use can exacerbate issues in both directions. It can affect teens with naturally lower self-esteem and greater anxiety issues in negative ways. But it can also empower these teens, inspire them to pick up a new hobby, perhaps get them into sports, cataloging and sharing their personal achievements, and building up their own self-worth through a positive feedback loop.

Furthermore, the impact that social media use has on teen anxiety is not to be overestimated in contrast to the impact of general everyday stressors. Teens are still mostly worried about their grades, their crushes, their friendships, high school and college struggles, and the problems of the near future, whether it’s the job market or global warming.

Would it help to lower a teen’s screentime? Maybe. A better idea might be to talk to your teen about their worries and concerns and help address them together. The constant feedback and noise of social media might not make things any easier, but many of the stressors teens experience are still closer to home than to the digital world.

It’s also critical to be a good role model with how you use your own tech. Teens are highly sensitive to anything they deem hypocritical or ironic and will be less likely to take your concerns seriously when your screentime almost eclipses theirs.

It’s a complicated world out there, and it’s difficult to raise a teen in it. But it’s also important to be cognizant of when an issue becomes too great for either of you to manage alone. Anxiety disorders, suicidality, and depressive thoughts are best addressed by seeking professional help together.

Self-care and mental health tips for teens can go a long way towards reducing the impact that stress can have on their lives. Teenagers face a myriad of challenges as they approach adulthood, from an ever-growing list of responsibilities to the social and physical awkwardness that comes with puberty, to the difficulties of navigating relationships in the 21st century with the ubiquity of the Internet. In addition to various social changes, teens today also face the uncertain impact of social media and cyberbullying, online image problems, and a rising spike in cases of anxiety and depression.

Recognizing and standing up to these challenges can be very difficult, even with the full support of friends and family members. It’s more important than ever for teens to be aware of how their daily stressors can impact their thoughts and feelings, and how simple techniques can help them combat these stressors, overcome their challenges, and build their confidence for the future. Let’s explore a few mental health tips for teens on building resilience in the face of stress.

Embrace Resources and Mental Health Tips for Teens

One of the most important mental health tips of teens is a boring one and has little to do with self-care. While it’s important to emphasize your agency when dealing with your mental and physical health, it’s also important to recognize that the nature of a serious mental health issue can be debilitating and paralyzing. Not everyone is equipped to deal with the way their anxiety or mood changes affect their relationships with others, or their ability to participate in a normal life with their peers. Many teens struggle with undiagnosed mental health issues that cannot reliably be dealt with alone.

If you feel like you’re completely isolated, drowning, and left to your own devices at times, ask for help. Embrace the resources available to you and get in touch with a professional. Talk to a guidance counselor, a parent, or a teacher. Seek out online local and governmental resources, alone or with a friend, to schedule an appointment with a professional and get a diagnosis. Sometimes, being able to put a name to how you’re feeling can be incredibly liberating, let alone the impact that a first-line treatment can make. Do not be afraid to make that first step towards a better life. There’s no need to struggle alone.

Seek Help From an Adult

Even if you don’t feel like seeking out mental health resources over your problems, you can still get a little help by communicating with an adult. Talk to your teacher or parent about how you’re feeling. Open up to them. Listen to what they have to say. Parents need to know how to communicate with their kids when they’re having a hard time balancing their thoughts.

Things can get overwhelming for teens, between sports, school responsibilities, new relationships, bullying, self-image, and the expectations of the future. Many parents will remember what it was like to be a teen and may help their kid by relating to their experiences and bringing up some of the ways they coped back then. If your parents aren’t helpful, you can always seek help from a counselor or therapist.

Explore Constructive Coping Skills

There are constructive and destructive coping skills. To cope means to live with, or even in spite of a negative circumstance. But some coping skills are better or worse than others. Destructive coping skills include drinking, substance use, engaging in violence, bullying and self-harm. Constructive coping skills help build up a teen’s self-esteem through skills building, better physical health, a healthier sense of self, and include hobbies such as:

• Painting
• Writing
• Carving
• Tinkering or mechanical work
• Pursuing a personal project
• Taking up a sport or athletic goal

If you don’t have any hobbies you enjoy, or if you need new hobbies, it’s a good idea to try things out with a friend or relative. Picking up a new interest or hobby with someone else can help you stay consistent. Coping skills can also be irrespective of a hobby or interest, such as talking outdoor walks or hikes in the forest, swimming or other physical activities, or journaling.

Implement Meditative Activity

Aside from different interests or coping skills, it can also be a good idea to pursue a deliberately meditative activity. Find something to do that keeps you away from distracting conversations, screens, media, and other stimuli. Some people like to meditate in the mornings – others meditate through physical expression, like yoga. Others yet enjoy meditative activities that don’t seem meditative at first, such as room cleaning, gardening, or long walks alone.

The point of a meditative activity is to emphasize mindfulness and self-reflection. A lot of mental health issues are exacerbated or emphasized through negative thoughts and unwanted, intrusive emotions. Mindfulness represents taking an active approach to shaping the way we feel and, as an extension, the way we act. A meditative activity can help you prime yourself for a better day through affirmative and positive thoughts, gratitude, and other mental exercises while you go through the motions.

Visit Support Groups

Aside from healthy self-care and seeking help when it’s needed, another useful way to cope with your inner thoughts and the challenges of teen life is by talking to other teens with similar issues. Seeking out support groups for your particular diagnosis, or just hanging out with other teens who share similar school and home life problems can help you gain an appreciation for the way other people cope, learn how their experiences shaped positive or negative outcomes, and learn more about yourself in the process.

Impromptu support groups can be toxic. Sometimes, people get together because of shared trauma or similar experiences, but cope in negative ways (self-destructive habits, from drug taking to delinquency). Seek out support groups headed by teens or adults interested in shaping a positive and accepting space for people who want to improve and feel better, through therapy and healthy coping skills.

There are many other ways to deal with the stressors of life, and their impact on mental health, including practiced gratitude, doing something for others, and encouraging those around you to take better care of their own needs as well. Whenever you feel lost or at the brink, it’s important to call for help and get in touch with a professional. The teen years can be difficult, but they’re also often the onset for most mental health problems, from depression to schizophrenia. If you’re struggling with the way you feel, there’s never any shame in talking to someone about it.

Journaling is a simple and effective tool for working through stressful and anxious moments and can be a big part of your treatment plan, or just a useful hobby to help cope with negative or intrusive thinking. All you need to get started is a little bit of time and the writing medium of your choice. 

Understanding how and why journaling works can help you leverage its usefulness in your daily life. In this article, we’re exploring how to start journaling for mental health.

How Does Journaling Work?

At its heart, journaling is just about writing what comes to mind. It doesn’t always need to be structured or sensible. It doesn’t always need to serve a purpose outside of creating a safe and private space to vent. You can set yourself a goal for the day or choose not to. 

You can aim to fill a page, hit a word count, or just put a single sentence to paper per day. Some people use journaling to create stream-of-consciousness rants and channel a little bit of frustration out and away from themselves. 

Other people make lists, create dreams, write stories, or use their journals as a way to chronicle how they felt, examine and re-examine their thoughts on paper, and create rebuttals to all their negative and unwanted emotions, to try and deal with the feelings they don’t like. 

There are multiple ways in which journaling seems to provide a benefit not only to people struggling with their mental health but everyone. The act of journaling can be cathartic, providing a sense of relief by creating an outlet for whatever we have in mind. 

Journaling is also one of the most effective exercises in overcoming rumination, a common issue for many anxiety disorders and different mental health issues, where a person is caught in a cycle of negative thoughts, one leading to the next like an ouroboros. 

To recap: 

• Journaling simply requires you to put words to paper, whether physical or digital. 
• Journaling can help you vent about your day and provide cathartic relief for frustrating situations. 
• Journaling allows you to take the time to explore your unwanted or intrusive thoughts and take them apart. 
• Journaling gives you the chance to break free from a cycle of negative thoughts and challenge them objectively, on paper, to move on to a healthier sense of self. 
• Journaling helps you gain perspective on your situation, allowing you to detail everything you’re worried about and angry about, while also taking the time to note down things you’re grateful for, happy about, or things that inspire you. 
• Journaling helps you organize and declutter your mind, address issues that bother you, and work through problems in your head that preoccupy you and keep you from focusing on the tasks at hand. 
• Journaling can elevate your mood and improve your wellbeing regardless of your mental state and is particularly effective for patients with anxiety and anxiety-related symptoms. 

Here’s how to start journaling for mental health.

Getting Started with Journaling

If you’re interested in giving journaling a try on your own, it helps to add a little bit of structure to your journaling efforts by giving you a quick explanation of how to set up a journal of your own. 

It’s usually best to decide on a writing style that suits your personality and issues. How do you like to organize your thoughts or tackle issues? Do you prefer to tackle questions in your mind via bite-sized bullet points, or are you more comfortable writing and making things up as you go along? 

When journaling, the choice on what to write or how to write it is entirely up to you – and best of all, you can easily switch and swap styles, try out new ideas, or go completely off-script and incorporate poetry or storytelling as a way to work through your worries. A few ideas include: 

• Use bullet points to jot down crucial thoughts or things that anger you, and in turn take note of things you are grateful for, or happy about. You can also treat a journaling session as an opportunity to sort your thoughts, establish a priority to-do list, or just jot down things you might forget later. 
• Recalling dreams every morning you remember them and reflect on what they might mean for you. There isn’t an exact science on what dreams do or don’t mean, but they are always open to interpretation, making them great writing prompts to write about things that bother or interest you. 
• Utilizing journaling sessions to sketch instead. Pick a daily or weekly motif and make day-to-day sketches of that thing, such as a tree at school, your pets, a house plant, a building, or a friend. 
• Stream of consciousness writing to vent about your thoughts, or just take advantage of the catharsis that comes from putting words to paper. 

You can choose to type your journal and keep it electronically or write it down on paper or e-paper, or both. Writing is often preferred by therapists because the act of writing itself can slow you down versus typing, provide a nice rhythmic exercise to work on mindfulness, and can be calming. 

Typing allows you to get your thoughts down faster, making it a better choice for the stream of consciousness journal entries, where the idea is to bring as many thoughts onto the page as possible, or just write whatever happens to come to mind. 

Schedule Your Journaling Sessions

Journaling is something that works best with a consistent effort. Journaling every now and again might provide a brief moment of relief, but by incorporating it into your daily or weekly schedule, you can create a habit that helps you preemptively cope with stress, keep your mood in check, tackle anxieties before they grow, and figure out what recurring thoughts or patterns might become too much for you to handle on your own before they overtake you. 

Set aside a timeslot each day or week to dedicate to your journal, either in the mornings or in the evening, as a start to each day, or as a pleasant mental nightcap. 

Consider Seeing a Professional

Journaling can be an effective tool for navigating your thoughts and establishing different ways to work through them, examine them on paper, or just get them out of your system. 

But don’t let journaling be the only tool in your repertoire. If you struggle with depressive, negative, or anxious thoughts to the point of finding it difficult to concentrate on your day-to-day, it’s important to consider getting professional help to work through those thoughts and develop a plan that works for you.

While it’s a well-known fact, there’s a clear connection between exercise and mental health, and the benefits are often underestimated by patients and their loved ones alike. Physical movement does more for you than just keep your body fit. It can help improve cognition and mood, regulate emotions, reduce stress, fight against anxious and depressive thoughts, and can play a significant therapeutic role in a patient’s treatment plan – to the point that, for many conditions, regular exercise can be considered a first-line treatment. But why is exercise such a powerful tool for mental health, and where exactly does the connection lie? Let’s explore what happens in the body and the brain when we get moving, and why exercise helps us feel so much better in general.

Exploring the Benefits of Exercise and Mental Health

There are multiple accepted theories for the benefits of exercise for mental health. We all know that physical exercise helps keep the body fit, improving heart health, reducing the likelihood of back pain, and even reducing the effects of certain age-related physical conditions such as disc degenerative disease and osteoporosis. Strengthening the muscles of the body correlates with longevity and resistance to certain diseases, and regular exercise improves the immune system. But the effects of exercise on the brain and a person’s mental state may have several reasons, including:

• Exercise raises your core temperature, which can have a positive effect on depressive symptoms.
• Exercise releases dopamine, which creates a feeling of euphoria and modulates mood.
• Exercise increases the availability of multiple important mood-regulating chemicals in the brain.
• Regular exercise serves as a distraction from distressing and intrusive depressive thoughts, as well as other negative thinking.
• Consistent and regular exercise creates a positive feedback loop giving a person more control over their life and self-esteem.

Each one of these theories has some scientific merit, to the point that all of them could prove to be relevant to some degree for anyone who finds success with exercise as a therapeutic tool against depression and other mental health issues. As with most things, the truth may be somewhere in the middle, where the physiological and emotional benefits of exercise can be traced to a combination of all of the above.

Because exercise is usually structured in a way that emphasizes a linear progression and progressive overload – whether it’s in the form of new skills and techniques in certain sports, increasing challenges, or physical resistance – we develop a more positive sense of self in response to exercise. Meanwhile, exercise unleashes a wave of brain chemicals each time, leading to improved sleep, weight reduction, increased energy, better endurance, reduced mental fatigue, and mood regulation. All these factors in turn help reduce depressive and anxious thoughts. Discover the close connection between exercise and mental health.

Exercise for Long-Term Stress Relief

Aside from having a marked effect on multiple different mental health issues, from depression and anxiety to ADHD, PTSD, schizophrenia, and more, it’s important to remember that exercise is also a powerful preventative tool due to its ability to modulate and reduce stress. That doesn’t mean people who work out often can’t get depressed or anxious – however, it can reduce their likelihood of struggling with tougher outcomes and stronger symptoms.

Many of the factors surrounding mental health issues like depression and anxiety are uncontrollable, like genetics, traumatic experiences, and socioeconomic circumstances. Some of these can impact your ability to exercise regularly, due to physical disability, lack of time, or lack of resources. For some, regular exercise is a luxury. However, we don’t need to take on an athlete’s schedule to benefit from the mental health effects of exercise.

How Much Exercise Is Enough?

A meta-analysis of multiple studies found that anywhere between two to six hours of exercise per week is enough to reap the maximum benefits for mental health. This means you need only dedicate anywhere from a few minutes to an hour a day to start seeing long-term benefits from your workouts.

Forget “No Pain No Gain”

You really don’t need to overdo it. Unless you’re the type that specifically derives enjoyment and passion from competitive training, sports training, and pursuing specific goals, you’re much better off training conservatively and pursuing exercises that are fun, rather than prioritizing optimal growth, or athletic performance. What’s even more important than overall intensity is commitment and consistency. The benefits of exercise aren’t necessarily immediate, in the sense that you might not see a significant difference in mental health symptoms from one day to the next after your first few sessions of physical activity.

It’s Not the End All Be All

Despite the close connection between exercise and mental health, exercise is not a panacea. The downside to reaping the benefits of continuous and consistent exercise is that it’s famously difficult to be consistent or continuous with any kind of activity while struggling with a mental health issue. People who are depressed or struggle with anxiety will also usually have a harder time forming positive habits or convincing themselves to work out when they don’t want to. It’s difficult to create and stick to an exercise regimen while struggling with mood fluctuations, medication side effects, and bouts of mental and physical fatigue.

To that end, it’s important to figure out contingencies. Create an exercise group with your friends, and let yourself be encouraged by positive peer pressure. Pick exercises that are actually fun, or at least feel enjoyable to you. Vary up your exercise program so that you don’t end up doing the same things for months on end (if that burns you out). Create a modular program that can be adapted for “easy days” when it’s hard enough to get out of bed, let alone hit the gym.

Exercise is an amazing therapeutic tool, but it isn’t enough to tell a person to go for a jog in order to cure their depression. There are good ways and bad ways to incorporate regular exercise into your daily life when you’re struggling with a mental health issue. However, having an understanding and supportive family and experienced fitness and mental health professional on your side can be a tremendous boon.