May is Mental Health Awareness Month! It is important that society talks about mental health. We often forget that the brain is one of the most important organs of the body. How you take care of it impacts your health.
Many times we do not know that our mental health is hurting. We think we are perfectly fine, until it is too late. We have panic attacks or get depressed. Our feelings get heavy and it starts to impact our everyday lives. Many people begin to develop mental illnesses.
Taking care of your mental health is not suppressing your feelings. It is not just being positive and happy all the time. Taking care of your mental health is unloading that baggage we carry around with us. The baggage is our traumas, struggles, stressors, failures and insecurities. Everyone has baggage. We need to face it all, the good and the bad.
How do we take care of our mental health?
I could tell you to get enough sleep, eat healthy, and exercise regularly. Just do all of that and it will improve your mental health. Yes, those things definitely influence your mental health but not the only things. You can eat your fruit and veggies, and still be depressed. You can exercise every day, and still have anxiety.
Taking care our mental health is dealing with it. It is giving yourself permission to feel. Be sad, it's okay. Sometimes we need a good cry. Get angry. Sometimes you may need to sit in your car and scream. I definitely do. My family all caught me on the Ring camera, yelling about something I was pissed about. To them it was funny… to me it was unloading my baggage.
Think of your brain like a suitcase. When you travel you fill your suitcase with everything you need for vacation. After the trip you pack your suitcase back up, and fill it with all the souvenirs. Once you get home, we have to unpack. I hate unpacking. It is the worst part about going on vacation. All the clothes have to get folded. You have to do laundry. If I do not unpack right away, it sits in my room for days… sometimes weeks. Eventually, I get annoyed cause the suitcase is just taking up space in my room. Once the suitcase is unpacked, I always feel a sense of relief.
Our brains travel with us through all of our trips in life. We fill our brain up with every memory… which includes the bad ones too. We bring all the laughter, happiness, sadness, trauma, and insecurities home with us. We often forget to unpack them. Unpacking takes up time and can be a lot of work. It is annoying, difficult and not really fun. All these feelings, emotions, and memories sit inside us. Eventually we get annoyed or worse…damage our mental health.
Learning how to unload our baggage takes years of work. When you’re a kid, you often depend on other people to empty the suitcase. As you get older it becomes our responsible to handle it.
The only way I learned how to unload my baggage was getting help. It was talking about the things that were difficult. My mental health did not get better because I was working out regularly or getting enough sleep. My mental health improve when I started to talk about all the feelings and memories I was carrying around. I had years of luggage that needed to be unpacked.
You take care of your mental health by taking care of it. You are depressed, it is okay. Talk about it. Share your feelings with someone. You are not alone. You feel insecure, that is okay. Express your feelings. You have trauma, those experiences make you resilient. There are resources out there that can help you. There are so many resources today that can offer us support in improving our mental heath.
Unload your suitcase. I know it is heavy but once you empty it, there will be a sense of relief.
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