Lets make it mental (Road to healthy part 6)

Hello :)

Today I thought I'd write a bit about the part of being healthy, that I feel most people don't talk as much about, and I just so haven't had the chance to write about it myself either, since I've had so many other blog posts waiting to go up.

The subject as you probably could tell by the title, is mental health and I will be talking mainly about stress and anxiety since those are the two things that I find most common and on some level we can talk about our experiences regarding those two areas.

We have this very interesting lecture once a week about psychology and during the last few weeks we've been mainly talking about stress and everything related to it.

It seems easy to understand, such a small word - stress, but if anyone wanted me to define how feeling stressed feels like, then I probably couldn't give a suficcient answer. It's a negative emotion, mostly, it's often caused by anxiety that we have in our life, fears, tension and so on, but there's so much more to it, that I can't quite grasp.

Without a doubt all of us feel that kind of negative emotions in our life, but if they're constantly there and at a hightened level, then we might find ourselves under stress, so to speak.

It's so easy to think that stress just has a part in our life, separate from everything else, it's just this thing that we experience and then it passes and everything is ok again, when in reality stress can affect not just or mental health, but also our physical health.

There are several stress related diseases, some mental ilnesses can be triggered by stress, for example most eating disorders, but also diseases such as heart disease can be related to the stress we feel in our everyday lives. 

There are so many things going on in our body, while our mind is in stress, that the body has to work harder to maintain order and have our bodies work as they ought to be.

I think it's becoming more and more common that people do make the connection between their mental health and physical health, one can not improve without the other, but it's still difficult to figure out, what should be done in order to maintain a balance.

There is a normal amount of anxiety or stress that a person should feel, it helps us survive, we can use it to our advantage, for example in sport, where the affects of stress can help people achieve better results, but if there's too much of it then it can be damaging.

I've talked about this before, but for me to help me maintain a somewhat good balance mentally is to do yoga, it's the perfect time to make time for myself and my thoughts, while at the same time testing the limits of my body and it's a wonderful tool to explore the mind. Another thing I love to do, when I'm feeling a bit more stressed than usual is to write my thoughts down, because often, when I see them infront of me in black and white, I see that these problems can be solved and actually things aren't as bad as I make them out to be in my head. I feel better to have it out of my system and out of constantly circling my mind. For some people it is better to talk to someone to clear their head, or to do sport, make music, art, any sort of thing that helps one relax and unwind can help. There's no one medicin that could cure all.

I mainly just wished to share some thoughts that came up during those lectures, since I do believe than we can't be truly healthy in our bodies, if our minds are not tended to as well and although I don't feel like I've had any serious problems regarding stress or anxiety, then maybe someone reading this has and maybe it'll help somebody...or at least be interesting to read.

Take care,

Kaiela :)