21 Mental Health Self-Care Tips: What is your Cow?
Mental health self-care may be elevated to a whole new level with regular Mental Health tune-ups using these twenty-one recommended tips.
Symptoms
If one’s mind is not happy, it will show how unhealthy it is with an onslaught of undesirable symptoms, such as:
- OCD
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Flashing Lights
- Overstimulation
- Uncontrollable tremors
- Feelings of hopelessness
What symptoms do you experience when your mental health is struggling?
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Choosing Mental Health Self-Care
While our society focuses on physical health, the health of the mind is just as important as the health of the body.
Fortunately, there are things we can do on a daily basis to help keep our mental health in check.
Over time I have learned that when I incorporate these five specific habits into my routine, I feel happier, healthier, and more connected:
Five Habits
- Daily exercise: Simple stretches, or a walk around the neighborhood, is enough to increase the healthy hormones in my body and create a sense of emotional balance and stability.
- Prepare and eat nutritious food: Simply prepared food, such as a bowl of berries with yogurt, or a salad with protein on the side, saves time and helps restore my emotional energy.
- Get more sleep: Early to bed and early to rise truly is the answer when it comes to restoring mental health.
- Spend time in nature: Nature is filled with natural rhythm, stillness, and peace. Hiking, gardening, or going on a picnic are ways I’ve benefitted from the healing aspect of nature.
- Connect with others: Social isolation and loneliness not only lead to mental health disorders, but have been linked to increased risk for heart disease and stroke.1 I’ve found that visiting with a friend or family member on a regular basis can make all the difference, both mentally and physically.
Moving in the Wrong Direction
Despite the positive results received from incorporating these five specific mental health self-care habits into my routine, it becomes easy to let my good habits slide.
Suddenly, I find myself sitting for long hours in front of the computer working on a project.
I no longer exercise, and rarely take time to eat.
Zero time is spent outdoors, and too little time with others.
My prayer and scripture study slacken; I don’t spending enough time with God.
My brain gives me warning signals.
This time, I recognize the symptoms and am listening loud and clear.
My mental health requires immediate attention.
What do I do?
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Refocusing
It’s Sunday. Rather than begin the day in the typical rushed manner, I choose to get out of bed, turn on soothing music, make chamomile tea, stretch my muscles, and do deep breathing exercises.
Before church, I pull out a notebook and made a list of specific mental health care ideas that can be incorporate into my daily schedule:
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List of Ideas
- Connect with God: This can simply be offering a heartfelt prayer and reading a few verses in the scriptures, meditating for 2-3 minutes
- Listen to soothing music
- Get plenty of sleep
- Drink chamomile tea
- Spend time in nature
- Develop a new hobby: 199+ Teen hobbies / 70+ Hobbies for Women
- Do deep breathing exercises
- Do stretching exercises
- Take a bubble bath
- Get a massage
- Forgive others
- Connect with others face to face
- Prepare and eat nutritious food
- Do cardiovascular exercise
- Build resilience by learning about my ancestors and the challenges they overcame
- Spend time in places of worship
- Read scriptures and pray
- Take herbal supplements
- Do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Do things that relax my mind, such as reading, writing, crocheting
- Meditate daily
Some ideas I can incorporate daily, others only a few times a week, but I’ve learned from experience that doing them on a regular basis makes all the difference when it comes to the state of my health⎯both physical and mental. These activities also help to prevent overstimulation.
Recommended Mental Health Self-Care Family Activity: 40 Nature Walks: Print and Go
“Joy, hope, faith: these are very potent factors in improving the health conditions—simply because they act upon the sympathetic nervous system, and this latter acts upon the circulation. Happiness dilates the blood-vessels. Fear contracts them. Thus, unbounded faith; renewed hope; sudden joy; enforced will-power; all have a marked effect upon bringing about an equilibriated condition of the circulation—just the same as a hot bath does, though not so rapidly or so perceptibly. Further, we must remember that all disease more or less is a stasis, a congestion, somewhere; we have only to dissipate this; to separate the cells; to expand the part, as it were, and “resolution,” as we call it in congestion of the lungs, takes place. So that it seems to me that we can fairly claim a strictly scientific basis for Mental Healing. I have always, however, maintained that the attitude of the patient’s own mind has much to do with the result: in his consciousness there must be faith and hope in order to get the best effect.”
J. Stenson Hooker, M.D., Source
Responding to Overstimulation
One Sunday, with my mind feeling overstimulated, I wasn’t sure I would be able to attend church.
When my mind is not healthy, it is difficult for me to be around other people, to listen to talks, music, chatter, and miscellaneous noises coming from all directions. The melody of the organ, the friendly hellos from neighbors, the inspirational music, while normally deeply satisfying, can, in these moments, overwhelm the senses.
Perhaps you can relate.
Taking a few minutes for self-care prior to church, however, seemed to make a big difference. I knew that taking a crochet project with me might enable me to make it through two hours of church meetings.
You see, my crochet project was my cow.
Allow me to explain.
The Cow
Have you heard the story of the Cambodian antidepressant?
As the 21st century was beginning, a South African psychiatrist named Derek Summerfield happened to be in Cambodia conducting some research on the psychological effects of unexploded land mines — at a time when chemical antidepressants were first being marketed in the country.
The local doctors didn’t know much about these drugs, so they asked Summerfield to explain them. When he finished, they explained that they didn’t need these new chemicals because they already had antidepressants. Puzzled, Summerfield asked them to explain, expecting that they were going to tell him about some local herbal remedy. Instead, they told him about something quite different.
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The Farmer
The doctors told Summerfield a story about a farmer they had treated. He worked in the water-logged rice fields, and one day he stepped on a land mine and his leg was blasted off. He was fitted with an artificial limb, and in time he went back to work. But it’s very painful to work when your artificial limb is underwater, and returning to the scene of his trauma must have made him highly anxious. The farmer became deeply depressed.
So the doctors and his neighbors sat with this man and talked through his life and his troubles. They realized that even with his new artificial limb, his old job — working in the paddies — was just too difficult, that he was constantly stressed and in physical pain, and that these things combined to make him want to just stop living. His interlocutors had an idea.
They suggested that he work as a dairy farmer, a job that would place less painful stress on his false leg and produce fewer disturbing memories. They believed he was perfectly capable of making the switch. So they bought him a cow. In the months and years that followed, his life changed. His depression, once profound, lifted. The Cambodian doctors told Summerfield: “You see, doctor, the cow was an analgesic, and antidepressant.”
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What is Your Cow?
At certain times in our lives, we each have a “cow”⎯something that will fill an unmet need in our life⎯resulting in a decrease of mental health issues.
Like the man in this story, we sometimes need people to band around us, to listen to us, support us, and help us identify our “cow”.
Other times, we already know what our “cow” is⎯i.e. what we need to resolve the pain (the unmet need) inside.
While sometimes the “cow” includes chemical antidepressants, in addition to lifestyle changes, sometimes the “cow” is simply a change in lifestyle (i.e. habits and attitudes).
On this particular day, my mind needed to rest and heal. My crochet project was my “cow” because crocheting has a way of calming my mind.
Support From Others
So there I was, at church with yarn and hook in hand, listening to the incredible talks and presentations, feeling grateful that I had had the courage to tend to my mental health and bring my crochet project with me to church, rather than stay home and miss the wonderful spirit of the meetings.
Sometimes my children are embarrassed when I crochet in public.
This time, I was so moved by the fact that my daughter, rather than acting embarrassed, carefully unraveled the yarn for me each time I needed more.
She seemed to understand that this was my “cow”, and was there to give me any support she could.
We need more people like that in our lives.
I need to be that for more people in my life.
A day-in-the-life of a relaxing mental health self-care daily routine: Change, My New Friend.
Conclusion
This week, my children and I will be discussing what we can do on a daily basis to care for our minds.
Then I will be visiting with a friend, playing more games with my children, spending time outdoors, reading a good book, taking a bubble bath, and eating more fruits and vegetables.
Why?
So I can lead by example and have the strength and endurance needed to build the Kingdom of God.
If parents don’t teach these lifesaving skills to their children in the home, someone outside the home will step in to teach them other “methods”.
There is no shame in discussing the health of the mind, so let’s do it more often and more openly.
Perhaps the first step is to ask yourself, “What’s my ‘cow’?
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Quotes
Health quotes to inspire and motivate:
”The state of our health affects every facet of our life- our feeling of personal well-being, our approach to work, our social interactions- even our service to the Lord.”
Barbara B. Smith
“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”
Winston Churchill
“No matter how much it gets abused, the body can restore balance. The first rule is to stop interfering with nature.”
Deepak Chopra
“Ordinarily a healthy, vigorous person is in a far better position to work out his own salvation and be an effective instrument in rolling forth the great purposes of diety.”
Bruce R. McConkie
“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.“
1 Corinthians 3: 16-17
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