With the year wrapping up, you may find that even though the holiday season can be chock full of great memories and feel super exciting for the kids, all of the stress and anxiety you’ve felt throughout the year may be finally unloading itself onto your brain.
Heading into a new year, forget the New Year's goals that are directly related to finally joining a gym or starting a new business. Instead, let’s set some goals about actually making ourselves happy and fulfilled from the inside out. And that starts with achieving optimal mental health.
More from LittleThings: 5 New Year's Resolutions That Have Nothing To Do With Losing Weight
Our mental health affects everything in our lives, from our core relationships to how we handle stress and interact with people to how we center ourselves. If we’re not taking care of our mental health on a daily basis, everything can start to unravel until we’re just a shell of our former selves.
So let’s get real about it and investigate six New Year's goals directly related to achieving optimal mental health.
1. Set the goal of finding yourself a good therapist you can actually talk and connect with.
If you’re someone who struggles with depression, anxiety, or any other kind of mental health challenges that need attention and care, seeing a good therapist who can help teach you the proper tools and behaviors that will get you out of those negative thought processes can be truly life-changing.
Not every therapist-and-patient relationship is created equal, though. Sometimes we can meet with a psychologist but even after sitting through a few sessions, there’s just no way of crossing over from uncomfortable to helpful and open territory.
So, even if you strike out on the first or second try, mark finding a good therapist that you can talk and connect with on a real human level at the top of your list, because it can often become the first big step in taking charge of your mental health again and making it a real priority.
2. Always set getting a good night’s sleep as a top priority.
Similar to how we need food and water to survive, sleep also needs to be a priority due to its restorative function. Think about those days or weeks when you’ve been stressed out or stayed up too late trying to get everything done and woken up the next day feeling even worse.
Often, when you feel properly rested and bright, it can help you work through any emotional issues in an easier fashion, and you’ll have better concentration and problem-solving skills for work and parenting.
So, even if it doesn’t feel 100% natural for you, if good sleep is hard to achieve, try to set a bedtime each night, even on the weekends, and stick with it. Make your bedroom as dark as you can, set the thermostat down a couple of notches, and leave your phone in another room. If you’re still having trouble falling asleep, you might want to try a warm bath in the evening hours or some reading or meditation to slow the mind right down.
3. Find solid stress management techniques that legitimately work for you when life gets rough.
Unfortunately, life is always going to be stressful to some degree. Whether that includes family priorities or work stuff, there is likely always going to be something that causes those stress hormones to rise on a regular basis.
When you think about stress and how it can directly link to poor mental health, there’s definitely something to be said about finding constructive stress management techniques that allow your mind to get back to a positive mindset.
For some people, a good stress management technique is moving their bodies on a daily basis. This can mean anything from a 20-minute walk on your lunch break to setting aside a full hour to hit the gym or a workout class.
For other people, their idea of stress management is getting together with their friends once or twice a month to indulge in some yummy foods and lighthearted conversation. Others might need to journal once a day in order to properly binge those anxiety-ridden thoughts and feelings.
However you attempt to handle your stress, make sure that these techniques leave you feeling lighter and ready to take on whatever life has in store.
4. Take one day a week to prep brain-healthy meals because our bodies, including our minds, need the right kind of fuel to thrive.
Whether the idea of meal prep excites you or not, it can be really helpful to your mental health if you set aside one day a week to get into the kitchen and prepare a range of meals you can stick in the fridge or freezer that not only taste good but will also help your brain properly function.
For some breakfast meal prep, you could do a batch of egg bites with spinach and roasted red peppers and freeze them in packs of two so they’re super easy to get out and heat up in the morning.
Salmon has been known to boost brain development and help ease inflammation, so cooking up some salmon fillets with a side of rice and leafy greens can be a really easy meal to prepare and store for the week.
Or a good vegetable soup filled with hearty beans that give you extra iron and fiber will give you sustenance and you won’t have to feel that rush of anxiety that can often pop up when you’re super hungry and don’t have anything good to eat in the fridge.
5. Put your phone away at 7 p.m. each night.
Not only will putting your phone in a different room to charge at the end of each day help to improve your sleep because your brain won’t feel overstimulated right before bed, but you will likely reap other rewards that will further improve your mental health.
For example, if you’re someone who likes to spend an hour each night scrolling through social media, you might find your mind reeling afterward because your life doesn’t look like any of the influencers online or simply because you just wasted a precious hour of your evening when you could have been doing something productive.
Especially when you’re someone who has to spend a fair amount of their time online, when you make the deliberate choice to set aside your phone at the end of the workday, you will likely find that your mind can let go of that stress that’s often connected to being our devices.
You’ll feel a little lighter, and then you can either put your time and energy into things that bring you actual joy or even tick off a task or two that you’ve been putting off and find yourself feeling a sense of accomplishment.
6. Don’t be afraid to set a new boundary and say no to something that doesn’t serve you.
When you’re a parent or a partner, there are a lot of things that arise during your daily life that just seem to rest on your shoulders, and you might feel as though you just need to agree to them even if you don’t have the time or energy. These things can often lead to feelings of stress and anxiety or even resentment if you really wanted to say no but felt as though you didn’t have a choice.
The really great part about putting your mental health first and making it a priority is that you will start to learn that setting firm boundaries and saying no to things does not make you a bad person. You are no less of a mother, partner, friend, daughter, or person if and when you have to say no to something that you simply cannot adequately fit into your already jam-packed schedule.
Beginning the practice of saying no and setting boundaries may cause some friction at first, but in the end, you should be left feeling less stressed and more assertive and focused, and those around you will learn that you’re only human. Some days and weeks you can only handle a finite amount of what’s already on your plate, and that’s perfectly OK.
