Mental health is gaining traction. People are gaining awareness. Keeping your mind sharp and healthy is beginning to become as important as it should be.
Caring about mental health for yourself and others is complicated. Everyone ticks a little bit differently and it can get frustrating.
How then, do we care for the collective mental health of humanity?
How To Care
Listen. That is it. That is really all that you have to do. People just want to be heard. I really cannot stress this enough. Acknowledgment, understanding, empathy. Learning how to do that is the question. It sounds really simple, right? How to listen though, for real is a little more complicated. There is a technique called active listening that refers to not doing anything other than listening. We are all guilty of this. Someone is talking to us and we are formulating how we are going to respond instead of really just listening and understanding. Active listening involves body language, eye contact, and a real effort to see past your own point of view.
Caring For Mental Health
Other people will notice this. It is an intangible part of the human psyche that can just tell when someone is listening on this level. This will show that you care about the mental well-being of the person you are talking to. Mental health and simply showing you care about people go hand in hand. This is a one for all type of attitude. Everyone wants to live a life how they want to. As is their prerogative. However, to ensure that everyone can live their life to the fullest, we need to work together.
How To Care For The Collective Mental Health
This might sound like a crazy task. Let me make it more simple. Simply doing something for no reason is such an important thing. Giving a homeless person change, telling someone they look nice today. Even telling someone “good job”. Positive reinforcement is so powerful and beneficial to someone’s mental health. Then they pass it on. Exponential mental health growth has now occurred. I cannot stress enough how important it is to just be nice to others. No links on this post can explain this or help with this. We all know what is nice and what is not nice. It is a matter of putting forth the effort to make people feel better. I can guarantee you that you will make someone’s day. And that will in turn make your day better.
The Bottom Line
Caring about your mental health and other’s mental health is a team game. Work together and spread the wealth to improve our mental health. This goes for anyone by the way. Any person can do this for another person and vice versa. Just compliment someone, tell them “thank you”, tell them you appreciate what they did. Let’s be the change that we want to see.
I know when my mom entered her late 50s, she started asking the same question more than once as she just didn’t remember asking the question. So for me, I am always trying to work my brain and I take supplements. I don’t want to lose my memory. I am just turning 60, so I know that keeping my mind sharp now is important.
Hi Leahrae!
Thank you so much for sharing that story. It is so important to always take care of yourself no matter what. Losing memory is something that scares me too because life is so amazing to live and I want to remember living it. Absolutely for sure, that’s awesome to hear! Take care and keep on keeping sharp.