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World Mental Health Day 2021 was acknowledged this week to spotlight the need to focus on well-being, and singer Ariana Grande teamed up with Better Health to give away up to $5 million dollars in free therapy.
Long before the pandemic, most people were struggling in one way or another, across cultures and across the world, with a variety of mental health issues such as stress, anxiety, poor self-esteem, eating issues, and family strife, CNN reported.
Of course, the pandemic only exacerbated many of these problems and introduced others. For example, incidences of eating disorders and alcohol-related liver disease have risen during the pandemic, particularly among young women, Good Morning America reported.
This week, World Mental Health Day was acknowledged by the World Health Organization (WHO) on October 10. The overall objective is to raise awareness of mental health issues and mobilize efforts in support of care.
“The Day provides an opportunity for all stakeholders working on mental health issues to talk about their work, and what more needs to be done to make mental health care a reality for people worldwide,” the WHO says.
Here are a few tips offered by experts toward improving your mental health.
1. Start a daily wellness regimen
Improving mental health starts with taking action. Further, action must be something you take every day. Make daily time for focusing on your daily health. Actions could be things like daily walks, meditation, reading daily affirmations, resisting harmful habits and replacing them with positive ones, and more.
2. Body health supports mental health
There’s an old saying: Garbage in, garbage out. It’s important to support your emotional well-being by enhancing your physical health. That means what you put in your body matters: Food, drinks, drugs, and the information you absorb. All of these have the ability to alter your mental health and positive or negative ways. Choose wisely.
3. Don’t stay in your head
Keeping your focus too much on yourself or what’s going on in your mind can amplify your feelings or emotions. One way to avoid this is to put your attention on serving others. Doing so, often results in your own worries diminishing.
4. Remove unnecessary activities from your life
Busyness is one thing that can amplify stress in one’s life, especially when spreading oneself thin. Things that put extra pressures or burdens on you that aren’t 100 percent necessary might be things you can or should eliminate from your life. Look for ways to streamline your life. It can enhance peace of mind. Social media scrolling is also an activity that is unnecessary and can increase anxiety and stress.
5. Reassess your relationships
Relationships of all kinds can add stress for effective emotional well-being, whether they are physical or virtual. Relationships that are one-sided, toxic, or add pressure in your life one way or the other should be reevaluated. Harmful relationships should be eliminated, and stressful interactions minimized.
In support of World Mental Health Day, Ariana Grande has teamed up with BetterHelp to provide up to $5 million in free therapy. This is the second time in recent months Grande has donated to mental health, giving away $1 million of free therapy with the business in June in a similar campaign.
“I acknowledge that there are very real barriers when it comes to accessing mental health resources, and while this is only one small gesture (and a much larger systemic problem remains) I wanted to do this again with @betterhelp in hopes of bringing access to a few more people and perhaps inspiring a few of you to try something new and prioritize your own healing,” Grande posted on Instagram.
Anyone desiring to sign up for the initiative for free therapy can do so at betterhelp.com/ariana.
