Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make healthy choices. There are certain things we should avoid to have apositive mental health.You’re probably aware that bad habits can make you sick. Eating cheesy sausage eggs every morning and pizza every night will raise your cholesterol, expand your waistline, and possibly cause heart disease.
Just as bad habits can harm your physical health, some bad habits can harm your mental health. These habits, for example, can increase your risk of depression or make you feel more anxious or stressed.
- Perfectionism
The pursuit of excellence is a healthy habit; it is always important to give your all when attempting to achieve a significant goal. Of course, doing something perfectly increases your chances of success, but the need to be perfect at all times can undermine your efforts.
Perfectionism is classified as either positive or negative by psychologists. Positive perfectionism encourages you to do your best – as a perfectionist, you never deliver anything less than your absolute best work. Setting realistic goals, letting go of failures, viewing mistakes as opportunities for growth, keeping anxiety and stress within healthy boundaries, and enjoying the process as well as the outcome are all positive perfectionism habits.
Negative perfection habits include setting standards that are out of reach and being dissatisfied with anything less than perfect.
- Guilt
Guilt has a limited place in society; feeling remorse for a wrongdoing usually prevents a person from repeating the offence.
Guilt often begins in childhood, when you learned to “clean your plate because there were starving children in China” or to act a certain way out of fear that your family would be disappointed in you. The emotional grip of guilt may have matured as you grew older. You may feel guilty about leaving your family to go to work, and then feel guilty about returning home to your family. If left unchecked, you may find yourself in a perpetual state of guilt that prevents you from giving your full attention to anything.
Guilty habits include exaggerating problems, claiming responsibility for problems that had little or nothing to do with you, viewing yourself as a bad person for minor offences, and refusing to forgive yourself.
- Lack of physical activity
Sedentism is bad for your waistline, heart, and, it turns out, your mental health. According to PsychCentral, exercise is “nature’s mood enhancer.”
Regular exercise may alleviate depression by releasing endorphins and other “feel good” chemicals, suppressing immune system chemicals that exacerbate depression, and raising body temperature to create a calming effect. Regular exercise can also boost your confidence, divert your attention away from worries, improve social interaction, and help you cope with life’s stresses in a healthy way.
Exercise irregularly or not at all, exercising to exhaustion, practising bad form, and engaging in only one type of exercise are all bad exercise habits that affect your mental health.
- Co-dependency
Co-dependency impedes your ability to enjoy a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship. According to Mental Health America, families pass down the learned behaviour of co-dependency through generations, so you may have picked up this people-pleasing habit from your parents.
The term “co-dependency” was coined by psychologists to describe partners in chemical dependency, but it is now widely used to describe any one-sided relationship. Co-dependency behaviours include sacrificing yourself to care for another person and putting someone else’s desires ahead of your own.Co-dependencyrobs you of your identity while endangering your health, well-being, and safety.
5.Regret
Regret is another emotional state that is only beneficial in moderation. Everyone has regrets in life, such as not marrying someone, taking a job, or purchasing a car, but regret should not be a daily habit.
According to Psychology Today, regret is more common in cultures where people have more control over their life choices.
With regular practise, regret can become a lifelong rumination on what could have been. Regret can cause depression, anxiety, sleep issues, and difficulty concentrating. According to the findings of a Concordia University study, regret can even have a negative impact on physical health.
