Prioritize your mental health before things get hectic!
By: William
The holidays can be a wonderful time of year, but they can also be a time when mental well-being is at the greatest of perils. Finances may drop low, family members may clash and cause stress, and you may find yourself unable to put into words what is disconcerting you so deeply, either due to shame or fear. But you need not be either of those things, as I have some tips that should help make the holidays a slightly more peaceful time. Keep your chin up, because all will be well!
1. Budget Carefully
One of the biggest stress factors in my life is financial stability. If you’re a younger student and you have your own money for the first time, it is incredibly easy to go wild and spend money on things you’ve always wanted, until you eventually don’t have enough to cover rent, your school fees, or even food. Lack of money can lead to both physical and mental stress, so if you want to avoid those, you have to budget carefully.
When it comes to budgeting, I follow two rules of thumb. The first is to ask myself, “Will I actually use this?” It’s a matter of self-control; you may think you have a purpose for an item when in reality it’ll probably be used once or twice before being tucked into a drawer or under a large pile of clothes. The second question I ask myself is, “How much time will it take to earn the money back?” An expensive dinner or a new piece of technology may prove beneficial to you, but if you cannot recoup the cost, you may find yourself in the red and regret your purchase. It is all about practicing discernment; prioritize what you know you need to pay (food, bills, school fees), and triple-guess any frivolous purchases made for vanity or entertainment.
2. Talk to Someone You Trust
People are not meant to be alone, and communication is a uniquely human capability that was not built only for convenience, but for survival. If you are having troubled thoughts or feelings, dealing with it all alone can be an overwhelming and insurmountable task; but sharing those thoughts with a willing soul can help alleviate your concerns. We often keep our troubling thoughts to ourselves because we think no one will relate to us, and that we will appear strange or incorrect to them. But remember this fact; you have never dealt with something that someone else has not dealt with before. Despite what you may feel about yourself, your actions, or how you think you deserve to be treated by others, I want to tell you that you are completely normal and are by no means a failure.
Of course, there are various types of people you can talk about your concerns with. Close friends and trusted family can be a good start, as these are people who know you and presumably want the very best for you. But professional help can offer something that friends or family cannot; an explanation. Professionals are trained to explore the reasons why you feel the way you do, and that second-hand explanation can help you see yourself or your situation in a new light you would have never considered otherwise. And I shall repeat this one more time; no matter what you are dealing with, you are normal.
3. Analyze Your Surroundings
One challenge to your mental health is being trapped within one’s own thoughts. Reality may seem to fade away as you stumble through what feels like a dream, the only reality you’re experiencing is the one you craft in your head. But oftentimes what is in our head is different from the truth, and it is important that we realign ourselves with the realities of the world and don’t lose our way via unneeded despair. One way to deal with this is to simply look at your surroundings, and I mean this in the most literal way possible.
A game I play to keep myself in check with reality is to look at random objects in my surroundings, and simply say what they are. “That is a red car. That is a pine tree. That is a neon ‘Open’ sign,” etc. This activity serves two purposes; it removes you from your own thoughts to instead consider the outside world, and it makes you think in non-abstract terms unrelated to time. That second point is important because many of the concerning thoughts we tend to have are rather abstract—stressing about abstract numbers in our bank accounts or in our grades, worrying about future scenarios which will probably never happen, fighting abstract thoughts of fear and self-loathing relating to the past. This activity simply replaces those thoughts with more concrete ideas, things that cannot be made abstract unless you wish to paint them. But don’t do that, simply look at them and say what they are out loud.
Dealing with mental health challenges can be terrifying. The most dangerous facet of them is that they attack our ability to be logical; the reason that telling someone who has depression to “snap out of it” doesn’t work is because the very thing that processes how we perceive the world and ourselves is malfunctioning. It’s easy to think that you’re a bad or lazy person for suffering from these things, leading to a self-destructive spiral that only screws your life up even more and which you allow simply because you have resigned yourself to “fate.” But that is not how fate works, and poor mental health is not an immediate determiner of it. With the help of other people’s compassion and compassion towards yourself, you can not only live a happy life but have a genuinely wonderful holiday.
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