Three Helpful Tips To Manage Your Mental Issues
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Health and Wellness

Three Helpful Tips To Manage Your Mental Issues

These three have helped me, so I am sharing them to you.

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Three Helpful Tips To Manage Your Mental Issues
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It has been a year and a half since I first started seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist after having a mental breakdown in front of my friends. Since then, my mental behavior has improved greatly, and things have been looking up.

I find it important for everyone, especially my generation (millennials), to improve on their mental condition. I believe everyone has a worth, and they have the ability to recover. However, it is okay to get help. Sometimes, we cannot pick ourselves up, and we need someone or something to push us up.

Prior to my therapy and psychiatry, I knew I had problems, but I thought I could improve by myself. I was stubborn, but for many years, it became worse and much more unhealthy. My tantrums become explosive, my anxiety became unbearable, and my depression became extreme. I was not fond of people when they did things I did not appreciate or that made me jealous. I started to have a problem with valuing people. It made me flip-flop, become suspicious, or turn away from friends. I had a close-minded approach to situations, and if they do not go my way or my type of ideal, I got uncomfortable and upset. At the same time, I did not want people to see my burst of rage and anger. It made me feel like a monster and isolated. In contrast, I was anxiety prone. I always hated the way I looked and my height (5'2). I always thought of how people would perceive me. Along with that, I was not great at speaking in public or talking to people. I had a broken accent, and my diction was awkward. A couple of times during presentations, I would back out to do it another time. When I could not do that, I started to choke and become dizzy. However, fortunately, I walked out on a presentation once. All these aspects made me hate myself and feel worthless. Many sleepless nights and one small meal per day were much darker times. Words such as death, suicide, worthless, alone, and depression kept popping in my head. The only way to sleep was to cry because it tired me out. I was diagnosed with anxiety disorder, mood disorder, and major depression.

No more.

Mental illness does not discriminate anyone. Everyone has different experiences, reactions, situations, etc. It does not mean you are weak at all. If you are still reading this, and you are suffering through dark times, I applaud you for being brave and strong. You are your biggest challenge, yet you are still facing it head on. I say to you, do not give up! I am rooting for you.

If all other solutions are lost, there are three tips I learned for a while and found helpful that managed my mental illness. No particular order.

1. Patience

It is sort of overused, but it is actually the most difficult tip to follow. Not many people managed to learn the thought process of patience. Sometimes, people have patience, but later, cannot keep it up. They simply lose their patience of being patient.

The meaning of patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.

For many years, I kept on losing my cool and having explosive, violent tantrums. I reacted first instead of thinking all the time. It affected me and everyone around me negatively. Upon therapy, I developed my own method to manage my behavior and mood issues. With patience, it allows me to become less angry and sad. If there is a situation that makes me upset or uncomfortable, the idea of patience will allow me to accept what is happening. Basically, what I am saying is that it is pointless to lose your cool on something that will go away in the future. Do not waste your energy on that. With that, this allows me to assess and examine the situation further and make smarter decisions.

This is the hard part. What I am not saying is to conceal your emotions. The idea is that, there are some situations where you could lose your cool; however, it may not be necessary. The key is control. If it is a situation where you can control it, it is not best to lose your cool. That will obviously lose your control. As I mentioned, patience allows you to assess the situation to make you come up with smarter solutions.

Overall, with patience, you gain control. With control, you gain peace. With peace, you gain power.

2. Go With The Flow

Most of the time when we are anxious, we expect something to be done the way we want it to be. Expectations can lead to anxiety. When we expect too much, we are much more anxious. We are scared to fail. When our expectations do fail, we become upset and sad. Along with patience, having little expectations and going with the flow in life could go a long way for you.

I am not saying to lower your abilities or standards. What I am saying is that, in certain situations, you should not expect too much out of it. You should just go with the flow, regardless of what result appears. Hey, you might even be surprised, and everyone loves surprises.

For example, if you are planning a date with someone, and you expect things to go smoothly and according to plan, chances are you will fail. You will constantly be anxious on keeping according to plan. You will get uncomfortable when they fall through. You will also get upset. These behaviors you will exhibit will eventually upset your date and make him or her not feel special. I am sure you watch a good amount of television shows that have dates like this and/or experienced this. The best thing to do is to go with the flow. Never mind how the plan will go through, just be in the moment. Being in the moment allows you to improvise situations that may occur right on the spot. This will help you adapt to situations. When you plan things out, and they do not go through, you will feel lost and confused.

Another example is public speaking. You are anxious most likely because there are 20+ pairs of eyes looking at you. You are expecting success and fearing failure. You are scared of the judgment of people. You are not sure if your information is correct or if you are speaking perfectly. The solution is to go with the flow. Do not expect what the outcome is. Remember Shia Labeouf with the "JUST DO IT?" Aside from the comedic and meme side to it, he has a point. He basically wants you to go with the flow and do it. It does not matter if your information is right or wrong or you cannot speak perfectly. All that matters is that you are doing it. Your voice is speaking, and that itself is power. You will soon realize that when you just start speaking without expecting success, failure, judgment, etc., it will become much easier for you. Situations like that will help you adapt to on-the-spot pressure moments and improve your ability to pull through. You got this. You probably will not understand much, but if you are put in a situation similar to these two, just remember: DO IT.

You are getting so much with just going with the flow. You are improving your mental behavior and adaption to environments and situations. And you are realizing surprises make you more curious. I think that is what I am trying to say. Going with the flow will make you more curious in life to see what more surprises come at you.

3. Accept Your Emotions

It is a bit weird and probably contradicting, but accepting your emotions is a good step to improving your mentality. I believe that many of us (not all) constantly try to deny or subdue our emotions because we are scared to feel them. We do not want to be depressed or anxious. However, the concealment of emotions can eventually burst out if you do not let them out. By accepting them, you have more power to control them. When you feel sad or angry, you should let yourself feel the emotions. I believe that allowing yourself to feel them when they are present will help you get over them faster. Not only you are not bottling up your emotions and letting them burst, you are not allowing them to control your thoughts and actions.

This is tricky, but I will do my best for you to understand. When you bottle your emotions up, eventually, they will burst. You start to lose control of your emotions and actions. You basically have some sort of breakdown. However, if you allow yourself to feel the emotions rather than subduing it, you still have some control over yourself and your emotions. You are able to think things out and have assessments over the situation. Eventually, you probably find being angry or sad boring or tiring, and it is time to move on. It has worked for me, but I'm not sure if it will work for you. However, do use it to your advantage.

A downgraded anger is much better than a violent and uncontrollable burst of anger. Not many people need this tip because they probably have their own methods. However, this is a method I found useful that I am sharing to you guys.

Overall, we all have some sort of mental issues or illnesses. Some are small while others are hard to control. Regardless, these three tips that I am sharing to you guys that have been great benefits for me and some of my friends. They may seem interchangeable or related, but that is okay.

With patience, you can control situations and emotions that you may have unnecessarily exhibited.

Going with the flow will help you adapt to situations last minute, lower anxiety, and increase your curiosity in life.

Accepting your emotions may prevent or lower mental breakdowns, tantrums, or burst of emotions.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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