2017 was a rough year for a lot of people I’m close to. Job stress, school stress, and the ordinary slings and arrows of outrageously bad luck all took their tolls on us, and the majority of us are coming into 2018 with our fair share of psychological bruising. I can only speak for myself, but I don’t want to start 2018 in a defensive crouch, praying that this coming year will be better than the last one. If I can’t walk confidently into 2018, I’d at least like to head into the new year standing up straight. So I’m making only one New Year’s resolution this year — to take care of my own mental health.

It’s easy to make mental health low on your list of priorities. It’s easy to putter along with things being just ‘OK. You can get a long way on just "OK." Until things stop being "OK," that is, and you realize that if you don’t have the tools to handle "OK," you definitely don’t have a clue how to handle "bad." You might not even know how to recognize "bad" when it’s sneaking up on you. So whether things this year were good, OK, or bad, now is a good time to start making mental health one of your top priorities.

Taking care of your mental health isn’t easy. A lot of people think self-care is doing what feels good, and sometimes it is, but most of the time, taking care of your mental health means making yourself do things that you don’t want to do. It means going out and facing your responsibilities when all you want to do is stay in bed for the rest of the day. It means pushing through discomfort, both psychological and physical. It means asking for help even when you feel embarrassed or ashamed or even scared to do so.

Most of us wouldn’t dream of treating another person the way we treat ourselves. We wouldn’t berate our friends for forgetting something, for failing something, for feeling stressed. We wouldn’t mistreat our family members if they were having a bad day. But we regularly do these things to ourselves, as though responding negatively to our own struggles is somehow going to make them go away. I’m not saying that we have to greet our episodes of "OK" or "bad" with happiness — that’s absurd. But we can do our best not to kick ourselves when we’re down. Once you’re in a "bad" spot, there’s no point in beating yourself up over all the ways you might have been able to prevent it. The only thing you can do is accept where you currently are and try to get better from there.

Trying to move through your life at "OK" without any acknowledgment that there might be trouble on the horizon is like driving a car where one tire has a slow leak. You can ignore the problem for now, and maybe for a little while longer, on your way to where you’re going — but if you break down on some deserted stretch of highway, it’s going to be a lot harder to get back on the road. Pull over now. Put a patch on your leaking tire, or switch it out. Ask someone for help if you don’t know how. Start 2018 on the right track.

Happy New Year!