January is Mental Wellness Month. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. In October, we celebrate World Mental Health Day. Needless to say, mental health is a year-round affair. So, why start the year with a grocery list of resolutions that will be forgotten by February?
Instead, here are five sustainable ways to embrace mental wellness throughout all of 2024:
The rhetoric around mental wellness can sometimes feel banal. Get enough sleep, exercise, eat well, blah blah blah. But as the cliché goes— it’s cliché for a reason.
Before you can expand upon your wellness routine, it’s crucial to ensure you have a solid foundation. A nutritious diet with whole foods, a consistent sleep schedule, and a few moments of movement and exercise throughout the week are your first (and strongest) defenses against stress.
Don’t know where to start? Check out these foundational guides:
Once you have a solid routine, you can introduce new habits incrementally. There are endless new things to try that could positively benefit your health. Journaling every day, taking breaks from social media, or committing to getting 10 minutes of sun before breakfast are all popular supplemental habits. However, attempting to do all these things simultaneously and without moderation will only lead to burnout.
Choose one new activity that interests you and commit to doing it regularly for at least one month (ideally two to guarantee it becomes a habit, according to the European Journal of Social Psychology) or until it becomes a habit before introducing the next.1
Does a healthy gut = a healthy mind? Millions of nerves and biochemical signaling connect the gut and brain in the gut-brain axis. In the same way, stress can cause gastrointestinal issues, the latest research suggests the reverse can be true.
Jumpstart your gut health—the foundation of full-body wellness—in the new year with a gut detox. Here are 6 ways to naturally detox in the new year and maintain a healthy microbiome with a daily probiotic.
Humans are naturally prone to catastrophizing, where we imagine a situation to be worse than it is. In times of mental struggle or anxiety, keeping a list of your worries throughout the day can be helpful to compartmentalize your concerns. Rather than ruminating, creating a list of action items can help you visualize your priorities and map out a plan.
When I do this, I often realize my to-do list is much shorter or more trivial than the one I built up inside my head, and I feel more equipped to tackle each item one by one.
Ideally, you surround yourself with people and activities that add value to your life. So why should the accounts you follow on social media be any different?
If you’re going to spend time scrolling (which you should also consider limiting), make sure that time is spent productively. Start the new year by unfollowing any accounts not of people you genuinely care about and who care about you—that means you probably don’t need to follow your ex or the girl who was mean to you in high school. That also means unfollowing the celebrities you hate or the influencers whose lives you envy but are likely fabricated.
Overall, in 2024, we’re leaving behind resolutions and embracing habits. It’s not “New Year, New You.” Instead, it’s “New Day, Better You.”
1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.674
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