Mind your mind
The mind is the seat of one’s thoughts, emotions, perceptions, memory, behaviors, and automatic functions. Recent research points out that the mind is just not confined to the brain, which is usually acknowledged as the seat of the mind. There is an innate integration between the functioning of the body and the mind. Last week’s focus was on on self-care practices for the body. For a quick refresher, click here. The body-mind connection leads us to this week’s self-care area of focus, which is Mental Self-Care. Mental self-care involves practices that focus on the health of the mind.
So what is a healthy mind? What self-care practices helps one to improve the health of one’s mind? One way of knowing the health of our mind is to be aware of how our mind manifests thoughts, feelings, behavior.
• Healthy Thoughts leads to Healthy Mind
Given our innate capacity to think, we have different ways of perceiving our experiences by the way we think. When a friend doesn’t answer your phone call, you can either think that the friend is ignoring or that the friend is busy. We have the choice to think either positively or negatively about a given situation. For a healthy thought process, it is important to consider relevant available facts about any circumstances before making conclusions. It is necessary to pay attention to our thoughts about ourselves. Negative self-talk limits one’s ability to believe in self. In case you are habituated to self criticism, journal down the thought, and see how it impacts your mental health. If you don’t feel good enough, find a new thought to replace your critical thought. Being aware of one’s self-talk is a self-carepractice for a healthy mind.
• Healthy Feelings leads to Healthy Mind
Feelings are the conscious ways we express our emotions. You could feel happy when your friend answers your phone call or when you think your friend ignored you on purpose, you could feel sad. It is natural for us to feel comfortable expressing a few feelings but feel stuck around others. So how can one find ways to cope up with difficult feelings? One way is to be aware of the feeling and connect to what triggered the feeling. Naming the feeling helps one find ways to express it appropriately and act mindfully. Expressing gratitude, discovering your common emotional triggers, talking to a trusted friend or a therapist are a few self-care practices to process feelings for a healthy mind.
• Healthy Behaviors leads to Healthy Mind
When we encounter difficulties that stop us from achieving what we want, one of the underlying causes could be self-sabotaging behaviors. Common behaviors are procrastination, lack of motivation towards personal goals, lack of self-care practices, blaming others, overcompensating, being constantly stressed, and much more. The roots of such self-sabotaging behaviors are unconscious thought patterns that hold one back. The first step to being aware of this pattern is to take note of how helpful or unhelpful these behaviors are and make specific plans for change. If you notice that you are constantly stressed, it is useful to take a mindful break and do some breathing exercises until you feel calm. All the self-care practices discussed as part of this blog series could also be behavioral changes one can make to develop a healthy mind
About the Author
Jennifer Moses is a Career Guidance Coach at HerSecond Innings and a Counseling Psychologist based out of Bangalore. HSI community members can reach her by making at appointment at Coaching.
Her Second Innings supports women professionals on a sabbatical in their journey of getting back to work. The mission of HSI is to guide women to achieve financial independence. Support from HSI comes in the form of job interviews, reskilling programs in Automation and, free Career Guidance Counselling. Sign up with us and complete your profile to get a call from our counselors to know your job fit.
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