Five Bad Habits That Can Negatively Affect Your Mental Health
Everyone has a habit they shove under the carpet, hoping to get rid of someday. Many of these habits harm your mental health. With approximately 45 million American adults experiencing mental health issues, it is vital to identify and end these habits to improve your mental wellbeing. Here are a few common bad habits that may be negatively affecting your mental health.
1. Social and Emotional Distancing
Humans are social animals, and the lack of connection or isolation can cause chronic health problems like depression, a sense of loneliness and anxiety. This is why it is vital to stay connected with your loved ones. Although this may be challenging due to distance and the current health crisis, online technological resources like social media and Zoom can help you interact with your friends, while observing necessary precautions.
2. Striving for Perfection
Although we all know that no one is perfect, it’s hard to admit that you don’t want to strive for perfection. And that’s okay! While this pursuit can improve your chance of success, the need to achieve perfection can undermine your efforts. Experts have suggested that there are two sides to perfectionism, positive and negative. Positive perfectionism can push you to deliver your finest on a job. Negative perfection causes you to set an unrealistic target, which only contributes to dissatisfaction, disapproval and failure preoccupation. This causes you to see only mistakes even in favorable circumstances and feel unworthy, which adversely affects your mental health.
3. Smartphone Overuse
The benefits of smartphones include instant borderless communication and providing resources that improve your everyday life. However, over-dependency can trigger an overactive fear of missing out. Mental health experts have raised concerns over excess smartphone usage ,since it can lead to user addiction and obsessiveness.
Smartphone addiction is a genuine problem that people don’t recognize exists. It’s so damaging to your mental health and you may even consider partial hospitalization addiction treatment for it. While perhaps not as severe as traditional addictions in terms of what it does to your physical health, getting professional help is still necessary if your mental is degrading substantially.
4. Holding onto Guilt
Guilt has a unique way of keeping you in the past. The feeling of guilt usually has roots in childhood, where you are forced to live up to a code of conduct. This emotional guilt grip matures as you grow. For example, it is common to see people feel guilty for leaving their family to work. This sense of guilt, when left unchecked, can take the joy out of things you do and leave you in the perpetual guilt state. Letting go may seem impossible, but it is essential to find a way to forgive yourself.
5. Poor Sleep
Sleep is significant for building physical and emotional resilience by offering your brain and body the chance to heal from the day’s stress. Losing just two nights’ sleep can cause you to feel out of focus and wreak havoc on your mental health. Research has linked poor sleep to health problems. While herbs like chamomile, lavender, valerian root and CBD can restore your natural sleep cycle, follow the drug possession laws to ensure that you stay within your jurisdiction’s legal parameters. Seeking advice from a health professional on effective sleep practices and habits also can help.
If you find yourself falling into one of these bad habit traps, take action to stop. And asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.
Note: A reader suggested that I add this helpful article about how email can harm us: https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/email-mental-health-impact/ Thank you, Karen Ferrer!