Shownotes:

Self-care is not just about healthy eating or taking care of your body. Showing yourself some love can also be done on the inside like doing mental hygiene. Every now and then, you need to check on yourself and assess how you deal with stress, what’s going on in your mind and whether it’s healthy for you or not. Do you do mental hygiene? If yes, what kind of cleansing do you do? 

Hello and welcome to The Traveling Introvert. Today I want to talk about mental health and the reason that this has come up is recently I've had a lot of my friends go through some mental health issues for various reasons and I think it's something that doesn't get talked about often enough, but it also makes me introspect and think what do I do for my mental health?

And there are many different ways for people to look after their mental health. And something that isn't brought up enough is mental hygiene. As children we are taught that we need to brush our teeth twice a day and how much toothpaste to put on the toothbrush and the correct way to brush your teeth, which teeth needed a little bit more love and also your tongue and other areas of your mouth and mouthwash, et cetera.

So we get taught also how to clean ourselves. We get taught how to wash, and shower, and bathe ourselves. We get taught that this is good for us and this is what we should be doing to be a good human being. However, when it comes to mental health, I don't think we get taught in the same way if at all how to look after ourselves mentally. And this is becoming more and more of an issue. Not only due to the way life is now, but the things that we do and the way we do things, our life is very different from how it would've been 50 or a hundred years ago. We deal with a lot of technology. Our life is much more fast-paced to then it used to be, there is a lot of outside influence, a lot of things that happen that are more reactionary and we don't do things in the same way.

You know when your email goes off, your phone goes off you jump straight away like Pavlov's dog when that sort of a thing happens. But you know, a hundred years ago that wasn't really a thing. And so having this constant bombardment of information, and things, and notifications leads our brains to be wired up slightly differently. And also the expectations that are set upon us societally how we're supposed to deal with things. What is a good or bad way of dealing with something is taught in a really interesting way, but it's not taught necessarily directly.

You're not taught directly how to take care of yourself mentally. You are taught directly how to brush your teeth but you're not taught directly by your parents, "Hey, meditation might be a good thing to do." Or examining why you do things and what your triggers might be. So what I think is a great idea is to set aside some time and think about what mental health or mental hygiene might mean to you and how you would like to achieve that.

And also how you've seen it with other people, what they've done, what they've tried to do and maybe failed at. And it's okay because you won't always know what works for you mental health wise, and that might change over time or when something happens. I know definitely there was an incident that I had last year that changed my view on a lot of things because of what had happened and so I then had to try and deal with that and I'm still dealing with that and that's fine. That's okay. Don't expect everything to be solved straight away.

That's the other problem right now is the instant gratification thing. Yes, you can go to therapy, but you you should only go once or twice and then you should be fine. And that's not the case. Sometimes healing takes years and that is okay. So I'd love to know listeners, what is it you do for your mental health.

Do you spend 20 minutes a day writing a journal? Do you spend 10 minutes coloring? Do you meditate? Do you do yoga? Do you speak to a therapist? What works for you and why is it important? And is it something that you used to do and you stopped doing and you'd like to take it up again?

Because just like brushing your teeth and showering, mental health, you shouldn't just deal with it when something happens. There should be constant care and attention, even if it's once a every six months that you go to a therapist just to talk it out. And yes, your friends semi-count as therapists, but they're not professionals. So I'd love to know what you do for your mental health. And if you don't do something now, what you would like to do before the end of the year. Thank you for listening. This is Janice from The Career Introvert, helping introverts launch, their podcast with limited overwhelm.