Have you ever thought about your own mental health? I, for one, have never taken the time to analyze how important it is to feel safe, secure, and in balance and how my mental state has impacted my actions during my lifetime.
We hear so much every day about how it’s necessary to do activities to help us control stress and develop good habits, but it wasn’t until I was given the amazing opportunity to partner with Glasswing International in their mental health program as their Partnership & Marketing Fellow, that I realized how little attention we dedicate to nurturing the correct headspace to function.
Trends like self-care, wellness, and well-being keep rising worldwide, and new apps and software are in development to provide accessible treatment for conditions like anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, which are becoming more and more common as days pass. According to data from the World Health Organization, just in the Western Pacific region, there are more than 100 million people struggling with mental health disorders as we speak.
Having gone through unprecedented difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us were forced to take a step back in our routines or face immense challenges such as sudden sickness or deaths of loved ones, loss of income sources, canceled or failed projects, and for healthcare personnel specifically, extreme and exhausting workloads, that approached rapidly and silently. The world as we knew it, loud and busy, was turned off but our minds kept working on overdrive.
Many of these factors became excuses to avoid grasping reality with social media, games, or forgotten hobbies, while many others were in need of a helping hand.
Panic attacks, mood swings, aggressive thoughts, or extreme crying can indicate there’s something pressing within ourselves that needs immediate attention.
Glasswing’s programming centers on building life skills, such as resilience, and supportive relationships that can significantly minor any potentially violent act related to trauma. Investing in mental health and trauma-informed ecosystems can foster a positive environment and enhance youth development, reduce the possibilities of violent crime occurrence, as well as strengthen bonds between families and communities. For them, the results are visible in migration and violence reduction statistics, especially in Latin America, where their work has been changing lives for 15 years now.
As we learn to identify and treat such conditions, regulate our own emotions, and express discomforts in an empathetic and compassionate manner, we weave a network of responsible and self-aware human beings, willing to advocate for more open and inclusive spaces and amplify the conversation on how to get the inner harmony we all need.
Our brain doesn’t always have all the answers but we can help it digest disturbing times by practicing conscious breathwork, cultivating self-esteem, staying physically and mentally active, growing social connections with others, procuring sleep hygiene, and embracing gratitude as the new normal.
Hero and Thumbnail Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
