5 Ways to Cultivate Mental Health

"That's what sets people in mental health recovery apart," my friend said, "we've been forced to take time to examine ourselves and our lives. Often that makes us very healthy." I looked at him, knowing he was right.

Some of the most self-aware and psychologically healthy people I have met are people living with mental health conditions. How can this be?

Well-being and mental health are more than the absence of mental illness. It's a multidimensional phenomenon including self-awareness, sense of meaning, relationship health, living by one's values, emotional expression, regulation, and more. While a mental health condition can affect parts of these, it is possible to have a high level of psychological well-being while struggling with mental illness just as it is possible to be truly struggling in this area but to have no diagnosable mental health condition.

While not everyone lives with a mental health condition, at any time we are all in varying degrees of mental health. We are constantly negotiating the joys and challenges that come with interacting with ourselves, others, and the world. There are steps all of us can take toward improvement.

Here are five ways anyone can cultivate mental health:

1. Reflection. Sometimes the days pass by without much time for pause. Yet, taking the time to process is key to making sense of things and moving toward what matters to us. This can be done in several ways, meditation, writing, art journaling, or conversation. What is important is that we have space, to be honest with ourselves and reflect.

2. Engaging Curiosity. Curiosity is an excellent indicator of psychological well-being. When we feel safe, we explore. Similarly, satisfying the natural desire to learn and range over our environment is key for our health. Engaging curiosity could be as simple as walking through a park we've never been to or looking through a picture book. Or, it could be a grand action like a vacation or taking a college course. There are infinite ways to be curious.

3. Letting Ourselves Feel. Emotion is in ways inescapable. We can push it away, but it bounces back. Sometimes we feel so much that we can no longer tell what we feel. It is like a kind of anxious mess. Yet often people are afraid to feel. Particularly after a loss or difficult time, we may wonder if we allow ourselves to feel if we will lose ourselves in a river of tears. We won't. Letting the emotion run through us and facing it gives us renewal.

4. Connecting with Other People. Time with others in meaningful conversation, activity, and or presence is something we all need. This is more than a simple, how are you hallway conversation. Taking the time to connect with the people who matter to us is key to our well-being. If you struggle to think of anyone to connect with, know you are not alone. Reaching out to old friends or making new friends through community groups, support organizations, or gatherings can help you to reconnect.

5. Kindness. Practicing kindness gives us a sense of well-being and connection. A meta-analysis of 27 studies investigating the effects of altruism on happiness found consistently that acts of kindness correlate positively with measures of well-being (Curry et al., 2018). Bringing others joy gives us happiness as well.

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