Have you ever taken a formal mental health assessment? Let me tell you, they can be brutally boring. They are of course, helpful and evidence-based tools, but it’s time we all think outside the box a little bit.

But now, it’s time we try something new. We all have our strengths and weaknesses as people, and I think we can learn a lot about ourselves when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zones and try to do hard things. As any assessment does, we need to push ourselves to do things we normally do, and see how we do when we try something that’s uncomfortable (but ultimately good for ourselves).

So, without further ado, here are five activities that I challenge you to do this week. If you can do all of them without issue, then congratulations, you have fantastic mental health according to this unofficial assessment that I made up. If you can’t, then you’ve found an area of life where you have room for growth.

1. Spend ten minutes sitting in silence every day. You could practice meditation, breathing exercises, or something else,
2. Pick someone that you hate or really don’t respect and write down as many positive traits of theirs that you can.
3. Plan and do two unproductive things this week that you enjoy. Have one of them be a solo activity, and one a social activity.
4. Tell three friends something significant about yourself that they don’t already know.
5. Write down five things in which you are below average or have failed at. Then, journal about how it feels to acknowledge this.

I think that everyone can improve their mental well-being just by doing all of the things on this list. If one of them is particularly difficult, then you may have found something to work on in the future! Although therapists like myself are great, you don’t need to work with a therapist to improve your mental health. The truth is, you can keep bettering your life just by doing little things each day for yourself and others, and reading blog posts like this one.

One reason that I made this post is to recognize that often times, we don’t try to improve our mental health, we merely want it to be “not bad.” But, if we only care for our emotional well-being when we’re breaking down, then we’re inevitably going to break down very often. Instead, we need to be proactive and do things that are good for our minds and hearts in the same way that we exercise our bodies even if we’re already healthy.

You probably can do most everything on this list, but there’s usually one thing that challenges our insecurities. However, it might be easy to look at this list and say “Well I know that I can do everything on this list, I don’t need to prove it to myself.” And while you’re probably right that you can do the things, you only get the benefits when you actually put your foot down and do something good for yourself. So, I hope that I’ve sufficiently motivated you with those words; best of luck in your proactive mental health care!

Thank you for reading my practice’s blog, my library of all the random thoughts that would make a terrible book but make
a halfway-decent blog. To request a session or contact me, head to my Scheduling page to get in touch with me today!