Summary
Practising mindfulness, engaging in hobbies, and eating well can provide nourishment for your mental well-being.
Firstly, mindfulness techniques including progressive relaxation, loving-kindness meditation, and focusing can benefit the body and mind. Next, hobbies, which can be individual or group activities, reduce procrastination, increase cognitive stimulation, and improve belongingness as well as enhancing coping skills and agency. Lastly, eating can bring happiness in some ways.
Read on to know ways to go about improving your mental health immediately. If you have any comments or questions after reading, you may send them to me.
Just like your car needs you to top up petrol before it can move, your mental health also needs nourishment for it to function well. Instead of waiting for a miracle dropping from somewhere, it is wiser for you to find some ways to improve your lot. There are many ways to nourish your body and mind. We will look at a few here.
Practising Mindfulness Regularly Helps Depression and Anxiety
It is no secret that mindfulness practices can benefit our physical, psychological, social and spiritual well-being. We will explore the psychological aspects here.
First, what is mindfulness?
It is a mental state achieved when we focus on being aware of the present moment by noticing our feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations without judging. For example, you may “see” in your mind when you close your eyes a red-coloured patch. You simply notice the patch and then gently let it pass.
Second, what are some mindfulness methods?
Progressive relaxation is a common body technique. You can start by focusing on your feet. Next, you tighten your feet muscles when you breathe in, and then relax all tension in the muscles when breathing out. Next, you proceed to repeat the tightening and relaxing for the next group of muscles, from ankle to calf, knee, thigh, pelvis, abdomen, chest, shoulder, neck, and finally head.
Another mindfulness technique is loving-kindness meditation which aims to clear the heart. For example, you receive “compassion and forgiveness” into your mind when you breathe in, and then send “compassion and forgiveness” to your loved ones while breathing out.
Focusing on the present is yet another technique. Rather than ruminating about the past or worrying about the future, you take note of your surroundings. Basically, you are mindful of what you see, hear, smell, taste and feel now while breathing in and out.
Lastly, any proofs that mindfulness works?
Of course! A recent research (McCabe & Day, 2021) showed that regularly practising mindfulness outside the therapist’s clinic helped clients in reducing the frequency and intensity of depressive and anxious symptoms. This is because releasing bodily tension, cultivating positive thoughts and emotions, and blocking off maladaptive worries can nourish mental well-being. So, what are you waiting for? Start noticing your breath now!
Engaging in Hobbies Benefits Mental Well-being
What else can you do to nourish your mental well-being?
In case you assume that you can survive on breathing alone, you can actually do more. For example, a case study found that a hobby, such as making bread, introduces deadlines which are an antidote to procrastination (Ball, 2021). You see, people tend to have low productivity when working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic because they waste time worrying about stuff they cannot change, or getting distracted by phone messages. If you are making bread, and you leave the dough to proof on the kitchen table, you will try to finish your work by the time the dough is ready for going into the oven. This helps to organise your time, reduce procrastination, and indirectly improve your sense of well-being.
What if you do not like bread-making?
What other types of hobby are there? The first type: groups or societies such as making music, joining a team sports, ballroom dancing, and volunteering. Another type: individual activities such as drawing, writing, and photography. There are also handicrafts such as sewing, carpentry, collecting, and model-making.
How do hobbies benefit mental health?
Besides structuring your time, hobbies provide distraction, novelty, cognitive stimulation, belongingness as well as enhancing coping skills and agency and (when engaged in as part of a group) provide social support, all of which are positively associated with mental health. Moreover, hobbies can also provide sensual engagement, self-expression, creativity, and relaxation.
In fact, non-medical sources of support within the community (also known as “social prescribing”) such as cultivating hobbies are especially helpful for patients with mild-moderate depression for which traditional medical approaches have not been found to be as effective as for more severe depression (Fancourt, Opher, & de Oliveira, 2020).
Where is the evidence?
It comes from a study of 8,780 adults aged 50+ from England consisting of 55% females. The participants were followed every two years for a period of twelve years.
For participants who were free from depression at baseline and did not have a hobby, taking up a hobby was associated with the maintenance of lower levels of depressive symptoms and a 32% lower odds of developing depression. For those who had depression at baseline and did not have a hobby, taking up a hobby was associated with an improvement in depressive symptoms and a whopping 272% higher odds of recovering from that depression. It also did not matter whether the participants were male or female, had available free time and money, or what types of hobbies they engaged in.
Hobbies are therefore another nourishment for mental well-being. So, start a new hobby or spend time on your hobby now!
Eating Right Benefits Mental Well-being
Is eating your way to better health possible?
Eating your way to better mental health is possible but not so straightforward. The belief that eating improves mood is not entirely true. For example, one study found that carbohydrates do not have a beneficial effect on any aspect of mood. Instead, carbohydrate consumption lowers alertness within 60 min after consumption (Mantantzis et al., 2019). Besides, carbohydrates increase fatigue within 30 min post-consumption. In other words, ‘sugar rush’ is a myth.
Does it mean that eating and mood are unrelated at all?
Well, the relationship is a bit complex. Researchers found that young normal-weight women who “desire[d] to eat when [they were] irritated” reported less sadness and more happiness immediately after eating food subsequent to a process of inducing negative mood in them (van Strien et al., 2019). However, this relationship between positive mood and food intake is only true for those who reported being satisfied with the food eaten. Those who desire to eat when they are irritated are named “high emotional eaters.” In another study, young normal-weight female high-emotional eaters showed that they derived comfort from eating “tasty food”, not just any food, after a stressful task. Contrarily, low-emotional eaters did not show that they benefited from eating tasty food probably because they had poor appetite when stressed. In conclusion, appetizing food do provide comfort specifically for high emotional eaters, at least while eating.
Can we just eat as much as we want in the name of improving mental well-being?
Tasty food can make you happier according to the research discussed above. But can tasty food be nutritious too? We do not want to solve one headache, and then end up with a new headache. Luckily, there are food which are tasty and nutritious. For instance, drinking tea made with 2 g of lavender twice a day, once in the morning and another time at night for two weeks improved the anxiety and depression scores of participants. The study was done by Bazrafshan and his team on elderly participants in Iran in 2020. Thus, lavender tea can be an affordable drink to supplement your medical treatment. Bottoms up!
In short…
To improve mental well-being, you can try to become more mindful of yourself and your surroundings, engage in meaningful hobbies, and eat nourishing food for your body and soul.
I wish you a great start to a better mental health. If you want to more information on this topic, you may contact me.