Coping with Mental Health

Coping Skills for Your Mental Health & Mental Wellbeing

Coping skills are strategies that help people deal with mental health challenges in order to achieve positive mental health and wellbeing. The techniques vary, depending the type and the severity of mental illness. It may be hard to make the first step. But coping skills are not given. They are choices. They are habits that can be built over a period of good practice!

Common coping skills can include:

Noticing tension and taking deep breaths to reduce it
Catching negative thoughts and replacing them with healthy ones
Setting and maintaining appropriate and healthy boundaries between you and others
Relaxing with aromatherapy
Distressing with soothing activities like colouring, reading, etc.
Eating healthy
Sleeping the right amount
Finding things that make you grateful
Creating little moments of joy in each day

Coping skills don't necessarily remove stress or eradicate challenges like mental illness, but they go a long way toward helping people function well despite challenges.

Simple Tips Worth Incorporated into Your Daily Life

Common self-help suggestions do help; useful and work for many people. However, other proven methods aren’t mentioned as often. Many of them are quick and simple techniques that can easily be added to daily routines. Start your own personal coping skills to take charge of your thoughts, feelings, and actions to combat mental illness based on the guideline below!

Radical Acceptance
Accepting is the first step to recovering. By definition, radical acceptance means “completely and totally accepting something from the depths of your soul, with your heart and your mind."

Life is unpredictable. And that's the beauty of it. Most of the time, we don't have the control over the situation. For example, imagine a tornado is coming your way. Obviously, you can’t do anything to stop the tornado; that’s not possible. But if you accept the fact that it’s coming, then you can act, prepare and keep yourself safe. If you sit around trying to will the tornado to stop or pretend that there is no tornado, you’re going to be in real trouble when it comes.

The same applies to mental illness. You cannot change the fact that you have a mental illness, so any time you spend trying to “get rid of it” or pretend it doesn’t exist is nothing but draining you, wasting valuable energy. Accept yourself. Accept your condition. Then take the necessary steps to take care of yourself.

Deep Breathing
Breathing is an annoying cliché at this point, but that’s because the best way to calm anxiousness really is to breathe deeply. Meditation is a good practice to start with. But if you don't have the time, try the "5 3 7" breathing rhythm:

Breathe in for 5 seconds
Hold the breath for 3 seconds
Breathe out for 7 seconds

This gentle repetition sends a message to the brain that everything is okay (or it will be soon). Before long, your heart will slow its pace and you will begin to relax—sometimes without even realising it.

Opposite-to-Emotion Thinking
This refers to an act in the opposite way your emotions tell you to act. Say you’re feeling upset and you have the urge to isolate. Opposite-to-emotion tells you to go out and be around people—the opposite action of isolation. When you feel anxious, combat that with something calming like meditation. When you feel manic, turn to something that stabilises you.

This may be hard to start. But fear not! You will improve your skills as time being!!!

The 5 Senses
Use your physical space to ground you through a crisis. Instead of focusing on a specific object, with “The 5 Senses” you run through what each of your senses is experiencing in that moment.

As an example, imagine a depressive thought comes on in the middle of class. Stop! Look around you. See the movement of a clock’s hands. Feel the chair beneath you. Listen to your teacher’s voice. Smell the faint aroma of the chalkboard. Eat a mint to refresh your breathe and mind.

Running through your senses will take only a few seconds and will help keep you present and focused on what is real, stay in present and leave the bad memories in the past.

Mental Reframing
This involves involves taking an emotion or stressor and thinking of it in a different way. Take, for example, getting a bad grade in end-of-unit assessment. Sure, you could think to yourself, “Wow, my life is horrible. I'll never be able to get a good score ever again. Why am I so stupid?"

Or you can reframe that thought, which might look something like, “I didn't do well in this particular test, but now I know my weaknesses and rooms for improvement. Blaming myself won't help. Neither can it improve your score, nor does it help you fully understand the course. So, I will make sure to remember the correct knowledge for my own sake!"

Perfecting this technique can literally change your perspective in tough situations. But as you might imagine, this skill takes time and practice.

Emotion Awareness
If you live in denial of your emotions, it will take far longer to take care of them. Because once we recognise what we’re feeling, we can tackle it or whatever is causing it. So, if you’re feeling anxious, let yourself be anxious for a couple of minutes—then meditate. If you’re feeling angry, let yourself be angry—then listen to some calming music. Be in touch with your emotions. Accept that you are feeling a certain way, let yourself feel that way and then take action to diminish unhealthy feelings.

We can’t control that our mental illness, but we can control how we respond to your symptoms.

Treatment for Mental Illness

Your treatment depends on the type of mental illness you have, its severity and what works best for you. In many cases, a combination of treatments works best.

Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy, also called talk therapy, involves talking about your condition and related issues with a mental health professional. This is the first step in dealing with mental illness of all type. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists are trained to inform you about your condition and your moods, feelings, thoughts and behaviour. With the insights and knowledge you gain, you can learn coping and stress management skills.

There are many types of psychotherapy, each with its own approach to improving your mental well-being. Psychotherapy often can be successfully completed in a few months, but in some cases, long-term treatment may be needed.

When choosing a therapist, you should feel comfortable and be confident that he or she is capable of listening and hearing what you have to say. Also, it's important that your therapist understands the life journey that has helped shape who you are and how you live in the world.

Treatment Programme

There are a number of effective treatments for mental illnesses of all kinds. You may need to explore a few different treatment options to find the one (or ones) that are right for you.

Some of the most common treatments include:

Behavioural therapy involves a number of interventions that are designed to help the person unlearn maladaptive behaviours while learning adaptive behaviours.
Cognitive therapy helps people identify distortions in thinking and understand how these distortions lead to problems in their lives.
Interpersonal therapy focuses on improving interpersonal relationships. This includes family, friendships or marriage.

Medication

Although psychiatric medications don't cure mental illness, they can often significantly improve symptoms. Psychiatric medications can also help make other treatments, such as psychotherapy, more effective. The best medications for you will depend on your particular situation and how your body responds to the medication.

Some of the most commonly used medicines include:

Antidepressants for depression and anxiety
Anti-anxiety medication for anxiety disorders
Mood-stabilising medication for bipolar disorders
Antipsychotic medications for psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia

They are used to improve sadness, hopelessness, lack of energy, difficulty concentrating and lack of interest in activities.

Support Groups

Sharing your own feelings, struggles and stories can help you become more open about your status. Thus, one of the ways to deal with mental health problems is gain support and encouragement from people dealing with similar experiences. This companionship does not only benefit you, but also encourage others to be more open towards their mental health problems.

Make sure the group fosters a positive and healing environment. If the group seems too negative or focuses heavily on complaining instead of getting better, you may want to find a different group.
You can consider joining an online support group if meeting face-to-face is too difficult or not convenient for you.
Ask your mental health professional for a reference or any useful suggestions