Self Care For Mental Illness – A small disclaimer: My site is for educational purposes only, not a substitute for professional treatment or healthcare. The resources here are not intended to be comprehensive and are not presented as “medicine” in any way. There are many factors that affect mental health, and I strongly recommend that you seek professional help if you are constantly struggling with your mental health. This page is designed to simply give you a starting point to think about your mental health and to give you some resources you can use to help you be intentional about taking care of your overall mental health.
I’ve created a little “Mental Health Self-Care Guide” to encourage us to be more aware of activities that can help us calm our mind and body and bring us peace.
Self Care For Mental Illness
See how much you can make in a month. Challenge yourself to do one thing a day to take care of your mental health.
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It’s easy to get busy during the day and let endless tasks take priority over self-care. But neglecting our mental health eventually catches up with us, and can lead to mental health problems (ask me how I know 😉). Do you know the signs of increasing stress? Can you tell when your body is overloaded? Are you aware of your daily habits and how they can affect your overall mental and physical health? Are you aware of your daily rhythms and routines and how they can affect your mind and body? Do you feel how you feel so you can recognize every pattern in your mood?
Taking a few minutes to assess how you really feel can help you identify ways to improve your overall mental health.
Paying attention to how you feel can help you identify your mood patterns. It can help you identify activities or habits that affect your mental health – both positively and negatively. Are you tired when you eat a lot of sugar? Do you feel happy when you are with other people? Or maybe those days are worrying? Paying attention to your feelings and the things that affect your mood will help you take better care of your overall health.
Mood tracking lasts for 31 days. Assign your colors to each emotion/feeling and then color your garden with flowers each day based on how you feel that day.
Mental Health Self Care Kits
Another mood tracking for 30 days. Assign your colors to each emotion/feeling, then color the rays of the sun each day based on how you felt that day. This page also doubles as a coloring page, which is another calming exercise on those stressful days.
One big thing we’ve learned on this mental health journey is the importance of breathing, and how important it is to slow down and take deep breaths when anxiety and panic start to rise.
There are many breathing exercises (just google and you will find countless sources). One that I recently discovered and love is the breath prayer.
Breathing Prayers combines deep breathing exercises with meditative prayers on God’s Word to help you calm your body and focus your mind on truth.
Self Care Alphabet
When you feel anxious or panicked, your nervous system kicks in, increasing your heart rate and triggering rapid, deep breathing that can lead to gasping for air. Breathing is part of your thoughts. What you think affects how you breathe. Focusing on negative thoughts and worries can increase feelings of anxiety and panic, making it difficult to control your breathing.
Deep breathing exercises help your parasympathetic nervous system, slow your heart rate and breathing, and help you calm down. And when you turn your mind from negative worries to the Truth, you can begin to calm your mind, change your feelings, and “let God change you into a new person by changing the way you think.” (Romans 12:2)
(Read more about Breathing Prayers, including instructions on how to do them, in this post: Breathing Prayers)
Breath as a Prayer will walk you through the practice and proven health benefits of Christian breath prayer: purposeful prayers centered on Scripture that focus your mind on Christ while keeping your body focused on intentional breathing.
Self Care For Mental Health 10846827 Vector Art At Vecteezy
Taking care of your mind and body is an important part of taking care of your overall health. This guide is full of self-care ideas to help you when you’re feeling anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, scared or down.
There are two color options for the print (one with a white background and one with a blue background)…choose your favorite and print it and hang it on your bathroom mirror, put it on your nightstand, or stick it above your inspiration table for priority. your mental health every day.
Fun idea: Collect some self-care products for a friend and add them to the print for a cute self-care gift.
Print a 6×6 art print to hang above your desk, hang on your bathroom mirror, or even wrap as a self-care gift for a friend.
Arts + Wellness Forum: Self Care And Mental Health
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed, one way to calm your mind is to practice some mindfulness techniques.
Mindfulness helps you focus on time. Research has shown that mindfulness can help reduce anxiety and depression. Mindfulness involves learning to respond to stress by increasing awareness of what is happening in the moment…not worrying about the future or worrying about the past, but focusing your mind and awareness on the present moment.
One way to do that is by focusing on your 5 senses: what you SEE right now, FEEL right now, hear right now, smell right now, and even taste right now.
Combining deep breathing exercises with mindfulness can help reduce anxiety and calm the mind and body during stressful times.
Self Care Is Important At Every Age
There are two print color options: one with a white background and one with a green background. Print your favorite one and hang it on the bathroom mirror, put it on the bedside table or put it on the table.
Feeling stressed at times is a normal part of life. We’ve all felt nervous, restless, or tense when navigating or anticipating life events. Upcoming exams or assessments, unplanned activities or unpleasant situations can make us anxious. We all know what it feels like to worry, whether it’s about the future or finances or about our children, we can all get worried from time to time.
For a person with an anxiety disorder, however, this feeling of anxiety is constant, intense, and seemingly uncontrollable. If there is excessive, irrational fear of everyday situations, it can be disabling. It can interfere with daily life and even prevent them from participating in activities or going to places that increase these feelings.
Anxiety disorders can be caused by a number of risk factors, including genetics, brain chemistry, personality, and life events. There are no easy answers or quick fixes when it comes to dealing with anxiety disorders, because the causes and symptoms vary among individuals and situations. But there are strategies and tools that can help reduce feelings of anxiety and help you take care of your mental health when feelings of anxiety start to rise.
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(These are not all-inclusive by any means, just some suggestions to get you started thinking about things you can do to protect your mental health when you’re feeling stressed.)
This printable PDF includes two versions: one with a green background and one with a white background. Print your favorite one and hang it on the bathroom mirror, put it on the bedside table or put it on the table. You can even stock up on some self-care products for a friend and put them together for a cute self-care gift.
What do you do when you feel scared? You may not be able to control the storm outside or the situations that scare you inside, but there are steps you can take to manage your fear.
As Christians, it can be easy to dismiss the 365+ times the Bible tells us to “fear not.” Sounds simple, right? It is true, God reminds us many times not to be afraid. I wonder if there are many reminders in there because he knows how prone we are to fear and forget that he is with us? He knows. He sees our fear and knows we will be afraid. The greatest comfort when we are afraid is that He reminds us that He is with us.
Self Care Tips To Look After Your Mental Health
For someone struggling with a mental health condition like panic disorder or agoraphobia, fear is even more difficult. Due to various factors, including brain chemistry or even past trauma, even everyday activities can trigger extreme fear, anxiety, and panic.
So what do you do if you are afraid? Pray and remember that God is with you? Yes indeed. But also, take care of your mind and