3 Essential New Year’s Goals to Boost Your Mental Health

3 New Year’s goals for your Mental health

It is a new year, and I am going to be working on one of the most important things in a person’s life, my mental health. Out of all the goals I could choose from here are the 3 New Year’s goals for your mental health I believe are important. One thing to also remember is if you want to achieve the other goals you set for the year, the status of your mental health matters in achieving those goals.

What are mental health goals?

A mental health goal is when you set a goal that is positive for your mental health. Examples of good mental health goals are things such as getting more or better sleep, working reduction of stress, finding more or better wellness tools and the list can go on and on.

3 New Year’s goals for your Mental Health

Sleep

As I talked about earlier, your status of sleep matters in the level of your mental health. Lack of sleep has been linked to depression, suicidal thoughts, and mood and behavioral problems.

A key thing to understand nowadays is that our brain is sensitive to light and always has been. We all have a circadian rhythm or 24-hour clock. At dark, we let out melatonin hormone, which helps us sleep.

But cell phones or other screen devices let off a  blue light. The blue light makes it harder for us to go to sleep because it delays the release of the melatonin hormone, which again is connected to our internal clock. Ways to work around this are.

1. Setting your phone away from the bed. On dressers on the other side of the room or setting it in another room altogether.
2. Instead of Phone alarms use alarm clocks to wake up, making it so the phone is not closed.
3. The best one is to do things like reading, drinking tea, or any other activity without a screen that helps you get ready for bed. 30 minutes to a 1-hour without a screen can make a significant difference in your quality of sleep.

Self-Care

Self-care is a big one because if you work on taking care of yourself you can achieve many more goals and the quality of life can improve enormously. By self-caring you make it so things like helping others, achieving goals, relationships, and much more can improve. Here are some key self-care ideas.

1. Exercising, aerobics, and Intense workouts both have great effects on your mental health. Aerobics can help you control your anxiety and intense workouts can help with depression. Any exercise can help you clear your head, think straighter, and release the stress you dealt with for the day, week, month, or year.
2. Morning Routines. Andrew Huberman talks about optimizing your mourning routine. In the video, he points out that exposure to morning sunlight can help improve and set your circadian rhythm.

3. See a therapist or counselor regularly. I have monthly scheduled appointments with my therapist, which helps me deal with negative events or actions of the month. It has also helped me in controlling and managing my behavioral disorder and improves my goal setting and achieving.

Treat yourself.

Treating yourself is a thing that helps you get rewarded for activities, events, and things you do for the day. Things that fit in this category are things like

1. Food that you do not get often. Foods like candy, fast food, certain drinks, etc.
2. Activities, like going places like parks, fairs, certain restaurants, fun parks, and events just going places you love that you do not usually have time for.

Rewards like these help you get a positive feeling for achieving something. What you achieve can be big and small. When getting a job or finishing a project that is a wonderful thing to reward yourself for. At the same time on days where just getting out of bed or having a positive thought of yourself is extremely difficult but you still reward yourself. Getting out of bed and just watching TV or reading a book. That is still achieving something because of how difficult it is for you.

The days when it is hard for me to stay on task or even just get out of my pajamas are days when I reward myself for getting even close to it. On pajama days just putting on sports pants and a t-shirt is still closer to my goals. Reaching small goals with rewards can add up to you achieving the goal that you at first did not think was possible for the day.

There are many goals to help your mental health but these 3 New Year’s goals to help your mental health are some of the basic and can commonly lead to you achieving more goals. Always remember with good mental health you can achieve anything.