Connect With Yourself and Work on Mental Health

Most people don’t think much about their mental health. The natural world we live in makes it hard to consider anything that’s intangible. But the internal world is just as real as the outside world–it controls your reality. Your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and emotions run your world. A negative sense leads to a low-quality life. Thanks to scientific research, more people are beginning to appreciate mental health. A better understanding of yourself leads to a healthier and more productive life. That said, here are some tips to help you connect with yourself and work on your mental health.

Practice Metacognition

Most people don’t know this, but the mind has two parts to it–the conscious and the subconscious mind. When children are born, they absorb the world around them as much as possible. A child acquires their beliefs about themselves from people they trust. This is usually a caregiver, teacher, or religious reader. During this tender age, the child’s brain waves cycle between alpha and theta. These states are the same as that of someone in meditation or a hypnotic state.

Once the child grows up, their subconscious mind starts to run the program of what they’ve learned. The subconscious mind accepts all things, and it works through repetition. Anything you do for a long time will turn into a habit, and soon after that a personality or character trait. Once this happens, your reality becomes the program you run daily. When an individual has a negative sense of self, it’s usually a program in the subconscious mind.

Trying to improve how you feel about yourself at a conscious level isn’t a permanent solution. For you to succeed at this, you will need to practice mindfulness. This involves being completely aware of your feelings, emotions, and actions constantly. The best thing to do is changing the internal negative self-talk and beliefs to positive ones. To do this, one has to rewrite a new program in the subconscious mind. Metacognition helps you achieve this because you get to analyze your thoughts. When you catch yourself with negative thoughts, you start channeling your thoughts elsewhere. Once you hack looking at the quality of your thoughts, changing the program becomes easy. But this is something you have to do daily until you no longer have self-loathing thoughts. One method to enhance metacognition is practicing responsibly with sativa strains to help open your mind to new ideas. Click here for more useful cannabis articles.

Master the Art of Meditation

Once you’ve mastered metacognition, you’ll have to come up with a set of life principles that you can live by. This will help you to know each time your mind veers away from the correct thinking pattern. Having a pattern of thinking allows you to maintain a positive self-image. Meditation helps you nurture this type of consistency in how you feel.

Many people believe meditation is woo-woo junk that doesn’t work. But, this is either because they are ignorant or they’re doing it wrong. Meditation is a powerful way to enhance mental health. It’s also a great technique to help you understand and connect with yourself better. Meditation is all about focusing your attention. Where your attention is, that’s where you’re sending your energy. This is why when you continue to focus on how worthless you are, it only makes you feel worse.

There are different ways to meditate. But the goal is to help you channel your thought energy towards the right direction. This will make it easy for you to have control over your emotional states. And as a result, you are likely to carry yourself with more confidence. While meditating, you could use positive affirmations. You can also do the affirmations on your own. If you are consistent with your meditation, you will soon realize you’ve gained a new identity. The primary goal of meditation in this case is to help you know who you truly are.

Talking to a Professional

A majority of people associate seeing a counseling Psychologist with “going crazy.” In the past, this kind of stigma made it difficult for anyone to voluntarily book a session with such an expert. The good news is that today, seeing a therapist has become more socially acceptable.

Talking to someone is a great way to get out of your head for some time. If you deal with self-loathing thoughts, seeing an expert will help you get better. Such experts help guide you through an array of treatment models. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the common intervention techniques they use. With CBT, you get to learn how to change the quality of your thoughts. It starts by identifying the negative thoughts and their triggers. Next, you’ll get to evaluate these negative thinking patterns. This way, you can see for yourself that feeling less worthy isn’t right. The final step involves the replacement of such thoughts with positive thoughts.

Working with a professional will help you chart your progress. Additionally, you will also get to make long-term commitments that you can stick to. This is important because you’re trying to develop a new character and way of thinking. CBT is not the only reason you should consider seeing a professional. Other than the guidance they offer, therapists can be there to listen. Sometimes you only need someone to listen to you. It could be that you don’t have anyone else to share this with. Sometimes, the issue is that you only have friends or family that judge you or don’t understand. If this is the case, don’t shy away from speaking to a counselor. Simply sharing how you feel has a profound impact on healing emotional pain.

Wrapping Up: The Take-Away

Your peace of mind determines whether you enjoy your life or not. This peace of mind doesn’t mean you don’t or won’t experience any challenges in life. It means you’ve made an intentional choice to stay in control. Allowing external factors to control your internal state is unhealthy. Regardless of the situation, you must make a conscious decision to stay in control. With this, you won’t only maintain your mental health, but your physical body will feel great too.