Balancing your mental health and emotional well-being in times of crisis is challenging. Here are five steps to help you take charge and become your own health and well-being coach. You can do this!
Our mental and physical health affects every aspect of life, which is why we need to make it a priority. However, making our health a priority can be difficult because the modern world prioritizes profit over health and well-being. So, you must learn how to create a strategy that can accommodate both your personal needs and the demands of the corporate world. This becomes more critical and challenging during a health crisis like a pandemic.
Make health a priority and a part of your new normal. Prioritizing it over everything else gives you the good health to enjoy all that life offers.
Improve Your Health and Well-Being
Let’s start our discussion with a definition of health and wellness.
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” — World Health Organization (WHO) (1)
You’ll notice that this definition includes three distinct elements: physical, mental, and social.
We’ll discuss five steps you can take to improve your health and well-being in all three areas of your life. These are practical but not necessarily easy. These steps go against the cultural narrative. So even though they are simple steps, their effects will be felt immediately. Sometimes, the effects are positive, such as increased clarity and reduced stress. Because they help your conscience to surface, you may discover increased clarity makes you see things in our culture which are disturbing.
Becoming Your Health and Well-Being Coach
However, implementing just one of these practices will cause noticeable, positive changes. The more of these steps you can implement, the better. We’ve put them in the order we think works best. You might think meditating or reading would be first, but reducing the cultural noise makes these processes much more accessible.
Tactics For Mental Health and Emotional Well-Being
1) Reduce Cultural Noise
The first thing to address is our social well-being because our culture has an enormous impact on our mental perspective. Emphasize those things with positive outcomes, then eliminate anything harmful. Don’t forget that the Earth is a living thing that we must protect. When people and practices have a positive impact, everyone benefits, not just a select group.
Several sources of harmful programming have a negative impact on our culture:
- sectarian religious broadcasts
- propaganda disguised as news
- racially biased social media
- false political, social media
This kind of programming uses brainwashing techniques to skew your thinking and values, and for this reason, you must avoid these sources. You can identify them by their content. The following media outlets are well known to promote conspiracy theories, racism, and extremist ideologies. (2):
| conservativesforum.com | News Front |
| Before it’s News | Newsmax |
| Bill O’Reilly | OAN News (OANN) |
| Brit Hume | Postal Reporter |
| Catholic Vote | Postal Times |
| Citizens United | Rita Cosby |
| Conservatives Forum | RT.com |
| Constitution Society | Shepard Smith |
| constitution.org | Southfront |
| Counterpunch | Sputniknews.com |
| Epoch Times | The Conservative |
| Fox News | Voice conservativevoice.com |
| Global Research | WhatDoesItMean.com |
| Greta Van Susteren | World Net Daily |
| Zero Hedge |
The above is just the shortlist. Many social outlets profit from your consumption of their propaganda because it sell advertising space. Propaganda is hazardous to your mental health and emotional well-being.
The COVID pandemic gave some advertisers the opportunity to generate more revenue. To raise their ratings, they spread controversies, false information, and bad advice. This misinformation was often wrapped in harmful religious, racist, and political rhetoric. When people ignore the advice of medical professionals and adopt gimmick treatments, they suffer horrible consequences. This is why it’s important to eliminate your exposure to negative social programming.
There is a constant tension between legitimate sciences and the promoters of pseudosciences and religion, and this tension causes a mental condition known as cognitive dissonance. It arises when your beliefs don’t align with the facts. This mental state creates stress and anxiety while triggering fear and anger, and when we are in this state, we become susceptible to groupthink manipulation.
Strange as it seems, fear can be addictive, even though it is harmful to our health. The bottom line is to unplug from harmful programming. Start questioning the cultural narrative, especially if the information comes from the sources above. The first step in becoming your health and well-being coach is to eliminate your exposure to harmful programming.
Understand that the focus of these tools is to trigger emotional responses. Most times, they fill these assertions with misleading information. So, what are the sources of this harmful programming and stress?
If you eliminate or reduce these sources to a minimum, your mental health and emotional well-being will immediately improve.
2) Use A Journal
One simple way to spot negative programming is to use a spiritual journal. Journaling brings your inner thoughts to the surface, and your thoughts will reflect the programming you receive.
If you are honest in documenting your thoughts, you’ll see the positive and the negative. It will show you the effects of exposure to adverse social programming in black and white. It will also reveal the thought scripts of personality and instinct.
Using a journal is second on the list after clearing the mind clutter. Once you can think more clearly, you can start your true feelings and thoughts. Putting them on paper is therapeutic. Yes, use a paper-based journal instead of an electronic one. Your handwriting contains a lot of information. There are clues in your doodling and drawing as well.
Graphology is the study of handwriting. You can learn a lot from how you put your thoughts on paper.
This simple tool will help you see and purge negative bias and prejudice from your beliefs. You’ll likely see thought patterns. It will help you see the harmful programming you need to remove.
3) Read and Learn
Reading a variety of different things can expand your perspective. When you read things outside of your paradigm, it opens your mind to other possibilities. As you increase your mind’s ability to think and reason, you’ll be on the way to becoming a freethinker.
If you are not used to reading new material, you may find it tiring. Why? Because you are not used to encountering new ideas. Once you learn to encounter new ideas, you’ll learn to love them. Reading new material helps you grow. It’s good for your mental health and emotional well-being.
Learn a new language to increase your mind’s ability. When we learn, we create new relationships in the brain. Learning a new language expands our awareness as we create new ways of communicating and understanding.
When you learn to consider outside of your comfort zone, it becomes easier to change your mind. You no longer trigger fear and anger when you encounter new things. This will enable you to become a freethinker.
4) Meditate
It’s essential to learn and incorporate proper meditation to reach the fourth state of consciousness. Meditation is the most powerful element for balancing health and well-being and building a healthy foundation for the mind.
The mind heals itself through rest, and proper meditation is like a reset switch, providing this deep, restful state. It allows you to access the transcendent state of silence. You reach this state through a process known as Japa Meditation. This technique’s more well-known commercial version is Transcendental Meditation (TM).
You have probably heard the state of consciousness described in several ways. For example, Samādhis the common Indian term from (Sanskrit) Samādhi, Sama, meaning “together,” and dhi, meaning “mind.” Other influential teachers refer to this state of pure awareness, bliss consciousness, and the state of transcendent awareness. This state has metabolic characteristics that differ from waking, dreaming, and sleeping.
Meditation is a practice that gives immediate results: peace of mind, a reduction in stress, and a refreshing outlook. Modern medicine recommends it to increase mental health and emotional well-being.
5) Regular Physical Exercise
Engage in a regular exercise program designed to cover all aspects of general fitness, from cardio and strength training to flexibility and stamina. The greater the number of these actions you can take, the greater the probability of moving past the inertia. These steps may not unshackle you from your life situations, but they will provide clarity and enable you to balance with less stress.
We know this one can be difficult to add to your routine, but it’s critical. But, when you take charge as your health and well-being coach, you will have the flexibility to change your daily routine. One way is to bundle something you like with the exercise. An example would be to play your favorite music before or during your exercise routine. You can also use periodic non-food rewards, like new exercise shoes when reaching a specific benchmark.
Our recommendation is to focus on durability. Physical durability includes the full range of wellness, physical, mental, and spiritual. So, this comprises both seated and moving methods of mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness differs from Japa or TM listed above. However, it is easy to learn. You can teach yourself if personal instruction isn’t available.
Increasing Our Mental Health and Emotional Well-Being
When you have depression, anxiety, and lack of inspiration, you are more susceptible to self-hypnosis and group hypnosis manipulation tactics. Organized religion is the primary source of this propaganda mechanism. Many people believe religion is the fast food of spirituality.
Create a plan of your own that incorporates these five steps: reduce the cultural noise, use a journal, read and learn, meditate, and exercise. These practical steps will make your body, mind, and spirit more durable and insulate you from the effects of groupthink manipulation. This is how you become your health and well-being coach.
References
(1) World Health Organization: https://www.who.int/
(2) Spot Fake News: https://www.spotfakenews.info/