How to Prioritize Your Mental Health
It’s pretty easy to tell when you’re not prioritizing your well-being because the symptoms are pervasive, long-lasting, and often don’t match what’s going on around you. Here are some telltale signs it’s time to step back and prioritize your mental health:
You feel tired or exhausted all the time without a definitive physical or medical origin
You’ve lost interest in things you used to care about
You’re isolating yourself, well beyond the point of charging up your social battery
You’re doing too much for others and not enough for yourself
If any of these resonate with you, it’s a great opportunity to do a mental health reset. You’ll take note of anything that harms your mental health, and start slowly and systematically replacing them with actions, habits, and goals that better support your mental health.
Wondering how? Follow these actionable steps to prioritize your mental health.
Table of Contents
Create a List of Harmful Activities
Relationships That Negatively Impact Your Mental Health
Create a Mental Well-Being List
Learn to Make Space for Discomfort
Create a list of harmful activities
First, consider what contributes to a decline in your mental health. This is going to look different for everyone, so it’s best not to compare yourself to others.
Imagine yourself going through a typical week and zero in on times where you notice a considerable drop-off in your mental well-being.
What do you see yourself doing?
What happens before and after?
You’ll likely find some really obvious activities, like doomscrolling on social media or wasting time on something you don’t really care about that you can easily pinpoint isn’t great for your health. Start with the most obvious things and write those down.
Next, consider activities and behaviors are a little less obvious, but a lot more insidious. Sometimes these habits can be so ingrained that you don’t even notice the negative impact. For instance:
Complaining a lot or being negative all the time
Not setting boundaries even though you know you need to
Overworking yourself to please others
Ruminating on something upsetting that happened
Worrying about something that might happen
Try not to judge yourself too harshly if your list is long! It’s perfectly normal to engage in harmful activities when you’re struggling or having a tough time. We all need an escape, even if it’s harmful. What’s more important than paying too much attention to judgey thoughts, is to be honest with yourself.
This is going to give you a really helpful baseline to start with. Knowing which activities are harmful for your mental health means you can start replacing them with activities and behaviors that better support your mental health.
Actionable step:
Mentally go through a typical week and create a list of anything and everything you do when you’re not prioritizing your mental health. Be honest, not judgmental. You’ll know it’s harmful because you typically feel worse afterwards, not better.
Example:
When my mental health is poor or I’m really struggling, I often see myself:
Spending too much time on my phone
Saying yes to things because I feel obligated
Avoiding starting projects or working on hobbies because I don’t want to potentially feel bad about myself
Being extra hard on myself
Related: How to Stop Wasting Your Free Time
relationships that negatively impact your well-being
When it comes to your mental health, there are internal factors and external/environmental factors to consider.
Sometimes it’s your own habits that might derail a sense of well-being, and other times it’s actually your relationships.
There are certain unavoidable people (like bosses or co-workers) that you may need to figure out how to cope with, and others that are voluntary relationships that may need consider re-evaluating (friends, family, etc).
Take an honest look at your relationships and assess which people consistently bring down your mental health.
That one friend that always has something to complain about
A negative or critical parent or family member
A micro-managing boss
Think about any new boundaries you may need to set with them in order to prioritize and protect your mental health. This may look like limiting time spent listening to them, putting time boundaries around how long you hang out, or not answering phone or email after certain hours.
If you’re consistently putting other people’s needs first and feeling resentful or burned out, it’s a signal that you need to firm up your boundaries. You may need to make small changes here and there as you work towards firmer boundaries.
Related: How to Deal with Negative Friends
Need to Set boundaries but aren’t sure how?
Check out my FREE mini workshop: Setting Boundaries That Actually Work. Learn practical strategies to confidently express yourself without feeling anxious, overwhelmed, or mean.
Create a mental well-being list
Now that you have a list of activities that are harmful, you might wonder what to do instead?
If you’re ever unsure what to do, you can almost always reliably count on the opposite action working out better. So in this instance, you’re going to focus on what’s already supporting your mental health.
The easiest way to do this is to create a list of things you do when you already feel fine. Meaning, what do you naturally gravitate towards when your mental health is good or you’re enjoying your time?
You can also add anything you’d ideally like to do, even if you’re struggling to implement. Having a list of things you already do makes it so much easier to implement and maintain more consistent habits. This might look like:
Engaging in hobbies or learning a new skill
Spending time with positive friends and less time with negative friends
Using social media responsibly
Spending time outside
Tidying up and cleaning
Being kinder and more patient with yourself
Practicing gratitude
Don’t stress too much about creating a perfect or all-encompassing list. Start one so that you can add to it over time, and keep it somewhere visible as an external reminder (like the fridge or a mirror you use often). Whenever you think of something, add to it!
You might be wondering how to actually implement these new habits, especially if you’re tried in the past and they didn’t stick. There’s a step between creating and maintaining a habit that you might’ve been missing. Read on to find out!
Actionable step:
Create a list of activities and habits you engage in when you already feel good. Put that list on the fridge, a mirror, or anywhere you know you’ll see it everyday. Continue to add anything helpful as you think of it.
Example:
When I prioritize my mental health or I feel fine, I usually see myself:
Spending more time on my hobbies
Being kinder to myself when I mess up by not paying too much attention to self-critical thoughts
Cultivating more self-compassion
Related: How to Be Nicer To Yourself
Learn to make space for discomfort
At some point, your brain is going to revert back to harmful habits.
It’s not a defect, it’s just how your brain works. It’s going to default to the familiar, especially if you’re under a lot of stress, in order to save energy. Knowing this ahead of time means you can respond to it differently.
Here’s a question I always ask clients: what difficult thoughts and feelings will you need to make space for in order to do what matters?
Consider how you’d like to respond to any difficult thoughts and feelings that will almost certainly arise from not doing something you’re used to doing, particularly if it’s a distraction (like doomscrolling).
For instance, you may set an intention to only check social media for one hour per day, but find yourself unable to stop once that hour is up.
You’d need to pay attention to any difficult thoughts and feelings that show up:
Is it boredom or anxiety, or some other uncomfortable feeling?
A bit of FOMO?
Thoughts that you don’t know what else to do?
You’ll need to make space for these and consider the cost of continuing to do what you already know is bad for your mental health and make the difficult choice to choose something else.
The short-term cost of doing so is a spike in anxiety, discomfort, boredom, or anything else that’s showing up. It’s likely those feelings will intensify the longer you don’t engage in harmful habits. If you can respond to these feelings with compassion, patience, and acceptance, that discomfort will eventually pass.
If you try to avoid feeling bad or uncomfortable at all costs, you’re more likely to engage in activities that are harmful to your well-being. If you can make space for uncomfortable feelings, you give yourself more choice and opportunities to do things that matter to you.
Actionable step:
Put your plan into action by writing down your goals or new habits, any difficult thoughts and feelings that show up, and how you normally respond to them. Then write down how you’ll respond differently moving forward.
Example:
My goal: to limit social media to one hour per day
Difficult thoughts and feelings: I start to feel anxious and feel the urge to keep scrolling when my 1-hour timer goes off < I then beat myself up for wasting time < I feel really uncomfortable and ashamed < I keep scrolling until it gets late
Moving forward: I’ll set a timer that forces me to get up from the couch to turn it off. I’ll say “this is really hard” to myself, and then I’ll go look at my list of well-being activities and pick one at random.
Related: 10 Small Ways to Improve Your Life
Give yourself a break by not putting too much pressure on yourself to make lots of changes quickly. Burnout is a slow and steady process, which means burnout recovery also needs to be slow and steady.
Remember to pay attention to which behaviors and habits support your mental health, and which don’t. When in doubt, try the opposite of anything you know from experience leads to burnout or poor mental health.
While this sounds simple enough in theory, putting it into practice can be challenging. If you ever catch yourself reverting back to unhealthy habits, remind yourself it’s simply your brain trying to save energy by defaulting to the familiar. This will allow you enough time and space to make a healthier choice (even if it’s harder).
