10 tips and habits to MASTER your mental health break the cycle and start healing

Spread mental health awareness. Prioritize your mental health. Social media harms your mental health. I get it, I love the message, we hear it all the time on every single platform, but how do we actually get there? I actually suffered with my mental health really badly a few years ago to the point where I slipped into a really deep depression for around three months and I was in a state where I almost never left my bed for those three months. I stopped speaking to my friends completely. I isolated myself. I didn't leave the house. All of the healthy habits that I had maintained up until that point, like going to the gym and things like that, just were not happening. I had no motivation. But since coming out of that, in the years that have passed since, I've realized how much of a blessing it is to have emotional stability and how grateful we can all be every single day just for the fact that we were able to put our feet on the ground and get up and go about our day. So because of that experience, I felt like it changed my life and the last few years I've actually really intentionally wanted to prioritize my mental health and learn certain ways, mindset shifts, actions that I can be intentional about actioning positive mental health every single day. Because the truth is we're all gonna have bad mental health days, right? We're all gonna have lower energy. We're gonna be stressed about everything. Not everything is gonna feel perfect. But the question is, how can we do something practical every single day to stay on track with our happiness? Because that's what it's about. You can't have a perfect day every single day, but you can give yourself that reassurance that you are being self-loving and showing up for your mental health rather than it just slipping away with any bad situation that comes your way. So in today's video, I'm going to be breaking down the best mental health hacks and actions that I've learned in just 10 simple steps. And a big thank you to xTiles who have sponsored today's video. Step number one, let's get into the basics. Mental health is basically how well your mind is functioning. Your mind affects everything on a day-to-day basis. It's basically ruining your reality. It affects how you feel, how you relate to others, how you feel about yourself, what your self-perception is, how well you handle stress, the decisions you make. So it's really important that we gain control over our mind to have more positive mental health and then therefore make our reality even better. But the thing is, mental health isn't something you just have and that's a common misconception. Mental health is something that you train and that's the whole purpose of this video. Figuring out what are those exercises we can do for our mental health to improve every single day because it's exactly like a muscle. Like you would not go to the gym and expect to have abs after working out every single day for a week. That's just not going to happen. You have to be consistent with it. So in that case, we're looking at it kind of like a routine. So this would be your mental health routine. We need to base it all around the different happy hormones. So this is my routine for it. I move my body, I exercise or I'll go on a I meditate and go outside to get some sun and that helps me release serotonin. I play with my cats every single day and I regularly spend quality time with my boyfriend and that helps release oxytocin which is the love hormone, another one of the happy hormones. And lastly, I always put in the work and keep promises to myself and that helps me release dopamine because I'm getting rewards for actually achieving my goals. And then on top of those four actions which meet all four happy hormones, I also journal regularly to just check in on my because a lot of the time the reason for your bad mental health isn't your mind and your thoughts that are on the surface that you're aware of all the time. It's actually your subconscious thoughts, it's the things that have built up over time, it's the suppressed emotions, it's the worries, the self-doubt and the trauma that you have that you've never actually looked at and sat with. But it's only through journaling that you can actually go deep into your mind and actually unlock your subconscious mind and discover what's there and how it might be holding you back. This way I can check in on anything that's going wrong and kind of nip it in the bud before it just escalates and creates a whole situation where I'm stressed and I don't know why. I personally like to do this in my self-obsessed journal just because the guided structure of it really encourages getting deep into those subconscious thoughts and getting them out. And then lastly in this mental health routine, I think a big part of it is I don't wait for my mental health to be in a bad place or for me to have a slumped day. I'm pre-empting it. I'm preparing for that situation. And again, this is purely because I had gone through depression and I know what that feels like. It motivates you so much to always be like, am I doing the best favor for myself today? F looking my best. Forget worrying about how much work I have to do and keeping up with pressures from my family or my friends. No. Am I okay? Am I happy? When was the last time I checked in with myself? How am I doing really? If I were to think about it, that becomes the number one priority every single day. So for that reason, when I'm planning out my work week, I always block out a rest day. I like to do this on Sundays. And of course, sometimes it changes. I'll be doing my Sunday reset routine. Maybe sometimes I'll go to the park all day or go on a solar day because Sundays are really a me day and I get to decide what it is every single week. I have to set a strong boundary with myself that I am not allowed to work on that day. Because if the week was really hard and I was really stressed, then I'm allowed to be a couch potato every Sunday. Or if I feel like I never had time for the gym all week, it's time to go and do a workout and then do a walk. Maybe hit the sauna on a Sunday to just reflect and reset and make sure that the stressfulness and the busyness of that week doesn't continue on into the next. And it slowly builds up. Point two, your environment is programming you and we need to make sure it's the other way around. There's also a common misconception that your mental health is entirely internal, but the truth is your environment is also affecting it every single day. So to make sure that your mental health is in your control as much as possible, we need to move away from our environment controlling and programming us to us programming and controlling our environment to benefit us and what we know aligns to us and serves our best interest so that we can be our happiest selves. And this means just taking a step back and really evaluating and auditing your life and questioning, how is this affecting me? You would be surprised the amount of people that would go their entire lifetimes not doing this. I was the same, but the second that I actually started questioning it, my whole life changed and I feel like I'm finally at peace and I'm finally consistently in environments that benefit me and my emotional state. So an example of this is going on every single social media app on your phone and thinking, which stories do I need to mute? Which creators do I need to unfollow? Why am I viewing this? Why is this coming up on my for you page? I need to hit not interested or I need to block this. You wouldn't even think it, but music is a huge thing because it really affects your vibrational frequency. Listening to sad songs is one of the worst things you could do for yourself. I was a girl who, I love being in my feels, okay? I love some sad music. I literally used to have a whole sad playlist. Even if I wasn't sad, I'd just listen to it and I'd like get into the mood of it and like pretend I was in a movie. No, it's just not worth it. I literally deleted every single sad song off my Spotify and I still listen to like my fun R&B music, but I also have intentional playlists. So in the morning I listen to my affirmations playlist on Spotify and in the evening I listen to my high frequency music playlist and it's basically filled with high hertz tracks that you can listen to and I always listen to this while I do my skincare. And then another way to take back control of your environment is the people that you keep around you. Even going through phases where maybe you don't reach out to a certain person for that long, you know? If you were going or a business and you need as much positive vibes and confidence as you can get, maybe hanging around with the people that don't quite get that and aren't sure how to support you and that isn't the best idea for your energy at that moment. On the other hand, sometimes just walking away from situations and people that don't serve you is the best thing and the healthiest thing you could ever do for yourself because you cannot be around chaos and expect inner peace. And I think when you reframe this, it makes it so much easier to make these decisions. I was someone like especially in school who worried a lot what other people thought about me so I thought what I mean if I cut somebody off and I don't have a reason for it like somebody has to do me wrong for me to walk away from this otherwise like I look like the villain. No. When you realize how precious and how fragile your mental health can be and how just little interactions and little things that you see and consume on a daily basis can build up and really affect your whole life, your self-perception and the thoughts that you have to experience every single day, you will start to be cutthroat with the energy you surround yourself with because at the end of the day, it's never about the other person. It's not about hurting them. It's not about being better than them. It's simply about protecting yourself. Step number three, productivity and organization will save you. Another misconception that people have especially about productivity is that productivity is all about doing more, doing the most, making sure every single hour in your day is filled with work. Absolutely wrong. Productivity is simply about doing the right things with the right energy and when your mental health is in a really good solid place, you are going to understand this but if you are in a place where you are craving external validation and you don't have a solid foundation for your self-worth, you are going to chase work and productivity and looking like the busiest, most successful person as the most important thing in your life. You're going to stretch yourself out. You're going to drain yourself. You're not going to give yourself a balanced life. You're never going to prioritize your happy hormones because you're too busy worrying about what other people think about you or making sure you are the most successful person in the room. No. When your mental health is good, you're like I'm literally only going to do the things that matter to me and serve me and I'm going to make sure my energy is amazing while I'm doing that. So a really good example of this is women who cycle sync. So they are planning their organization, their productivity, their work schedules around each phase of their menstrual cycle. So you're always going to be doing a little bit less in your luteal phase. You're going to be resting a lot during your menstrual phase and so with this comes organization. Organization is so freeing because it's freeing up all of that mental space that you could be spending worrying about what you have to do or questioning if you're actually doing good enough. No. I take a step back, I look at what I want to accomplish for the year, what's on my vision board and then I integrate that into what I want to get done during the week and I don't worry about achieving everything all at once because it's impossible. I literally color code my calendar because those visual reminders help me stay emotionally balanced. It means looking at that workload physically and emotionally feels easier and less overwhelming because having a clear plan can help you maintain a clear mind and I think having the right tools at your disposal makes this 10 times easier. So when it comes to organization, the most popular method would be to use like a paper planner, organizer, diary. There are so many of them on the market right now but if you're someone like me who's constantly on the go and you really want to be flexible with everything you're going on every single day, having a digital planner is crucial and Xtouse has created one that feels just the same as your paper planner. Xtouse is a really great tool that empowers your creativity while taking care of all of the nitty-gritty. They are a fresh new productivity tool catered for Gen Z, people with ADHD and creatives and the best part is it's such an easy to use app, honestly much easier than a lot of the other platforms and alternatives that are available which I think is honestly so essential considering this whole topic is all about mental health and prioritizing your happiness. You don't want to be doing it in a way that feels draining or tiring or like a chore. The heart of the system is your visual planner. Everything is flexible, you can move tiles, add colors, banners and even embed files or widgets. Plus it's beautifully structured into a yearly, monthly, weekly and even daily view so you can use it in whichever way suits you best. Xtouse now has a new big feature, it's called My Planner and it brings the paper experience into the digital world and within it you get five pre-made pages. All your tasks from daily notes to project specific actions are automatically captured and gathered in one place. Then the project page acts as folders for all of the different categories and areas of your life. So each of your projects whether it be a home renovation, a YouTube channel or a startup gets its own dedicated space. You get a daily and weekly calendar, extra resources like habit or budget trackers or a gratitude journal which you guys know I love and then you can use the flexible drag and drop home page for quick views of everything you've got going on. So you guys can get started with Xtouse for free using my unique link below in the description and then you can get started with your organization and productivity and that's one less thing to worry about while you're taking care of your well-being and mental health. Step number four, you can't master a mind you're afraid to sit with. I started journaling properly and consistently in 2020 so it's been five years and it's honestly saved me, it's helped me make some of the biggest decisions in my life that I wouldn't even have like had the right knowledge to navigate that situation had I not taken the time to write about it and explore what I really wanted in my life. Not to mention it helped me face my inner shadows, all of the parts of myself that I suppressed and hid away and hadn't accepted so it really helped me just elevate on my self-love journey which of course made me a happier, more confident person. So aside from trying to work on my journaling, I would also write letters to my past self to really heal my inner child. I would also write journal entries to my future self and that's why I included a page in Self Obsessed Journal which is called Future Self Journaling because it helped me manifest every single thing I wanted. I really put myself in the emotion and the experience of having every single thing I wanted to manifest and just that every single day helped me overcome my self-doubt because I felt like I was already living my dream reality and I think that that is just the epitome of healing. Just even five minutes, ten minutes a day where you're really spending quality time with yourself which again I think is the most self-loving thing you can do. You're really taking time to question and evaluate the quality of your thoughts and then changing them and rewiring your mind to be one that benefits you, uplifts you, empowers you and makes you happy every single day. Step number five, it's all in the routine. Slow mornings saved me and I've spoken about this so many times because genuinely I can't believe I didn't start this sooner. It's made my life so much more fun and honestly the whole purpose of life is just to be happy and to have fun so I don't know why as human beings we are always so insistent on making our lives harder. We wake up at the last possible second and we rush out the door every single day and it really does stress you out and it makes you feel like there's no life left for you to experience on your own terms and and that's why at night time we have revenge bedtime procrastination where we're scrolling for longer than we need to or watching Netflix for longer than we need to because we're not actually intentionally giving ourselves the time that we need. So every single morning I stopped jumping straight into chaos and responsibilities and work and I started reclaiming my peace in the first hour of my day and this routine can look completely different for everyone. I think you should cater it to your own needs. For me, I love to wake up early, I meditate, I do my skin care, my little LED mask, I go to the gym, I do my journaling, sometimes I read in the mornings. My whole morning routine that I've like designed and I've got in a system on my phone is all centered around my happy hormones so then I can get through that mental health routine without even needing to think about it. Most people think they need to feel good in order to do something but the truth is it's actually the other way around. You need to do good, feel good habits in order to feel good and happy. So if I feel low or slumped I know I need to go and move my body and get those endorphins or I know maybe I've had a really busy week and I've been prioritizing work too much, let me go see my friends, let me go have just a chill day. Just taking those actions can really help you unlock those more positive emotions. Step number six is to protect your peace. Think about it this way, when you say yes to something you don't really want to do, you've now added emotional stress. You're annoyed at yourself for people pleasing again, you are then spending energy on something you don't want to do and that energy could have been spent on bettering yourself or living your life in the way that you want to or just making yourself happier and psychologically you are reinforcing this identity and this rule book on your life that you are not allowed to say no or prioritize yourself and your needs and your desires and that's the damage that slowly accumulates up in your body and your mind over time and then you're all of a sudden stuck in this cycle and this pattern that you can't get out of. So I really had to learn that boundaries are the most loving thing you can do not only for yourself but also the other person. It's self-respect, it's teaching other people what you are capable of and it's taking control of your life and your time and being able to actually live it on your own terms without worrying that people aren't going to like you for doing that. Step seven, stop choosing familiarity. Everyone has some sort of toxic familiarity in their life and it's going to be different for everyone but if I'm giving myself as an example, mine was dating. Being a serial dater, I was always in relationships. It was the kind of dating where drama felt like love for me and it just completely ran my life, my identity, the decisions I made, how much time I committed to social time over going on a date or being with a boyfriend or looking for validation from a man that I wasn't even with for more than three months and it meant that with every breakup not only was I just so destroyed because I had no life outside of it but especially at the end when I decided to quit dating and focus on my self-love, there wasn't much of me left and it meant that I had a really shaky foundation for life without this other person. I was so codependent and that's just emotional sabotage because I'm not setting down those foundations and layers where if this doesn't work out in my life or if this person walks away, who am I? What is my identity? Where do I derive happiness from? Because the only place you can consistently derive it from and not worry about it leaving you is yourself, is who you are inside, not all of these external achievements or people or situations. But the thing is toxic familiarity is so hard because you've been stuck in a cycle for so long that leaving it feels boring, it's hard, it feels painful, it will make you cry, it's so effing hard but the thing is all of the most healthy things you can do come with time, they come with dedication and discipline like again like going to the gym and trying to get abs that is a long tedious tiring process is not going to come overnight and there's going to be so many days where you don't want to go or that you want to quit regardless you show up anyway because it's the only way to get the result and the same goes for things that you are familiar with but and I think the easiest way to do this is to literally just start identifying as a new version of you, a new type of person that does put their mental health first, that does only do things that serve them and bring them peace. I am the type of person that loves being on my self-love journey, I would never associate myself with a man who puts me down, I would never chase validation from other people without first giving it to myself and that reframe alone just helps you change everything and helps you live this new lifestyle in a little bit of an easier way. Step number eight, your mind mirrors who you are not what you want. I realized that my goals meant nothing if my identity didn't match them. If I am not the type of person who can already have those things why would those things even come to me? So in this scenario I could say I want peace and happiness and good mental health a hundred times but if I am not the type of person who lives my life in that way why the hell would I get that goal? If you identify as somebody who thrives in chaos that just does what they want to do all the time without worrying about the consequences and the long-term effect that's going to have on their life you're going to be stuck. So you want to step back and fully evaluate your life and ask does this align with the future version of me? Is this contributing to better mental health or is this making me take one step forward and three steps back? Because you can't manifest a reality that contradicts your identity. Step number nine, make a joy list. When you are sad and you're stressed out and you're hopeless you cannot remember all of the things that are going to help you drag you out of that pit and that slump and I know that because I've been there a hundred thousand times. You forget everything that makes you happy, you forget everything that's good for you because you're so consumed by the sadness and the pain and that's all you can deal with, that's all you can process at that point. Once I learned this I actually made a list on my phone and it's called things are good for me versus things are bad for me and this means when I'm in those places what I'm really emotionally going through and I don't have much capacity for anything else let alone thinking of a strategy to get me out of that slump I literally just look at that those notes on my phone and I'm like boom here are like three things I can pick from this list that are going to get me out of this now oh my god I forgot how much taking a walk makes me feel good oh my god I forgot how much just working in a cafe rather than home makes me feel refreshed again and motivated. Take a seat 30 minutes right now really think what adds to my life what takes away from it and then you keep yourself accountable in the phases where you feel just a little bit weaker. In order to do this you need to ask yourself what were your best days where you felt you're most happy what were the common patterns on the days where you had no motivation or you procrastinated a lot you know what did you do did you wake up did you scroll first thing did you not have an organized day did you not have a to-do list rereading my journal entries is another huge thing because it helps you answer those questions when you look back on like oh I wrote that I had a really good day okay what happened what else did you write and then you start identifying those patterns one thing for me personally I'm not gonna lie my biggest dopamine hit comes from shopping I love it it's like my favorite activity in the world even if I don't buy anything and I think if you're the same as me one thing that really helps without breaking the bag is one window shopping just going and looking and imagining what outfits you would like create together what you would buy stuff like that and then even online sometimes I'll just go through an entire stores app and I'll add loads of things to my wish list and then I close the app just that it fills the satisfaction without you having to complete that whole action and finally step number 10 audit your mind every single time you catch yourself saying a negative thought we need to nip that in the bud and how are we going to do that first you need to step back you need to be consciously aware of it okay we can't just be letting our mind run wild with dialogue and half of the time we're not actually really present with it and thinking actually why the hell did that come in my head so if you are saying in your mind oh I'm so behind in life would you say that to a friend would you say that to a family member would you say that to somebody you really cared about no so why are you saying it to yourself okay where does it come from what's triggering you in your life right now that's bringing up this thought and what actions can we take to combat it and prove it wrong with evidence for example I'm so behind in life let me make a quick list of everything I've done so far in my life I've made friends I got through school I got to university I picked up hobbies I learned how to play a certain sport I overcame my trauma I've journaled and I've grown my identity in the process of so many things actually literally two days ago guys I made a list in my phone of all of the things I've successfully manifested can you believe I didn't have that list before it was mostly because I just thought oh I just remember all of the things I got right like my youtube plaques are over there and like oh I get to live in London so you know I know I manifest things no when I wrote down this list there were so many other small things I've manifested in the years of my life that I naturally forget about so anytime I feel like I'm not doing good or I'm behind I read through that list I feel so good about myself and it's like a written down version of your portfolio of proof it's proof it's evidence that all of your negative beliefs are bs you have so much to be grateful for you have so much to be proud for I highly recommend this isn't fake positivity it's literally just reprogramming your mind and shifting its focus to positive things rather than negative things half the time the negative things aren't even real they're just they're just worries of potentially this is the worst possible thing that could go wrong in my life let me just dwell on this for the whole day hmm I wonder why I feel so sad I wonder why I'm not motivated and I've been slumped and that's the difference between daily spiraling and rising above it and that brings us to the end of this video I hope you guys enjoyed it I can't believe I've never made a video on mental health before but I do have so many videos on my channel on how to master your mindset and rewire it and they are all compiled into a nice little neat playlist for you to watch here if you're interested thank you so much for watching and being here and just being here at the end of the video I appreciate you since you're still here I would love if you could go down below into the description and check out all the links there because I have so many things online to help you guys in feeling good about yourselves feeling confident growing manifesting your reality I have my newsletter which I always share exclusive tools links hacks to help you guys level up I have my youtube vlog channel I upload every single day on tiktok and instagram I've written a book I have a guided journal that again is going to help you with that mental clarity as well as manifestation and self growth but that's all from me and I will see you same time next week for a brand new video I love you I appreciate you and I'm just honestly so effing grateful for everybody here on this community every single day