Managing your mental health
I have become somewhat evangelical about this topic…and I am not alone! I firmly believe that managing your mental health is as important as managing your physical health. We are one system and our physical health affects our mental health and vice versa and yet, while there is a lot of advice available about improving your physical health, there is much less information about how to manage your mental health. So I plan to do what I can to rectify that in this regular column, with both information and some tips to help improve your mental health.
I’m sure that you have all heard about the fight/flight response, which is hard wired into our brain to enable us to deal with life threatening situations. Unfortunately it isn’t only triggered by sabre tooth tigers wanting us for lunch! In the developed world we are fortunate not to encounter many life threatening situations but we trigger the response by the threats that we think about. These thoughts may be about something that is actually happening or something we fear may happen in the future. So you may be worrying about the financial health of your business because of the actual state of your bank balance or because you fear that the good times won’t last. Our brain perceives both of these as “sabre tooth tigers” and reacts accordingly.
It can be very stressful running your own business, so we are likely to be in an “activated” flight or fight state for much of the time and this can damage our cardiovascular system no matter how healthy our diet and frequent our exercise. There are also mental effects as well, like struggling to think clearly or make decisions. Both of these can lead to poor sleep and that just makes things worse. However, it is possible to take back control and I’ll start talking about that next time!
She treats everyone as an individual and by developing a good relationship, based on mutual respect and trust and always does the best for her clients.
- Don’t panic! - March 9, 2024
- How do you manage overwhelm? - February 5, 2024
- Responding not reacting - December 6, 2022
