5 Unusual Ways to improve Your well-being – blog written by Tania Taylor
You can read through so many of my various mental health and well-being blogs here. But today I thought it might be useful to consider some of the ways you can improve your mental health and well-being that you may never have thought of before. It is incredible just how much we can improve our mental health by using the techniques below.
I love the fact that this can include absolutely anything! From learning a new language for free using an app like Duolingo (I can highly recommend by the way). To deciding you are going to learn to read upside-down. Every time you put your head to learning something new you encourage new growth of neural pathways in your brain. Research shows that not only can this support you to feel good, it can also help lower the risk of some health conditions such as dementia.
Research shows that the act of growing and nurturing gives us lots of internal rewards. This could be a plant in your home. Or perhaps some vegetables. I recently bought a home-growing button mushrooms kit from Merryhill mushrooms and not only was it fairly easy. It was great fun! The reward comes from seeing your nurturing coming to fruition, but also from the tasty results, and long-term money saving and environmental contributions. Rewards left, right and centre! If mushrooms aren’t your thing, you can also try other edible ideas such as potatoes or lettuce. Simply plant an existing potatoe or lettuce base and get ready for more edibles! For the more green fingered amongst us, the world is your oyster.
A friend, family member, your hairdresser, a shop owner, a café worker, someone walking their dog. It really can be anyone. The trick is to keep the conversation light-hearted, friendly and lovely. What you’ll notice afterwards is just how smiley you are and how good you feel for having a good chinwag. Ideas for topics to chat about:
Before you know it, an hour will have passed and the whole time you will have been completely engrossed by what a wonderful time you were having. Read on for more unusual ways to improve your well-being.
Did you know that we tend to stick to visiting the same twenty-five places? Who knew! But if we start to bring ourselves out of our comfort zone and explore some more, we get rewarded. Our brains constantly give us rewards in the forms of releasing wonderful feel-good chemicals. Visiting a new place and exploring can be really beneficial for us as long as we are enjoying ourselves. Most of us find that there are spaces right on our doorstep that we’ve never ventured to. Perhaps a local park, a public footpath, a local café, restaurant, or maybe a leisure centre.
Declutter your house, declutter your mind. A clear home results in a clear mind. We’ve all heard the sayings. They are true! A balanced cleaning regime within your home with the occasional spring clean and declutter can work wonders for our mental health. Cleaning is moving and therefore exercising our bodies. Great! But we also get the reward of beginning a task and seeing fabulous results by the end. Let’s not talk about the overwhelming bit in the middle!
On a serious note, if this feels particularly overwhelming for you here are a few tips:
Repeat as often as you need to, only ever focusing on one of the five tasks you have set yourself. Your pace, your time, lots of rewards.
Sometimes though, doing something new can feel too tough and we can get stuck in a rut. When we find ourselves struggling, we might find it difficult to pull ourselves out of being in a difficult head space. That’s not to say that we should never allow ourselves to experience difficult feelings. But when those difficult feelings become prolonged and begin to impact on our ability to cope with day-to-day life, it may be time to seek some help and support.
If you need some guidance in the form of solution focused hypnotherapy and psychotherapy, feel free to read more about it here. And if you feel this is the kind of therapy that may support you in moving forward in the right way for you, you can book in a free initial consultation by phone with me here.
What is a people pleaser and how do you know if you are a people pleaser? A people pleaser is someone who finds themselves going above and beyond. Making sacrifices to be kind and helpful to others. They often find that as a result of their acts of kindness, they are left with little or no time. They may be quite agreeable with others, even if they don’t agree with what is being said. This trait often comes from a need to be liked. And many people pleasers have experienced trauma or challenging relationships as a child or young person. These situations have taught them that the only way to receive love and affection is to please the recipient.