How to Practice Good Mental Health Hygiene

Well Staff Writer

Sometimes we may know what to do but need a nudge on how or when to do helpful things.

We all are relatively familiar with physical health habits, like exercise, eating balanced meals, having regular checkups with a primary care physician, and so on, but mental health habits are often overlooked: what things can you do habitually to help keep good mental health hygiene?

Of course, seeing a good therapist is a good habit, as therapy can help alleviate symptoms as well as provide support and guidance to work through issues and gain a fresh perspective. Studies have shown consistently that therapy has positive outcomes — for anyone. Indeed, behavioral and emotional interventions can be beneficial whether you have a clinically diagnosed condition (like depression or anxiety) or not.    

What other things might help keep good mental health hygiene? Not everything works for everyone, but luckily there are plenty of options.

Some find that journaling or mood tracking can be helpful, because tracking your feelings, experiences and concerns can help you manage mental health conditions as well as prioritize your concerns — while also providing a space to reflect positively on yourself and your experiences. Of course, it’s also useful to avoid creating mood dichotomies (categorizing days as either good or bad), and instead looking both at a full range of emotion and working on norming feeling neutral or okay.

Working purposefully to find joy in everyday activities, even if this feels like a struggle, is a good habit to practice. While it’s natural to focus solely on things that need to be done every day for work, your family, school, and other important areas of life, it’s also important to carve out time for joyfulness, whatever that looks like for you. For some, it’s buying a slice of cake when out grocery shopping to enjoy later; for others, it’s reading a book before bed. The important thing, though, is that these things are valued as good mental health hygiene habits, rather than seen as optional treats too easily skipped.

Cultivating radical acceptance is a good way to become more aware of your own relationship with what’s around you. Radical acceptance is a skill that can be developed in therapy, but you can also work on it on your own. Central to this skill is the idea that you cannot address the issues at hand if you do not accept the reality of a situation. By acknowledging the things that are unchangeable, we can better focus on things that we can do and avoid increasing stress by feeling responsible for things beyond our control. 

Making time for meaningful connections habitually can be beneficial as well. Many of us feel we should spend more time talking to our friends and family members, though life seems too often to get in the way. Making these connections a habit — say, by setting up a time every week to call a specific loved one, or setting up a virtual book club, for instance — can help you get into the habit of making time to connect with those we care about. For some of us, this might also look like spending more time with our pets: adding another walk to the dog’s day, or letting the cat sleep on your laptop for a while and giving her a pet, rather than responding to emails right away. 

Interestingly, some things track between mental and physical hygiene practices, as exercise, for example, can help you keep up both. Aerobic exercise can result in improvements in mood because of exercise-induced increase in blood circulation to the brain and its influence on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis can work to reduce stress and have a positive impact on mood. Working on ways to have a consistent and quality sleep pattern, too, is worth the effort for the physical and mental health outcomes.

These are just some examples of popular mental hygiene habits, and it’s worth thinking about what you do to work on mental resilience, wellbeing, and health. This is also a conversation to have with your therapist, as along with being a good mental health hygiene habit, they can help you identify others.