As someone who’s experienced the odd blip in my mental health, it annoys me to see magazines and websites offer self-help advice that often equates to buying yourself a new pair of shoes or desperately reaching for that promotion in order to improve your life. Sometimes your life cannot be improved by superfluous additions to it, and you need something more than just shit you can buy and shit to buy that shit with to keep you on the straight and narrow.
Over the past few years I’ve been employing the following few nuggets of advice into my life, that have either been imparted onto me or I have learned from personal experience. While they won’t cure your troubles, they’ll at least help you get back on your feet a little bit and will be far more beneficial to your mental well-being than Maxim’s Top 10 Ways to Look Arrogant and Convince Girls to Have Sex With You, or whatever else it is that you read in the vein hope that it’ll lead you to a wonderful life of meaningless sex and self-satisfaction.
Here are 5 mental health tips those magazines and sites never tell you.
Further Reading:
10 Ways Facebook and Twitter Have Ruined Your Life
20 Weird Phobias You’ll Be Glad You Don’t Have
Top 10 Creepiest Places on Earth That We Kinda Want to Visit
Photo: Getty Images/Frank Herholdt
7 Alternative Health Tips No One F***ing Tells You
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If there's something in your life that you're unhappy with, work on f***ing changing it.
In life, you will often be told to just "tough it out" and that "things will get better." This is because most people seem to operate under the belief that as time passes, it is inevitable that the Universe will become sentient, somehow acknowledge their sadness and look to do something about it. Unfortunately, the reality is that the Universe does not care about you - it's too busy doing Universe-y things like expanding and being the home of all conceivable existence - and that you're just a lonely human standing on a bit of dirt, surrounded by water on all sides.
While this may sound a little disheartening, taking responsibility for your own actions and not simply expecting things to get better because they have to is all part of being a functioning human being. While quitting your mundane job, exiting your loveless relationship and moving to Alaska for a life of solitude tomorrow wouldn't be considered a reasonable decision, you needn't completely overhaul your life in the space of 24 hours, but rather attempt to make small decisions that will ultimately lead to you becoming happier in the long run.
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Don't do physical exercise just so you can write a Facebook status update about it, do it because it's f***ing good for you.
Stress can have some nasty implications, and with no outlet to get rid of that stress you're essentially a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.
In a world where people are all too eager to take topless photographs of their pectorals in their bathroom mirror, you could be forgiven for thinking that self-described "gym freaks" now have the monopoly on physical exercise, but to alleviate stress often the best medicine is to simply run it off.
Stress is essentially the build-up of worry and anxiety, which manifests itself in your body as adrenaline. Exercise puts this excess adrenaline to good use, instead of needlessly storing it up inside of you. Going for a run at least once per day won't miraculously get rid of your stress, but it'll certainly make it easier to deal with.
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You are not a product of what you create, so stop f***ing worrying about your social status.
WIth jobs increasingly difficult to come by, those who obtain a good one, or at least a half-decent one, wear it as a badge of honour. There's no problem with this, but constantly being confronted by the success of others can have a detrimental effect on your self-esteem, or inspire you to become ferociously competitive.
While striving for success is by no means a bad thing, that success should not be solely determined by your occupation. Convincing yourself that your career is the determining factor of your character will only inevitably lead to the unnecessary worry that you are somehow not fulfilling your potential. Having a good, well-paying job is important to the majority of people, but it should never be considered the only important thing.
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Don't f***ing worry about not making the most of your spare time.
Never underestimate the importance of doing absolutely nothing. Far too often we're encouraged to take advantage of all the spare time we have, with "inspirational" posters and the like informing us to live every day as though it's our last.
But no, you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't be made to feel guilty about not spending every minute of your life producing shit, or trying to make everlasting memories. It's fine to be lazy some days, and to just sit down and do sod all.
No matter how much you might enjoy your job and how incapable you feel of simply allowing yourself to switch off and not fill up each and every minute of spare time you have, make sure you set aside some time to be a slob every now and again.
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Long-term healthy diet plans are always good, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of f***ing short-term fun.
Reading dietary guides always seems like an exercise in self-punishment in which you give up everything good in your life in favour of only eating salad, but you don't have to pledge your allegiance to green food in order to suddenly become happy.
Alcohol, which alongside nicotine will be the first thing your doctor will tell you to abolish from your diet, works nicely in the short-term despite its negative impact on you in the long-term. The reasoning behind this is that alcohol is a relaxant when first consumed, but if you're under pressure it can play havoc in your ol' brainbox after it metabolises in your system, which is why it's considered a depressant.
Going on a crash course diet and limiting your daily food intake to cereal and tomato juice won't make you happy. You need things like alcohol in your life to distract you from the inevitability of death. You also need chocolate, the consumption of which releases certain neurotransmitters which help to decreass stress, and you need coffee, though switching to decaf would be preferable.
