Why It Is Important To Take Care Of Your Mental Health: 5 Compelling Reasons
Why it is important to take care of mental health: 5 compelling reasons (BC AVANCE PSYCHOLOGOS) Mental health is one of the facets of life that, despite its importance, have been unfairly undervalued or directly made invisible for a long time. Luckily, in recent years awareness campaigns have been carried out in this regard, thanks to which more and more people who need it go to the psychologist.
However, there is still a certain tendency not to think about the need to take care of mental health; for example, assuming that this can be worn down indefinitely until we reach certain work goals because work comes first, or always putting the interests of our loved ones ahead of our own, regardless of everything else.
Therefore, in this article we explain what they are the main reasons why you should take care of your mental health In day to day.
Although emotional, cognitive or emotional problems can take on a great variety of “disguises”, it is necessary that we always pay attention to how we feel and what we do, so that we detect significant psychological problems as soon as possible. Pretending that they don’t exist will only make things worse.
These are the main reasons why it is very important to take care of your mental health, both by adopting habits that help prevent psychological disorders, and by seeking professional help quickly in cases where complications arise.
1. Mental health problems make it difficult for us to be happy
The first reason why mental health should not be underestimated is that problems in this area have a great ability to distance ourselves from happiness. That is to say, not all well-being and the ability to be happy depends on the absence of physical pathologies. In fact, the relative absence of obvious physical symptoms that occurs in most psychological disorders (at least during the first weeks or months of their appearance) means that they are not considered a problem, or that they are simply signs that the person is “ weak”, capricious or lazy.
2. Not taking care of it affects personal relationships
Mental health problems do not remain confined within the person who suffers from them.; They are also expressed in the attitude and behaviors of the individual towards others. Typically, this causes the person’s loved ones to suffer, and damaged relationships complicate the recovery process for someone who has developed psychopathology.
3. Once problems arise, it can be difficult to recognize them in oneself
There are many psychiatric disorders in which one of the symptoms is anosognosia, or the inability to recognize as such the symptoms of a neurological or psychological disorder. For example, some people in the manic phase of bipolar disorder do not perceive what happens to them as a problem, and something similar happens with addictions. It is not that the person lies to others, it is that they sincerely believe that what is happening to them are not the symptoms of a disorder..
This causes the search for professional help in therapy to take too long, something serious, because the sooner intervention is made from the field of psychotherapy or medicine, the better the prognosis.
4. Psychological disorders can generate self-destructive behaviors
Another fundamental reason why it is important to take care of your mental health is that, if you do not do so, we risk falling into a vicious cycle of self-destructive behaviors. These can take the form of very overt and direct ways of harming oneself, such as self-harm or even suicidal behavior, but they are not limited to these extreme and visible variants.
For example, it is known that depression causes people who suffer from it to adopt sedentary habits and relative social isolation, and this lifestyle further reinforces the presence of this mental disorder. In the same way, anxiety disorders make us begin to have an atrocious fear of the possibility of suffering those symptoms at a given moment, which makes us increasingly vulnerable and causes psychopathology to consolidate.
5. Mental health problems can shape personality
Especially during childhood, suffering from psychological disorders has a key effect on personality development.. Although the latter changes little by little throughout life despite not having complications in terms of mental health, when these do occur, the transformation is faster and tends towards extremes. For example, experiencing a traumatic experience can cause a person’s neuroticism to skyrocket, or can cause them to go from being extraverted to quite introverted.
It must be taken into account that childhood is the phase of life in which we internalize the main ways of interpreting reality and developing habits and routines, and therefore, the psychological dynamics that the person establishes in their early years will not easily disappear. (and that is why it is essential to go to child and adolescent therapy if problems arise in this regard).
Related article: “The main theories of personality”
Finally, we must not forget that some especially severe disorders carry a risk of death due to the physical wear and tear they cause, or because they generate suicidal ideation. Clear examples of this type of alterations are eating disorders or depression.
Are you looking for professional psychological support?
If you want psychotherapeutic assistance for adults, children or adolescents, contact our team of professionals.
In Advance Psychologists We have been offering our services in the field of mental health for 20 years, and we intervene in the areas of neuropsychology, speech therapy, sexology and psychiatry. We work both in face-to-face sessions at our center in Madrid and through online therapy.
