Your mental health is a significant part of your overall health and wellbeing. Your mental health impacts the way you feel emotions, interact with others, think, create ideas, and simply enjoy life. It can also affect how you handle everyday stress and make decisions. Your mental health is essential in every life stage you go through, and it continues to evolve from your birth through to adulthood and as you age in your later years.
Mental health can also affect other aspects of your health, especially your physical health. Over time, your mental health can change depending on a variety of factors, for instance, if you’re currently dealing with problems and difficult situations, such as overcoming terminal sickness, facing overdue bills, or relationship problems, you may find your mental health affecting the way you feel physically.
Any of these situations may overwhelm you and negatively impact your mental health, making it harder to overcome the problem easily; ultimately, these mental stressors can catch up to you and possibly worsen your mental health state. On the contrary, if you get help from your loved ones or through a trusted therapist, such as Alvarado Parkway Institute anxiety counselors, this can help to improve your mental health, and make you more resilient and able to overcome any situation. If your therapist prescribes you anything for your treatment, you can buy Medicine from Canadian pharmacy PricePro to save money on top-quality meds.
Factors Affecting Your Mental Health
Your mental health develops and changes over time, from your birth until your senior years. As it evolves, it can also be affected by different factors that have been surrounding you throughout your life. Some of these factors include:
- Life experiences including past trauma or abuse
- Biological factors such as brain chemistry imbalances
- Family background, whether anyone in your family has a history of mental health problems
- Lifestyles factors such as your physical activity, diet, or substance use
Other factors that can affect your mental health include your mental wellness practices like doing yoga, meditation, seeking therapy, using relaxation techniques, or being thankful for the things you have every day.
What Are Mental Health Disorders?
Mental health disorders are serious health conditions in which your behavior, emotional balance, and thinking ability is gravely afflicted. This can either happen occasionally or permanently and can be long-lasting. When you have a mental disorder, your ability to interact, relate to others, and function on a daily basis is affected.
There are various types of mental disorders, and each of them may present in different ways. Some common types of disorders include depression, dementia, eating disorders, panic disorders, and many more. All of them are generally characterized by a combination of imbalanced emotions, abnormal thoughts, irrational behaviors, and complex relationships with other people. Many people suffer from various mental disorders, resulting in not only poor mental health in those individuals, but also in potential burdens on economic, social, and human rights factors globally.
Signs Of A Mental Health Disorder
One thing that can be difficult about mental disorders is that they can sometimes be tricky to diagnose. It can be hard to comprehend if what you’re feeling are normal emotions or abnormal and irrational emotions, so instead of having this disorder diagnosed as early as possible, you continue to live your life without help, thinking it’s could just be a normal emotional reaction. It’s also possible that people in your life could dismiss your emotions and mental health concerns as exaggerations or overreactions, further deterring you from seeking help.
To avoid such confusion between real mental disorders and normal emotions, here are some warning signs that show you could have a mental disorder.
- Change of eating and sleeping habits
- Low or no energy to do anything
- Frequent smoking, drinking, and drug-use (more than your usual intake)
- Feeling hopeless and like nothing matters anymore
- Unexplained body pains
- Feeling suddenly forgetful, scared, upset, confused, or worried
- Severe mood swings
- Replaying memories that you can’t get off of your mind
- Seeing things or hearing voices that aren’t real
- Having thoughts of harming yourself and others
If you think that you’re experiencing any of these signs and symptoms, don’t hesitate to seek help as soon as possible; consult your trusted doctor, therapist, or a trusted loved one to help you understand your thoughts and feelings, and get any help you might need.
How Can Mental Health Disorders Impact Your Daily Life
When a person is mentally healthy, they show stability in their personality, mood and behavior, even if they’re not happy all the time. In an individual who has a mental disorder, there may be an observable impact or change in that person’s personality and behavior, and it can often reflect on his daily life, although not all mental disorders result in observable changes.
Here are six ways mental disorders could impact a person’s everyday life.
- Inability To Make Firm Decisions
When a person has a mental disorder, they may find it hard to confidently make decisions. This lack of confidence could be due to experiencing delirium as a symptom. In simple terms, delirium is when a person experiences frequent confusion about anything that occurs in the environment around them; their thinking becomes clouded, and they have a hard time focusing their attention on simple tasks. They may also find it hard to answer questions that require choices; thus, it results in having difficulty making decisions related to their work or social life.
- Failure To Properly Communicate
Another impact of a mental disorder on a person’s daily life could be a lack of proper communication, and failure to make meaningful connections with other people, such as their family, friends, or people from work. If a person was previously outgoing and able to socialize and communicate well, they may start to withdraw into themselves and avoid interactions.
Communication issues can also vastly affect a person’s job performance. In addition to withdrawing from social circles, an individual with a mental disorder may also find it hard to organize their thoughts into speech, making it harder to relay their thoughts. In some cases, the person may find it hard to answer questions and end up with long, rambling answers filled with irrelevant information, which can impact their credibility in the workplace.
- Inability To Behave Normally
The extremity of a person’s disorganized behavior depends on the type of disorder he has, but in general, anyone with a mental disorder may behave in a more unusual manner than normal. People with disorganized behavior typically have trouble doing normal daily activities such as maintaining good personal hygiene or obtaining food. In some cases, they may suddenly swear in public for no reason, or laugh or shout at random people they pass by with.
- Loss Of Interest In Hobbies
When a person has a mental disorder, they might suddenly lose interest in the things or hobbies they once loved to do. They may be saddened by this lack of interest, may also feel like something in their mind is stopping them from doing those things.
A sudden lack of interest in hobbies could reflect that that the person doesn’t feel any pleasure anymore in doing things they loved doing before, which could result in a person quitting their job, their hobbies, and withdrawing from the people they used to love hanging out with. Social isolation may worsen the symptoms of mental disorders, and deter someone from getting treatment.
- Extreme Mood Imbalances
Mood imbalance is perhaps one of the most significant impacts of a mental disorder in your daily life. Mood imbalances could include a sudden burst of anger, frustration, extreme crying, depression, and sometimes, feeling little or no emotion at all. Having an imbalanced mood can significantly affect your daily life in that people may find it hard to understand or communicate with you. In some cases, you could lose your job due to a sudden change of moods at work if they are greatly affecting your work performance, you could also get into conflicts with your friends or family due to emotional misunderstandings.
- Financial Problems
Without proper treatment, the symptoms of a mental disorder could ultimately lead you to lose your job and therefore, lose your ability to financially look after yourself. You could then face financial problems or overdue bills, which could serve to complicate your mental health due to extreme stress.
Treatments For Mental Disorders
Treatments for mental disorders depend on what kind of disorder a person is experiencing, and how strong their symptoms are. The earlier a mental disorder is identified and diagnosed, the easier it may be to create a treatment plan to manage it.
Most of the time, treatment may involve multiple rounds of therapy or tests with your doctor or a counsellor, a person may also be prescribed medicines to help them calm down and keep their emotions in check. One of the best ways to support a person with a mental disorder is by providing emotional and social support from their friends and family. This support system can help them realize that they’re not alone with their problems. Even if you don’t suffer from a mental disorder, having a strong support system can help you improve your mental health.
Some cases may need more intensive treatment due to a more severe mental disorder that was left untreated and undiagnosed for some time, or if a person’s mental disorder puts them at risk of hurting themselves or others. If an individual is a danger to themselves or others, it is likely that taking them to a hospital for a higher level of care and monitoring could be the best option, this will allow them to connect with the right support network for their needs.
The Bottom Line
Mental disorders can be caused or exacerbated by a variety of factors, and are not necessarily preventable, after all, a person is not always in control of the factors that can affect their mental health, however, by paying close attention to the warning signs that you may start to feel, you can make a plan as early as possible to treat these symptoms.