Treat Your Mind Like Your Home
On Being Proactive About Your Mental Health
We will do anything to make the physical spaces we live in beautiful. We will clean out the closets, get rid of clutter, and wash our windows. We will swap out the old with the new and refreshing. We will do all of this and not even give it another thought.
But our minds — the only spaces we truly cannot leave — often receive less love and care, less priority than our physical spaces. Our minds are hidden, the illnesses plaguing so many of them are invisible, and as such, our mental health is often not making it to our lists of priorities.
As the snow melts and we’re all thinking about how to make use of our longer, sunnier days, I’ve got something to add to our spring project lists: sprucing up our mental health.
To bring into focus the urgent need of prioritizing our mental health, a statistic:
A key finding from Mental Health America’s 2019 report states that more than half of adults in the U.S. with a mental illness do not receive treatment. This totals more than twenty-seven million people who are not being treated for their mental struggles, and it does not include adolescents, nor does it reflect the scourge of difficulties caused by the pandemic.
