Building better mental wellness
This essay written by Simon Mourani, a student in business administration, is part of a series featuring graduate ambassadors' approaches to maintaining their mental wellness and prioritizing their self-care.
Prioritizing our mental wellness is key to living a full and productive life. It’s important to develop and maintain a set of skills and strategies to take good care ourselves so that we may work towards a balance of emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental health.
Without doing so, it becomes increasingly easier to end up in a “funk” resulting in a lack of motivation, having trouble with being productive, or feeling anxious and worrying all the time. Many of us can relate to struggling with these issues at one point or another. Practicing different self-care methods to develop positive mental wellness habits in our daily lives is important in helping us tackle the ups and downs life has to offer.
As a graduate student, some of my responsibilities include schoolwork, job searching, and involvement in extracurricular activities. By discovering a variety of ways to prioritize my mental wellness, I’ve been able to maintain a nice balance amongst these responsibilities to avoid becoming overwhelmed or experiencing “burn out.”
Something that works for me is using a planner that offers monthly, weekly, and daily schedules. I begin each month with a list of everything I need to complete. From there, I create weekly schedules to spread out my tasks, so that I’m not bombarded with a million things all at once. Lastly, I create daily schedules to prevent myself from procrastinating. With so many things going on at once, keeping up with a planner gives me a peace of mind knowing I have time to complete everything and can take on my responsibilities one day at a time.
RELATED: Meet Graduate Ambassador Simon Mourani
Filling out my planner is only the first step of my strategy in prioritizing my mental wellness. After creating my task lists, I am left with open slots in my schedule to implement time for myself whether that be hanging out with friends and family, finding random cool events downtown to attend, or spending time on personal hobbies like editing video footage from my traveling adventures.
I am continuously trying to improve my habits of self-care to enhance my overall well-being. Everyone deals with mental wellness in their own ways and we’re all on our own journey of doing what’s best for ourselves. The best thing to do is try everything that we can and try our best at it.