Ups and Downs of Mental Health: Creating Change in My Life

By Ryan Henry

I am afraid this article will jinx my life. 

Then again, the advice I am attempting to provide you all today is based on the fact that I know I will be facing this battle again during my life. Life can’t always be good, despite the fact that we always attempt to make it be so. 

A year ago, I was trying everything and anything to make life feel good again. I was stuck in this low sequence of my life. My days felt like I was stuck on repeat, filled with nothing and desperately reaching for any sort of light in the darkness. A year later, I am now calling my parents up every day with a massive smile on my face telling them how I never felt this happy.

It has taken a lot of work to get to this state of mind, and I am still working every day to feel just a little bit better than I did before. What I’ve learned over the course of this last year is that the time and effort that you put in when your mental health is flourishing truly does provide you a benefit when you approach or hit a low. 

When I was struggling with my mental health, it seemed like I would never elevate back to a sense of serenity. I felt like I was going insane by performing the same habits on a day-to-day basis, just expecting that part of my life to pass on like a storm in the sky. All of these emotions I was battling ended up involving into this stagnant corrupting hurricane in my mind. 

I needed to evoke some change in my life.

I started treating my body better, let go of toxic friendships, and found passions that I put my entire heart and soul into. These little actions slowly gave me a boost in happiness over time, and they also became naturally embedded habits of my routine. 

When my mental health is reaching a lower point than usual, I often will check in on how I am doing with these habits. More often than not, I will be slowly forgetting to put my full effort into the aspects of my routine that bolster my mental health. From there, I reassess and prioritize them back into my life. 

I am not saying that integrating a few healthy, positive habits into your routine is the end-all-be-all or that it will fix mental health issues, yet it’s a step on how to cope with them. Like I said, I now wake up everyday expecting to not only learn more about how to use these habits, but also expecting to learn more about myself.

And I still make time to call my parents every night.