I'd like for you to imagine if your car didn't have a "Check Engine" light, and you only knew there was something wrong with the engine when breaks down. At that point, you may be in the middle of the road with no help in sight. You may not know how to fix your engine, and you're stuck. The engine may need to be replaced, and it'll cost thousands of dollars to do that. 😱
But lucky enough, that’s rarely the case. All cars have many different sensors that let us know when we should do a check-up. When it detects any sort of degradation or issue, we can act on it ASAP.
Just like the engines in cars, our brain and the state of our mental health is what allows us to function properly. 🧠
But unlike cars, we don't have a "Check Engine" light reminding us to check in on ourselves and ask whether we need to do any self-care or improvement on our mental health.
Near the end of 2019, I was easily angered, lost motivation at work, had difficulty sleeping, and experienced a variety of physical pains. At this point, I still wasn't aware that I was having a mental breakdown. I just thought these were unrelated occurrences that happened due to many different reasons.
I definitely wished I had a “Check Engine” light for myself. 🚨
It took me a while to realize that these were all related and I started seeing a therapist. You'd think it would've been obvious that my mental breakdown was causing all of these issues. But at the time, it wasn't.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a friend shared with me his similar mental health experience. He was the one who helped me realize the lack of a "Check Engine" light for ourselves to let us know when to check up on our mental well-being.
Proactively checking in on your mental health
Instead of relying on some automatic sensors, it's critical that we build ourselves a consistent routine of checking in on our mental health & well-being. When we take the time to proactively reflect on ourselves, we're doing ourselves a favor to ensure our mental health doesn't negatively impact the rest of our lives and the people around us. ❤️
Carving out even a few minutes of dedicated time to ask and answer the important questions to check in on your mental health creates a huge impact. Once you answer these questions, you'll be able to determine which self-care resource can help you.
Ask yourself the following:
How are you really feeling?
What do you need to get back into a healthy mental state?
If you're doing any sort of self-care, I'd love to hear what your self-care kit looks like.