Mental Health Matters

Mental Health Matters is here to provide you with weekly tips, resources, events, and methods to help you achieve better mental wellbeing and happiness. This is more important than ever with the ever changing circumstances that we are all finding ourselves in.

The Healthy Mind Platter

Here are seven daily mental activities to optimize your brain matter to create mental well-being.

• Focus Time: Closely focusing on tasks in a goal-oriented way can make deep connections in the brain that increase your level motivation.
• Play Time: Allowing ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, and playfully enjoying novel experiences, can help make new connections in the brain that help us to become happier.
• Connecting Time: Connecting with other people, ideally in person, as well as appreciating our connection to the natural world around us, activates and reinforces the brain's relational circuitry, making us more appreciative of socialising and our surroundings.
• Physical Time: Moving our bodies, aerobically if medically possible, strengthens our bodies and keeps them healthy, but these benefits apply to the brain as well.
• Time In: Quietly reflecting internally, focusing on sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts, help us to better integrate the brain and gain insight into ourselves.
• Down Time: When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and letting our mind wander or simply relax, we help the brain recharge.
• Sleep Time: Giving the brain the rest it needs consolidates learning and helps the brain recover from the experiences of the day.