Small Changes to Help Your Mental Health

Going to get real here. I'm not one for posting overly personal things, but over the past couple of months I have made some small changes, that have actually had an positive impact on my mental health, and I wanted to share them, in case they're things that you hadn't thought of before, and might actually help.

In hindsight, you do end up wondering, "why did i not think of this before??"

Removing work e-mails from your phone

To be honest, when I did this, I thought to myself "why have you not done this sooner??". And oh wow, has it actually made an impact. Like most people, I will wake up first thing in the morning and look at my phone. Cue seeing customer e-mails, messages on Etsy etc. and especially if it's not a positive e-mail or message, that really sets my mood for the day. Now, having some time from waking up to starting work, I can deal much better with the e-mails (I'm not saying that I get bad e-mails all the time by the way, I just sometimes find it a lot). And in the evenings, I don't see an e-mail that I feel like I need to reply to ASAP, because let's face it, asa business owners or anyone self employed, it's really hard not to reply as soon as you see an email/message!

I still can access work emails on my phone if really essential, via the gmail app, but it's an app I rarely use, usually sticking to the mail app on my iPhone.

Turning off app notifications

I'll preface this by saying that I haven't (and probably never will) remove apps like Shopify and Etsy from my phone, but what I have done is turn off all notifications for them bar the new order notification, and in particular removed them all entirely on my Apple Watch. Getting notifications of orders instantly is great, but also very distracting. I still have them on my phone, but my phone is on silent 99% of the time, and I'm not always looking at it, so I wouldn't always see notifications come through straight away. I have never actually had notifications turned on for any of my social media apps, but if you have them on, they'd be great to remove too.

I honestly didn't think removing notifications from my watch would make a huge difference, but it has. I did also remove all notifications for e-mails (even though I no longer have work emails on my phone) and any other apps related to work, so the only notifications I really get from my phone on my watch is calls and texts, and that's fine!

Spending less time on social media apps

Whether you use the apps for business or personal, you're always going to find yourself endlessly scrolling them. For the business side of things, I always find myself scrolling through Instagram, and more often than not seeing other businesses succeeding, doing this, doing that and then starts the comparison thoughts. Which are no good, and don't help at all. Personal use, I found myself scrolling through tiktok, most my FYP is cat videos naturally, which are great and all when it's a cat being cute or funny, but then you get the videos where a cat is ill, or has been abandoned, and then I just start crying.

So, I'm slowly learning to try and spend less time on the apps. It's not easy, we're so used to doing it, but if I can just scroll past a video I know is going to set me off, or just feel happy for someone getting lots of orders instead of being jealous, then it's progress.

Like with a lot of things, some days are better than others.

Is there anything you have found has really helped with your mental health? If so, let me know in the comments.