Habits control what you do, how you use your time, and your thoughts. Despite their influence on our lives, we tend to forget them when talking about mental health. Most people tend to focus on things outside of themselves when they’re struggling. They focus on the external. But in reality, it mostly comes down to how they spend their time and what they think about. To improve yourself and how you feel, you have to change your habits in the process.
In this article we’ll explore the 9 worst habits for your mental health and how they can affect it.
Related: What are habits?
1. Procrastination
Sometimes we have to do difficult things. You might have to go to the gym, cook dinner, make an assignment, or clean your apartment. All of these things will impact you positively if you do them, but at times you might miss them. When you intentionally or out of habit, delay or “forget” doing things like this, you’re procrastinating.
Everybody procrastinates from time to time. That’s not a problem. But when it becomes a habit, it can be impossible to get anything done. Your to-do list will slowly grow. As the list grows, it’ll take longer to finish and stress rises. It seems more overwhelming to start.
As the habit of procrastinating becomes ingrained in you, it’ll be almost impossible to get anything done, even the things you enjoy. When this happens, the risk of stress, anxiety, and depression increases.
If you’re struggling with procrastination, you can slowly reverse the habit by adopting the 2-minute rule. If the task you’re supposed to do takes less than 2 minutes, you do it straight away.
Related: How to beat procrastination with the 5-minute rule
2. Eating junk food
Fast food and takeaway are often the easier options. It’s easy and convenient after a long day at work, and it even tastes good. But eating junk food can, over time, affect your mental well-being.
Junk food can make you feel full and give your body the necessary energy to survive. But it doesn’t give you more than that. If your diet consists of junk, you’ll end up lacking important nutrients and minerals. When your body lacks these nutrients, it’ll hurt your mental health. The symptoms of a bad diet include:
- Not sleeping well
- Fatigue
- Getting sick easily
- Bone or muscle pain
- Feeling weak
- Depression or feelings of sadness
And it isn’t just the lack of nutrients that can affect your well-being. People who regularly consume junk food are more likely to be or become overweight. Which by itself has many serious consequences.
Practice cooking food yourself. Focus on getting enough vegetables and fruit and avoid eating out too often. Consider taking some multivitamins to make sure you are covered with the most important nutrients and minerals.
Related: The best habits for self-improvement
3. Comfort eating
Most people try to find comfort when they feel difficult emotions. One of the most common coping mechanisms is comfort eating.
Comfort eating will often make you eat much more than you feel good about, to the point where you feel physically sick. When things have calmed down, it will be followed by guilt and shame. If it becomes a habit, the shame and guilt will create a downward spiral in your mental health.
Comfort eating has negative long-term consequences besides obesity. If you eat every time you feel a certain emotion, you can begin to associate that emotion with being hungry. Slowly, you’ll lose your ability to recognize emotions.
Find other ways to deal with negative emotions. Take a walk, talk to a friend, hit the gym, or do something that can soothe you.
Related: Create an overview of your habits
4. Not getting enough sleep
We only have 24 hours in a day. This means that we have to make priorities to finish everything we’re supposed to. This means we have to cut down on certain activities to make time for the things that really matter. You can wait to watch the new show, spend less time on your phone, or cut back on a million other things. But for many, the first place they decide to carve out more time is from their sleep.
Related: 7 habits for better sleep
Cutting back on sleep might seem the perfect way to find more time. Who needs 8 hours anyway? Not getting enough sleep is one of the worst habits for your mental health and can harm your performance and productivity throughout the day. The symptoms of only getting 6 hours of sleep include:
- Shorter attention span
- Worse decision making
- Worse memory
- Reduced concentration
- Bad mood
- Struggling to let go of specific thoughts
Not getting enough sleep can cause you to lose the time you made by staying up, to being less effective when you work the next day. Reconsider if it’s really worth watching the new show instead of getting your 8 hours.
5. (Over)Using phones
Smartphones have, in many ways, made our lives easier. We have a device in our pocket that works as navigation, keeps us updated, and in contact with the people around us. While there are many good things about our phones, they serve as a threat to our mental health.
Dopamine is your reward system. Every time you do a task, you get a hit of dopamine. This system has been in place ever since humans came into existence and haven’t changed much since then.
In the early days of hunter-gatherer societies, there weren’t many sources of dopamine, so they had to work to feel satisfied. Today, you can pick up your phone and get a dopamine hit in seconds.
As people, we gravitate toward the easiest choice. It’s easier to get dopamine from scrolling through TikTok than reading a book. It’s easier to get dopamine from watching workout videos than actually doing a workout. This easy source of dopamine makes it harder to do difficult things because there is an easier way to make the brain feel the same.
Overusing your phone can cause a lack of motivation, shorter attention span, worse concentration, worse memory, stress, and anxiety. It makes you less productive and feel worse.
Related: How one habit can change your life
6. Multitasking
Multitasking is one of those things that seem productive but, in reality, isn’t. Instead, it can actually harm your mental health.
Your brain can only focus on one task at a time. When you multitask, your brain isn’t focused on several tasks at once. It quickly switches attention from one task to another.
The small switches in your attention keep you from entering a flow state. It keeps you from doing deep, focused work. Without this, the quality of your learning or finished product will be of lower quality.
But it isn’t just your work that will suffer from multitasking. When you create the habit of multitasking, the brain will slowly become worse at keeping attention. If it struggles to concentrate on one task, it will become harder to relax. Your anxiety and stress levels can go up.
7. Being inactive
Exercising is one of the best things you can do for your mental health. It can help battle depression and anxiety. It can bring your stress levels down and make you feel more confident. With exercise being one of the best habits for mental health, it should come as no surprise that being inactive is one of the worst.
Being inactive can cause depression and anxiety. It can make your self-esteem worse and increase your stress levels.
One of the simplest ways of improving yourself and your mental health is to beat this habit. To get out and move. Take a walk, go to the gym, go for a swim, or do something that requires your body to move. It might be hard the first couple of times if you’re used to doing nothing. But doing nothing will make the rest of your life difficult.
Related: Create an exercise habit
8. Complaining
Life isn’t always easy. You’re going to meet people you don’t like, have to do things you don’t want to do, and fail in things you would like to succeed. That’s life. You can accept these unpleasant situations and use them to grow. Or you can complain about them and always be annoyed.
Your brain has a model of the world. How everything works. If you have the habit of complaining, you’ll subconsciously begin to look for things to complain about. The people in your life, the weather, your work, and your situation suddenly looks worse.
The habit of complaining isn’t just bad for your mental health but can be annoying for the people around you too.
9. Negative self-talk
How you talk to yourself influences every aspect of your life, from how you feel to how you spend your time. Your inner monologue will most likely change between positive and negative throughout the day, depending on what you’re doing and how it’s going.
If you have the habit of talking negatively to yourself, most of this inner monologue will be spent criticizing yourself. You might downplay your achievements, say that you don’t deserve that thing you want or that you aren’t good enough.
The habit of negative self-talk can cause depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and many other problems with your mental health. Work on changing your inner monologue to one being more positive.
Remember, positive thoughts bring positive emotions. Positive emotions bring positive actions. Positive actions bring a positive outcome.
Related: How your perception of yourself can influence your habit
10. Having a fixed mindset
Generally speaking, we can divide mindsets into two categories, the fixed- and the growth mindset. Which of these mindsets you have will have an influence on your mental health and your ability to get and feel better.
A fixed mindset is when you don’t believe that you can get better. It influences you to believe that all your qualities are fixed and no amount of work and effort can change that. The issue with this is that you have to believe that change is possible before something can change. If you think that it’s impossible, it will be.
A better alternative is the growth mindset. A growth mindset is when you believe that none of your qualities are fixed. That with effort, you can change things for the better. Having this type of mindset is crucial if you want to improve yourself and your mental health.
Final thoughts
The behaviors on the list above isn’t a problem if you only do them occasionally. They become a problem for your mental health when they form as habits and are repeated often.
If you have any of the habits from the list, you can begin to work on getting rid of them to strengthen your mental health and your chances of self-improvement.
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