Back in 2017, there was an estimated 792 million individuals globally or one in every 10 people worldwide who have at least one form of mental health illness.
Additional data revealed that each year, there are an estimated 43.6 million American adults aged 18 years and older with one mental illness.
With the financial, social, and emotional impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no reason to think that such figures wouldn’t climb significantly as compared to years before the crisis.
In fact, among the immediately observable effects of the pandemic was the increase in mental health-related trips to emergency rooms of US children and teens below 18 years old based on available data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
With these alarming pieces of data, parents should really be vigilant and active in finding ways to keep family members’ mental health conditions in constant check.
Here are six inexpensive and simple tricks to maintain your family’s excellent state of mind throughout this crisis:
Do simple exercises to improve memory
Among the simplest, yet most effective ways to keep the human mind occupied, sharp, and in an excellent overall state is by doing some memory improvement exercises. These easy-to-follow, repetitive exercises optimize the brain’s performance to help individuals reach their full cognitive potential.
Some clinics specialize in providing memory improvement services that you may contact to help your kids easily process and memorize important pieces of information. By helping improve their memorization skills through daily exercises that only last seven minutes on average, your family members and even you can perform well at school or at work.
Most importantly, your brains would be too busy to think of sad thoughts or worry about things related to the crisis, so you can dodge the mental health problems caused by the crisis.
Keep those muscles and limbs worked up
It’s not enough that you exercise the mind to keep mental health illness at bay; you should also take care of your body to achieve such a result.
You can do this by doing regular physical activities including at-home exercises (jogging in place, pullups, stretches, and the like) and home improvement projects that require physical efforts. By keeping scheduled physical exercises, your body will essentially look forward to it as it will become second nature.
Just like memory exercises, physical exercises will also help keep your mind occupied while keeping the body in excellent condition. And, if you’re mixing in some light household improvements, then you’re also making productive use of your spare time.
Go easy on social media
There’s no denying just how much easy social media made communicating with friends, family members, relatives, colleagues, and even strangers.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and even until now, many have relied on social media to get information about the crisis to keep them informed. While quite a lot of the information is true or verified, many are unreliable and downright hoaxes. Despite this, people still believe such fake news to be the truth, which leads them to make false assumptions and even causes them to compromise their safety and that of other people.
With these in mind, you need to regulate the time your family spends on social media. While you need to socialize with people you are close with, you should also learn how to limit how long you spend each day scrolling through your news feeds or reading tweets from people you follow. Too much of anything, especially toxic or fake news, will surely be bad for your family’s mental health.
Do family activities regularly
Your family must do things as one unit. It may be gardening, doing repairs on the house, or watching movies — anything as long as you’re setting aside schedules to do them together.
This is to ensure that the bond that you have as a family would be maintained, so each family member would feel and know that he or she has a support system right at home. With it, doubts and worries would hardly have space in anyone’s mind.
Have plenty of sleep
Sleep resets the mind and body and helps prevent physiological problems caused by sleep deprivation. As such, be sure to have the family know the value of great-quality sleep and to have enough sleeping hours each day.
Look after each other
Your family should always check on each other periodically. If someone in the family starts behaving differently, you need to talk to that family member outright to see if something is bothering him or her. If there is, then act accordingly and immediately to contain the situation.
With these simple tricks, keeping your family’s great mental state amid the pandemic will be easier and more achievable.
