7 Ways to Improve Your Mental Health

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you want to master your 2025 goals and New Year's resolutions, I created a free 17-page ebook and workbook for you that you can go and get. If you go to goals2025.com, you can download it for free right now. Once again, goals2025.com. Today, we're going to be talking about seven different ways to improve your mental health. So let's just dive straight into it. The first one, which is very easy, but I think is very uncommon for people to do is this.

0:45If something bothers you, if something happens in your life, if somebody says something, if something happens, whatever it might be, if something bothers you after 24 hours of it happening, then speak up within 48 hours. Because if something is lingering, if something is still around, if it's still in the back of your head, it's taking up some form of physical, mental, and emotional energy for you. It's trying to show you something. And so what we tend to do, and I did this for years, is if something bothered me, I just waited until I forgot about it, or quote unquote forgot about it, or until it just didn't have as much energy.

1:26But I want you to understand that just because you ignore something does not make it go away. That thing is always in the back of your head, and then you develop some sort of narrative around it, around, oh, well, they said this because of this and this is how they are. This is why in relationships, you know, you'll let something go, you let something go, you let something go, and then something small happens and it ends up being the straw that broke the camel's back, but you explode because it's all of these buildups of just not speaking up for yourself. And I know I get a lot of messages from people who say that they're people-pleasers, so they don't speak up for themselves.

1:58They don't hold boundaries. It's something that we need to get better at. You know, don't allow things to fester and grow inside of you because those things over time, over and over and over again, start to turn into resentment. And I don't know about you. I want to get all of that negative, gross energy out of my body. You know, you got to get it out of your body. Don't allow it to rot inside of you. If you're still thinking about something, if it's still holding energy from you within 24 hours, just speak up and have an open, honest, vulnerable conversation with the other person about it within 48 hours.

2:33So that's number one, speak about it. Number two, which goes along with this, but we're going to go deeper into it, is try to get better at expressing your feelings in a safe way. You know, part of being a human is feeling a large range of emotions. And I know that for me, I always tried to, for the longest time when I was younger, I tried to like cancel out and act like I didn't have the, let's just call it quote unquote, lower emotions. And I wasn't good at expressing my feelings. I was never taught how to express my feelings. So if you have anger in some sort of way, let it out. If you have sadness in some sort of way, let it out.

3:15If you have frustration in some way, let it out. Now, I'm not saying if you have anger, go and punch that person in the face. But what I'm saying is there's some sort of energy that is still inside of your body, try to get it out. Maybe, you know, I've said it many times, sometimes adults, you just need to be in a quiet place with nobody else around you and just have an adult temper tantrum. It's completely fine. Like children are really good at expressing their feelings in the moment. It's just a natural thing within us, but we have been taught not to express our feelings from a young age. And so if you think about it, it's like if you're at home and you have something that's just really angering you are really making you sad or frustrated, get a pillow and beat the shit out of your bed, right?

4:00Nobody else. Don't beat the shit out of anybody. Beat the shit out of your bed with that pillow. Get all of your anger out. If you want to scream into the pillow at the top of your lungs, do it and just get the energy out of your body so it doesn't just linger and rot. So anger, get it out. Sadness, get it out. Frustration, get it out. But also another thing I want you to know is if you have happiness, let it out. If you have joy, let it out. And stop holding all of it in. Don't feel shame about your feelings. We have been, a lot of us, conditioned from childhood to feel like certain feelings are wrong or are bad or should be kept within us.

4:37If your body, think about this for instance, right? If your body is at ease without all of it, then it is at dis-ease if you don't release it. and dis-ease can cause disease in your body. And so if you feel it, you need to express it. However expressing it feels to you. Joy, let it out. You know, anger, let it out. I remember there was a time about six or seven years ago, I started to realize that I was not allowing myself, it was probably, now I think about it, probably about eight years ago. I remember I was sitting there and I was like, I don't feel like I feel the lowest emotions as much anymore.

5:18But I was also like, I don't feel like I feel the highest emotions anymore. And you cannot numb the lower feelings and also at the same time not numb the higher feelings because you're just numbing feelings, period. And so if you're feeling something, feel it. Don't let somebody invalidate your feelings. Unexpressed emotions don't disappear. They end up showing up in other ways. They show up as stress. They show up as anxiety. They show up as physical symptoms for some people. If you think of a river, for instance, a river works its best when it's flowing. And so think of your feelings as like a river.

5:56You want to let them flow rather than damning them up. Because if you dam them up, it's not going to stop. That water, it's going to spill over in unexpected ways. And you don't want it to spill over. You don't want your anger for your boss to then spill over on your children when you go home, which I know a lot of people do. And so you've got to get better at expressing your emotions, whatever that means for you. That's where it's to. Number three, we're talking about getting better. Get better at asking for help. We all need help. Imagine that everything that you do, everything that's placed on you has some sort of weight to it, right?

6:28Imagine that everything that stresses you out or everything that comes into your life or every cast that you have is like, a rock that you have to hold on to, a small little rock, right? And you just put, say it was a pound, just about the size of your hand, and you put it in your backpack. And you get another thing, and you put it in your backpack. You get another thing, you put it in your backpack. And it's not a lot until you end up putting 20, 30, 40, 50 things in your backpack, and you keep putting more and more weight into it. There are people that are around you that are more than willing to help you take some of that weight.

7:02But some people won't step in and try to take it for you, so they won't help you unless you ask for help. There are many people listening right now that have been carrying way too much emotionally, physically, spiritually, all of that stuff for way too long. And there's people around you that are close to you that love you that would take some of that weight, but they don't know that it's there. Or maybe they don't feel like it's their job to step in. And so if you can just get better at asking for help, that's why sometimes you feel so heavy. Like it can just feel so heavy sometimes. At some point, you got to drop the weight.

7:36Otherwise, it can all come crashing down. And you know, I've been there before. And asking for help is not something that we're really ever trained to do. And so asking for help, we think, oh my gosh, well, if I ask, it makes me seem like I'm weak. It doesn't make you weak. It makes you human. You know, our strength doesn't lie in our courage and our lack of fear and our pushing forward, which I used to think when I was younger. Our strength really lies in our vulnerability for our being able to express ourself freely and to be able to ask for support to other people because you know that you would do the same for them.

8:10And so it's really important to just get better at asking for help. That will help you with your mental health. And we will be right back. and now back to the show that's number three number four and this is really important for a lot of people imagine that you're born and when you're born and you're old enough to start to understand things you are given let's say it's you're a little bit older you're nine or ten years old and you're given this this person to take care of you're given this person it's your job to take care of this person think about as you grow up how much time how much more you love this person how much you would take care of them what you would do to make sure that their life the best it can possibly be, right?

8:49I want you to start to understand that the moment you were born, you were given one person to take care of, and it was you. And you need to start treating yourself as someone that you're responsible for taking care of. Stop taking care of every single other person and then forgetting to take care of yourself. Don't say that you don't have enough time for yourself. That's bullshit. Make time for yourself. You are the most important person in your life. You are because the better that you are, the better that you interact with every single person that you come in contact with, especially the ones that you're closest to and you love the most.

9:22You cannot pour from an empty cup. And so self-care is really important, but you could say self-care is like not just getting your nails done, getting a massage, getting your hair done. All of those are great, but I'm talking about like silence for yourself, meditation, eating the correct way, eating healthy, working out, going for a run, learning to love and accept yourself as you are. Self-care is not selfish. I'm getting really tired of people out there acting like people are selfish because they want to take care of themselves. No, it's necessary for you to be the best for those people that are around you.

9:59And so just ask yourself daily, just ask yourself a simple question. If I were taking care of my best friend, what would I do for them right now? and then you treat yourself the exact way that you come up with that answer and what you do for your best friend, right? If I was taking care of my best friend, what would I do for them right now? And then do it for yourself. You're helping. I'm just going to say this and leave it at this. You're helping nobody by ignoring your own self-care. Okay. So that's number four. Number five, stop trying to escape your pain. An attempt to escape pain ends up causing more pain.

10:35The only way past all of it is through it. Not by acting like it's not there. Not by looking away and pretending that this thing isn't there. This pain or this trauma or this thing that happened to you three years ago that's just kind of lingering in the back. It's on the back burner. It's just kind of using energy. It's like a program that's just running in the background that you can't figure out how to turn off. Not by numbing it. All of those things do not make the pain go away. You know, it's like if you've ever heard the example of like, if you take a water bottle and you hold it out in front of you and you were to hold it and you say, how much does this weigh?

11:11Whatever, you know, 16 ounces weighs. And you hold it there. It's not a big deal if you hold it for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, holding it straight out in front of you with your arm straight out. But if you hold it for an hour, that water bottle is going to start getting heavier. Two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours a day. That arm is going to start to fail. You're holding onto it out in front of you and it gets heavier the long that you hold onto it. That's how all of these things are. The longer that you hold onto something, the longer that you try to escape your pain and act like it's not there and you try to brush it under the rug as if it's just not really there, the more that it's going to start to become heavier, become harder to deal with and just be kind of like the way I like to think about it, it's almost like it poisons all areas of your life.

12:01it's like you can't just numb emotions and you can't just numb your lower emotions. If you numb your lower emotions, you're numbing the higher emotions as well. And so numbing the pain often means that we're numbing joy. It means that we're numbing all of the emotions that we have. And so if we really want to, I don't know about you, but I want to live like the most full life that I possibly can. In order for me to live the most full life that I possibly can, it means that I need to get better at embracing all emotions, the entire spectrum of emotions, even the hard ones. Because if I can feel the deepest of deepest, darkest feelings, well, then I can also feel the highest of high feelings as well.

12:42And so when you think about pain, just consider it as a signal for you to pause, reflect, understand rather than escape. And so ask yourself, like, why am I feeling this way? What is this trying to tell me? And it's really just like pain is a lesson for you, but you have to be the person to decide to discover that lesson and put yourself out there and try to discover it. Okay, so that's a super important one is stop trying to escape your pain. Feel it, work through it. Number six, try to create more space for silence. Schedule silence. If you have a 10-minute break, find it. And it's really like, the way I like to think about silence, and you could call it meditation if you want to, you could call it mindfulness if you want to, you can call it whatever the hell you want to call it.

13:34But even if it's just sitting and just breathing and just looking at a wall if you want to, or looking out of a window, it allows your mind to process, to store, and to declutter. And this is an actual fact. So when you go and you fall asleep, your brain reprocesses your entire day and it stores it all away. It's what your brain does during sleep. When you sit and you have silence, even if you just sit there and you just stare at a tree if you wanted to, your brain will start to process and declutter and store things away when you're not constantly on your phone talking to somebody, scrolling through Instagram, scrolling through TikTok.

14:12And so the same way that your brain during sleep processes and declutters, when you find space for silence, your brain processes and declutters, which then makes you more efficient later on. And so find space for more silence. You know, we're in a world where it is always on. And so finding silence is more than anything else, allowing yourself to calm down, to show some self-respect. You can spend some time in nature, you can meditate, or you can just sit quietly and let your mind just be without constant stimulation, without having to always be on a treadmill of thinking and doing and thinking and doing.

14:48And that alone is massive for your mental health because you're able just to clear out a lot of the BS that you've been just, it's like just static going on in the background. Just allow it to just declutter, to reprocess, put things away. And if you say, oh my God, I'm bored whenever I sit in silence, change the phrase boredom. And I've been saying that on this podcast for about a year now. Change the phrase, the word boredom to relaxing and see how you start to reframe the way that you think about it. So if saying I'm bored, when you're just sitting there looking at a window, say I'm relaxing.

15:21and you realize, man, that is a form of self-care, and that does help your mental health. So that's number six. And number seven, I recommend this to so many people, especially if you're a process-driven person, if you're an overthinker, put your thoughts down on paper. There's no perfect way to do this. There's no like, hey, I need to read a book on journaling. Journaling is just a really good tool for mental clarity and emotional release. Just write down anything that you want to write down. You start to write down your thoughts, what you did, what's going on, how you're feeling. Ask yourself questions.

15:53What do I want to work through today? What's stressing me out? Why do I feel this way? When you do it, writing helps you see patterns in your thoughts and release what's been really occupying your mind. And so you can try brain dumping in the morning, putting stuff down. You could probably try brain dumping at night to clear your mind before you go to sleep and so that you can start each morning with a list of things that you're grateful for. And so just get better at just taking everything from your mind and putting it on paper because our thoughts, we get so caught up and our thoughts are so complex and they're all over the place.

16:27When you put them down on a piece of paper, you start to see patterns. You start to see yourself. And I think it's really important for people's mental health where if you just start putting stuff on paper, you start to develop more self-awareness. Oh my gosh, when I put myself in this situation, I feel this way. When I put myself in that situation, I feel that way. Oh my gosh, I didn't realize that this is what I wanted for my life. I didn't realize that this was stressing me out. And you start to learn yourself more, which is really important. Like you think you know yourself until you really start to take these actions like journaling and you start to learn who you are and you realize things about yourself you never knew before.

17:05And when you do that, it allows you to change things in your life for the good, remove things that are the bad, and it makes a lot more space for your mental health. And so those are the seven things that I got for you to help you with your mental health and improve it on a daily basis. If you love this podcast episode, please do me a favor, share it on the Instagram stories, tag me. There's definitely some people who follow you that need to improve their mental health and maybe this podcast will change your life. So once you do, just tag me in at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And once again, if you're out there and you want to download my free ebook on how to master your 2025 goals, it is absolutely free.

17:39Go to goals2025.com. Once again, goals2025.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode, making sure mission makes somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.