Real Relaxation by Konstantin Koss

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The mind is a strange thing. The effects of your mental state are very often not limited to your consciousness only. It also affects your physical self and shows itself in how your body functions. Ever noticed how people who are constantly under stress often look tired, haggard and old for their age? It’s stress and a less-than-fine mental condition that cause these physical manifestations to appear. The lack of mental fitness very often will lead to emotional distress and even affect physical health.

Recognizing the Need For Mental Wellness

People are constantly exposed to stress, although it comes in many forms and degrees. Even babies can experience stress, such as when they cry and attention to their needs gets delayed. Their experience, however, are significantly more limited.

Adults, on the other hand, experience stress as a result of day-to-day activities. It also doesn’t help that the demands of work, family and social activities often put pressure on an otherwise smooth-sailing situation.

To take the step towards ensuring mental wellness, it’s important that you are able to identify symptoms of unnecessary stress. Some types of distractions or concerns are easily dealt with while others require extra steps to resolve, sometimes necessitating professional help.

Resources For Mental Wellness

The best way to handle mental wellness is to recognize that it is a real need. Most people would ignore signs and symptoms of mental distress because they are used to believing that it’s ‘all in your head’. Very often, they do not recognize the problems until it has already affected them in a negative way.

It’s also important to use the right kind of knowledge to help maintain mental wellness. Read books, magazines and other sources of information on the subject. If there’s help available, then take advantage and use it.

Generally, though, the best source of information regarding the state of your mental health is you yourself. You know your limits and what you go through everyday. You can also recognize the factors that affect your mental health when you encounter them. To make sure you take care of your mental health, learn to identify situations, events and people that are stressful to you so you will know how best to manage them when you need to.

Steps to Ensuring Mental Wellness

Once you recognize your stress triggers and the things that challenge your mental wellness, there are certain steps you need to take.

- Assess your mental health on a regular basis.

Determine your ideal state of mind and then try to see how far you veer off from it periodically. The point here is to take note of ‘trends’ in your emotional well-being. Have you been feeling happy and satisfied lately or are you generally depressed and have been for some time?

- Set aside time to focus on your mental wellness everyday.

Often, taking a few short breaks to relax everyday can do a lot for your mental wellness. Recognize that it is normal for people to have concerns and worries but that what you need to focus on are real solutions. To do this effectively, you need to make a conscious effort to manage your mental wellness.

- Choose your most effective ways to manage negative thoughts.

People have different ways of dealing with stress and unpleasant emotions. When these thoughts enter your head, learn to recognize them and then interrupt the flow. Think of more pleasant things or distract yourself by doing more productive activities. These thoughts will probably appear from time to time but the key is to prevent them from dominating you.

- Learn to prioritize.

Very often, the stress that affects mental wellness is caused by the lack of prioritizing skills. Make a conscious effort of completing tasks according to importance. Even if you have a list of 20 things to do in one day, for example, being able to complete seven of them before lunch hour can help reduce the pressure on you.

- Challenge your mind.

The mind can get a bit rusty when it focuses on only one or two things. Learn to tread on unfamiliar ground and challenge yourself. Learn a new skill, for example, such as playing a musical instrument or learning chess. Unfamiliar things make the mind work harder because there is new information to process.

- Go easy on yourself.

If your mind wants to take a break, then go ahead and let it rest. Your mental wellness, after all, rests on how well you can listen to what your mind is telling you.

Additional External Resources:

• A Mental Wellness Plan

- I hope that the information provided in this post and the ideas that I have begun to implement in regards to my own mental wellness, have provided you with the knowledge and understanding that we are never alone. …

• Mental Wellness - A Necessity for All

- I know youngmen that are on meds for pyschological mood disorders of various types. It’s not uncommon to find family members that have been prescribed anti-depressants and other medications or who are mental ill altogether. …

• Definition: Mental Wellness

- Positive Psychology.

• Article Dump: Supplements that Support Mental Wellness and Focus …

- Supplements that provide these in addition to the herbs mentioned above would be a powerful and well rounded tool for supporting mental wellness. As with any supplement make sure you consult a doctor knowledgeable in supplements before …

Popularity: 22% [?]

No man is an island unto himself, which explains why people feel the need to communicate, interact and form strong relationships with other people. With social wellness, a person will have the capability to socialize, be confident and function normally with other people. The lack of social wellness often leads to anti-social behavior and causes inability to adjust in social surroundings.

What is Social Wellness?

Social wellness refers to the relationships and connections we have with others. It also refers to our capability to build and maintain relationships, manage our feelings and emotions and develop intimacy with family and friends.

Social wellness is an important element in every person’s life, primarily because it helps him recognize his natural interdependence with others, regardless of the relationship. A person who is socially well-adjusted is capable of making friends, offering support to others and becoming a productive member of the society he lives in.

Social wellness also encourages a person to focus on other people’s needs and make his contribution for the greater good of the community. It also helps him maximize and share his life experiences.

Indications of Social Wellness

There are certain standards with which our social wellness is known and measured. These include:

• positive relationships and interaction with other people
• ability to build and nurture relationships
• ability to empathize and care
• ability to function in social situations
• willingness to accept other people’s attention and care

Measuring Your Social Wellness

There are several factors that determine the state of your social wellness. These are:

• the intention you have to give time for socialization with family, friends and acquaintances
• the quality of your relationships
• your willingness to learn about others and explore information regarding other people
• the enjoyment you feel when you spend time with other people

If any of these factors are missing in your life, it’s probably time to consider carefully what you have been doing in order to address this concern and make the proper steps to improve this area of your life.

Creating Social Wellness in Your Life

Nobody attains perfection in his life, mainly because life is a process and will continue to evolve. However, people can perceive perfection in terms of satisfaction and happiness. To create social wellness, here are some of the most important steps you can take:

Know your needs.

We all have unique needs. What someone might find important may seem irrelevant to you and vice versa. Learn to identify what your needs are so you don’t feel the pressure to perform in an environment you don’t enjoy or care about.

Reach out.

Offering friendship to people is a first step to social wellness. Without this initiative, it will be difficult for you to take advantage of potentially productive relationships. Consider joining groups and clubs that focus on your interests. Explore other avenues that may present certain possibilities for you, such as volunteer work and travel.

Choose your relationships.

Some relationships take a toll on people. Sometimes, it could come from experiences with an abusive partner, an overbearing relative or an insincere friend. The problem here is that all of these can cause unnecessary strain on your emotional state and affect how you function socially.

Learn to build and stay in healthy relationships. These relationships involve people you care about and who care about you and your well-being. Generally, these are people whom you feel can nurture and support your needs and whose needs you yourself can offer support for. Since there is trust and compassion, you feel safe and satisfied, two vital ingredients for social wellness.

Don’t feel the pressure to conform.

This is a rather tricky step because often, conformity is required in the society we live in. However, cooperating with standards and mores doesn’t necessarily mean changing yourself and becoming a person you are not. Everybody’s different and it’s our job to accept that.

If you try to conform, you’ll find that the pressure to change yourself will affect you in many ways, all of them negative.

Learn to communicate effectively.

You can only do so much about hiding your thoughts and feelings. Being able to communicate is a vital component of social wellness because this is how you initiate relationships in the first place.

Make it a practice to constantly work on your social connections and soon you will have an abundance of what we call “social wellness”

Sincerely,

Konstantin Koss

Popularity: 11% [?]

“Wellness” is the trend-word of the decade, that’s pretty obvious. And since the day I saw “Wellness Catfood” on the shelf of my local mall I knew there was something fishy going on (no pun intended).

A recent test by the Austrian Chamber of Labour now discovered what many people already have guessed. The amount of sugar in the wellness drinks you can buy everywhere nowadays is not much different than that in other limonades or ice teas.

• Limonades contain an average of 25 to 35 pieces of lump-sugar per liter (one gallon = 3.8 liters)
• Ice teas contain 17-25 lump-sugar pieces per liter
• Wellness drinks contain seven to 17 lump-sugar pieces per liter

Even what is sold as “light” drinks is majorly sweetened. Often when the product mainly uses artificial sweetener they often (not always) add sugar to the drink. Up to 3-4 pieces of lump-sugar are added in wellness drinks that advertise with artificial sweetener.

Do not believe the hype. Living healthy sometimes takes some carefulness.

Related to this I looked around on the internet. I don’t like the idea of just exposing a problem without offering a solution.

So, how do you make sure what you drink is actually good for you? Read this:

Water is key to Wellness. Drink it!!! - “[…]Water is the primary ingredient in all bodily fluids including our blood supply, lymph, saliva plus others. Water constitutes 92% of our blood and nearly 98% of our intestinal gastric saliva and pancreatic juices. Water is vital ingredient in the functioning of our body’s 100 trillion cells.[…]”

Konstantin Koss

(Photo by alykat)

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