Strong signs you need to take a mental health break.
Learn 12 signs when you need to pause and take care of your mental health with proper life choices
In the conquest of the next best thing in life, we all are rushing forward in sync with scary deadlines and hectic schedules. This takes a heavy toll on your physical and most importantly your mental health, and well-being.
Mental health is very subtle and can get disrupted if you miss out on taking good care of it.
Too many commitments, projects, goals, dreams, and aspirations make you always ready on your toes and alert. Stress and burnout are often major issues that affect our mental clarity and deteriorating mental health.
To understand those situations when you are too emotionally exhausted and on the brink of mental overload, you need to notice and be aware of the turmoil taking place in your overall health system and attitude.
Today’s post will help you to learn about those strong signs when you need to take a mental break and breathe out the stress building in your mind.
First, let’s discuss
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What is a Mental Health Break?
A mental health break is a phase when you pause your mind and rest yourself with proper self-care and self-love.
It is the reset time to energize your over-tired mind and aching soul with acts of self-love and kindness for your mental well-being and health.
Daily rush and high stress of work, home, kids, and commitments hinder you from taking a little time to relax. This makes your mind and body emotionally numb and tired.
When you have too many things going on in life that take ample space in your mind and head leaving you little to breathe, that is the time when you step back. Regular breaks are essential to alleviate daily stress.
Your time off for a mental health break is necessary to slow down to recollect and enjoy the beautiful moments for yourself until you feel fully connected to your present.
Never hesitate to take a mental health day if you feel overwhelmed and anxious at work or home. Rest, relax, reset, and come back to life being recharged energy!
Disclaimer: I am not a licensed therapist nor I do have any professional experience in psychology or mental health. The information shared by me is purely for educational or informational purposes. Please reach out to a professional expert for help if you are going through a tough situation in your life.
What are the benefits of having mental health break?
1) Regular stress and burnout from work and home make you exhausted. Taking a break and tending to your mind works wonders for your overall mental well-being and sharpens your focus.
2) Good mental health and energy curbs health issues building a strong immune system and cardiovascular fitness.
3) Make you more connected to the present rather than overthinking on past or future
4) Helps you to clear your mind from unwarranted thoughts resulting in mental clarity
5) Increases your productivity at work minimizing errors.
6) Have a good attitude with yourself and others around you.
7) Helps you to be more creative with new ideas
8) Calms your anxious mind down
Now let us understand those burnout symptom signs when you start taking notice that it is the time when you need a mental health break and step back to regroup.
STRONG SIGNS TO TAKE A MENTAL HEALTH BREAK:
WARNING SIGNS YOU ARE MENTALLY AND EMOTIONALLY EXHAUSTED
1. FEELING RESTLESSNESS
Stress levels if left unchecked can be detrimental to your mental health. The first strong sign that you need to take a mental health break is that you will notice you are always in a restless mode.
You will feel that your mind cannot sit still and is running miles away. Even if you are at work or doing anything else sitting quietly is going to become a challenge for your mind.
For example, you have started planning your next big project, but you are currently going through a hectic overload in your mind.
A sense of jittery or nagging unknown feeling will creep into your mind making you restless and unable to focus on the present work or task.
Read this post to check your stress level
Easy ways to relieve stress from your life
10 smart ways mindfulness reduces stress from life
2. HAVING NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
Your mindset plays an important part in controlling your mental health.
When we are energetic or in high vibrational space we are surrounded with positivity and good thoughts and beliefs.
But constant work pressure, competition, and comparisons that are crept into our minds by societal norms make us always in the rush to live tight lives.
This busy and exhaustive lifestyle are so-called perfect successful life in many societies that makes your mental health deteriorate leaving you to feel negative in your mind space.
You start to think and act negatively like “I won’t be able to finish this up”, “This amount of success is beyond my reach” or “I cannot achieve this …”
This means that you need to take a step back from your daily life just to breathe in peace without any baggage or disturbances.
How you can do it?
a) Try Journaling your mind on paper and scripting your thoughts, negativity, feelings, and emotions in any way you want. Slowly you will start to collect all your written thoughts and understand the underlying issue in your mind.
Journaling is a great tool to express your thoughts to free your mind up when we are unable to frame our thoughts in a convincing way to ourselves or others.
b) Another great way to shift your negative thoughts into positive ones is to practice affirmation in your morning or evening routine.
Using positive statements to change and reprogram your limited beliefs into strong, abundant thoughts does wonders for your self-belief and self-worth. These habits help to recover from burnout.
You can read these posts for further help with ideas of positive affirmation and how to use these life-changing statements for better results :
31 positive morning affirmations for a better start today
31 positive affirmations to curb worry and anxiety
70 powerful Journal Prompts for self-discovery reflection
3. FEEL A LACK OF MOTIVATION AND ENERGY
With mental fatigue and burnout, your motivation for anything in life is almost zero. Whenever you sit with some task you feel constantly tired and lack the motivation to put in any effort.
Your personal care routine like self-care practices also feels like a chore that makes you feel exhausted to enjoy your daily life.
Mental overwhelm makes you distant from your self-love activities with poor energy levels to feel charged up.
4. SUDDEN IRRITABILITY AND IMPATIENCE
One of the strong signs of taking a mental health break is when you start to get irritated about small things at every turn of your life.
And after you have shown your frustrations on that person who did not deserve anything like that, you will be left to be appalled by your sudden outburst!
You will be unable to perform any task or enjoy anything out of impatience. When your mind is sprinting you will expect everything around you to be as fast as possible.
This erratic behavior harms us consequently with guilt, shame, and confusion. Many of us used to become upset or cry out our pain for unknown fear, anxiety, or worry.
When we are mentally tired and have too much piled on our minds we lose ourselves to the toxic hook of impatience and baffling behaviour.
Either you can space yourself away to take some time to breathe, go outside for a walk, or think before you explode on someone just about anything.
It just needs an investment of your own time for yourself to change your attitude and behavior. Making a few lifestyle changes will help you to overcome this strong mental exhaustion sign.
Related posts:
12 simple ways to clear your mind
12 toxic habits to cut out for a healthy mind
Anxiety Journal Planner Printable bundle is a comprehensive tool kit designed to help you establish and track your anxiety worry and fear and improve your mental well-being.
Download this printable Journal bundle which offers a wide variety of worksheets, and planners addressing all your anxiety-related issues
5. GOOD HABITS TAKE A HIKE
Cultivating good habits is the last thing you want to have in your daily life when your mind is unsettled and emotionally numb.
As a result, we are drawn to toxic habits for temporary relief from this mental exhaustive phase.
Too much drinking, smoking, irregular life routines, and living carelessly are a few warning proofs that you need to take yourself away from this overloaded fatigue state.
Reprogramming your mind and body with good healthy lifestyle practices is the solution necessary to come out of mental exhaustion.
Read to learn more about curbing toxic habits for a better life
Toxic habits to give up instantly in the morning
16 good habits to boost your mood quickly
6. UNHEALTHY EATING HABITS
When you are on the verge of a mental slowdown and unable to move forward, you will compensate for your drooping energy by resorting to unhealthy high-calorie foods.
Too many things going on in your mind surely make you feel more unenthusiastic about most facets of your life.
So the unhealthy solution will be…
Binge on those fast food for quick happiness, gorging mindlessly on the crackers along with that carbonated water.
Hey! But don’t take this personally when we all have been there and still become hooked by eating disorders when everything becomes too much to handle!
This is something I have experienced when I took up many tasks or enlarged that to-do list in my daily schedule and equally fell behind in completing all. I used to take this easy route of temporary calorie pleasure!
This was one of my strong signs to take a mental health break and lead a slow lifestyle without all the mindless sprinting.
7. FEAR OF SIMPLE TASKS
When you are mentally tired the simple task of getting up early in the morning is going to give you chill!
As your mental energy level is so low, your physical health takes cues to become nonchalant about the morning or evening routine you have for a healthy life.
Simple tasks that you used to do with love and care will start to feel like dread!
This is a strong sign when you just relax your mind and slow down to a deep calm level. Getting back to your life only going to make you more refreshed and regrouped.
8. LACK OF INTEREST
Any tasks that had once given you a lot of interest and happiness to perform, with constant exhaustion start feeling boring and mundane.
Your loss of interest is another strong sign of your mental exhaustion.
When we are happy and relaxed from our mind we feel charged up to physically work on a task. But with emotional burnout, you feel discouraged to enjoy simple things.
9. PRONE TO QUIT
Mental fatigue always leads us to quit before putting resistance in our daily lives.
Too much workload and commitments make you emotionally tired and unavailable to fully devote your mind and soul to something.
This feeling of chagrin rushes you to quit anything at the very first roadblock you face. Letting go of any challenges very easily is a warning sign of being emotionally and physically tired and stressed.
10. UNKNOWN FEAR AND ANXIETY
Have you noticed that your unknown fear lately creeps into your mind out of nowhere?
Or you are anxious about certain uncertain future events or intrusive thoughts disturbing your mental peace and draining your mind and body more?
Well, these can also be warning signs that you are going through a mental and emotional burnout phase.
Whenever I am mentally overloaded which makes me exhausted, my fear of an unknown future or intrusive thoughts start ruining my peace and calm.
When your life has too much going on and you are unable to take a breath to feel each phase, you start getting emotionally numb and fatigued.
Too many to-do’s in your daily list also play a vital factor when you are unable to finish all at the end of your day. This lag makes you feel like a failure!
That is why your mental energy should have the top one or two daily goals in your day. Save your overwhelm and make you more productive at tasks. Avoid crowding your mind until it becomes a recipe for explosion!
11. SLEEP DISRUPTION
This is one of the strong signs to take mental health breaks in all of our lives when we are unable to get deep sleep to rest our minds and bodies in peace.
I always have suffered from this insufficient sleep schedule during the night. Tossing and turning during the prime time of sleep made my night as well as the next morning total crap!
Your mind will get thousands of images flashing while you get ready for bed and once you close your eyes the brain won’t shut down. This situation was very painful for me at least when I wanted to sleep as I was tired but stayed awake late at night.
With lifestyle changes and adopting good daily habits, I have now come out of this sleep disruption issue.
The cause of your poor sleep schedule is your mental fatigue as this exhaustion doesn’t let your exhausted body go to sleep. Use this post to learn the productive nighttime routine I use before bed for deep sleep.
HOW CAN YOU COME OUT OF MENTAL EXHAUSTION?
1. Write down the things you are grateful for. Daily gratitude makes a person happy and improves mental fatigue.
2. Write down all your emotions through Journaling on a simple piece of paper, notebook or your Journal book
3. Practice sitting in silence if you are not comfortable in meditation. Believe me, after a week you will start to feel like you are beginning to mindfully meditate even for 1 minute!
Mindful meditation improves your focus making you calm and bereft of any restlessness. It is a great way to decrease anxiety and depression.
4. Practice self-care to show yourself ample self-love that will improve your mental fatigue, reboot focus, and productivity.
Do you want to improve your daily self-care and self-love routine to live a happy and joyful life?
I am sure you do!
Download this easy to use Self-care Printable Planner to find peace and self-love amid your daily busy life
5. Try a simple and short morning routine, this will change your life. Stay in a rhythm with your mind and body through daily morning rituals.
6. Write down or say to yourself in the mirror positive affirmations that reach your ear properly.
You will feel better with time and practice making you more self-confident and have more self-love and self-esteem.
7. Try to eat healthily and cook at home, even if it is something simple and easy to make. Fast and junk foods destroy your mind and body with time.
8. Get outside if you work from home or are too tied in your office. A few minutes of fresh air and sunlight or an evening walk works wonders on our mental health making us refreshed and recharged.
9. Move your body with some simple stretching or yoga moves in the morning or evening at any time suitable for you, but do it consistently.
It’s alright if you skip one or two days, but don’t quit!
10. Read good self-help books that recharge your mind and boost your mood instantly. Go book shopping if you want to feel, smell, and be surrounded by the cool and calm atmosphere of good personal development tangible books!
11. Do something that you love and you find peace while immersing your mind and soul in it! Any hobbies, sports, creative art, doodling, scribbling or painting.
10. Never hesitate to ask for professional help if you are still suffering from mental exhaustion and emotional fatigue. Getting help from a professional is the right way to get yourself out of this pain.
Disclaimer: I am not a licensed therapist nor I do have any professional experience in psychology or mental health. The information shared by me is purely for educational or informational purposes. Please reach out to a professional expert for help if you are going through a tough situation in your life.
Take care of yourself by taking very good care of your mental health. Give yourself a break once in a while or maybe quite often for a long if you want to feel good and refreshed.
What works for you may be different for another. So never force anything on yourself.
Just try taking up or adopting one of the solutions in your life while you feel that your mind is too full to function at the top.
Or mix up any other fun ideas you have to help yourself relax your mind and body for that ultimate mental health break you deserve for a long.
Always look after your mind as this place is a very tricky part of our body.
The mind is not the same person as you are. Any time you notice strong signs to take a mental health break, go ahead. To keep it in sync with your life and right direction you need to nurture and show kindness to your mental space.
A mental health break is always the right choice for the health and well-being of your mind and body.
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