Reflective Essay on Mental Health

📌Category: Health, Mental health
📌Words: 830
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 10 April 2022

In the past, my mental health was not the best. I struggled with finding the positive aspect of life and it led to me not wanting to go to school. I would have panic attacks before going to school and beg my parents to stay home. I was losing friends because I would tell them that I wasn’t going to hang out last minute. I felt that school added to my stress and I had no time for myself to be able to figure out what was causing me to feel this way. I went to a therapist and I even became homeschooled because of how many panic attacks I would get.

Today, I have changed and grown a lot from my past experiences with my mental health. I think that being homeschooled helped with figuring out what was causing my stress and anxiety. It helped me manage it all better. I ended up going back to my high school after one year in home schooling because I wanted to meet more friends and have a good experience my senior year. Then, through my last year of high school and until now I have gotten so much better. I have learned about acceptance of myself because I acknowledged these issues and changed how I handled them. I learned that it’s okay to feel this way and that I wasn’t alone.

I want to keep encouraging myself that I have so many loving people around me and that what I feel is normal. I am continuing to build my confidence everyday and finding my happiness in life. I am still growing and learning everyday about myself and to love myself. My mental health will keep getting better because I will continue to be open about how I feel with people who care about me. It’s important to me that I don’t hold feelings back or brush them under the rug. I also want to continue to be optimistic about things in my life like in school and throughout my career.

Stress

I used to ignore my stress a lot when it would get really bad. I get stressed very easily and it was hard to manage it. I think that school caused my stress to get worse because of the pressure of getting good grades and having so many assignments to do. My stress affects my body to where I have digestive problems, headaches, and I become anxious. It messes up my sleeping quality because I get insomnia as well. Some stressors that I have are the first day of school, taking a test, or having a presentation. Those types of events I would get so stressed out that I wouldn’t be able to sleep the night before. I can’t even eat because I start to feel sick.

Today, I have been trying new ways to manage my stress. I manage my time by creating a schedule for myself. If I have multiple things due at once, I try to only allow myself to work on two assignments at a time to prevent myself from getting overwhelmed. For instance, if I have 4 assignments due around the same date, I will work on half one day and make another day to work on assignments. I used to cram everything in one day and wait until the last minute and it would cause me to panic. My sleeping schedule is better because I make sure to wake up early even if I am not going to work. I also make sure to eat to be more energized during the day.

My diet is something that I want to work on in the future. I drink coffee almost everyday. It makes my stress worse and I want to limit my caffeine intake to help with stress. I want to work on my nutrition more because I don’t have the best diet. Diet is a huge factor in managing stress levels. I also eat junk food everyday and nothing I eat has enough nutrition and vitamins. 

Knowledge from class

Physiological health is very important to me and I think this topic is what I related to the most. I learned a lot more about mental health in this class including the importance of a healthy self-esteem. Maintaining communication with others about how you feel, acknowledging feeling disconnected and having cognitive distortions and having a positive self-concept are ways that help achieve better self esteem. 

In this class, I learned that identifying your stressors and creating a plan to manage your stress is a great way to prevent stress from worsening. Stress is a natural reaction and it causes our bodies to respond in a flight-or-fight reaction. There are both appropriate and inappropriate responses to stressors. Exercise and creating a good diet are the best behavioral responses. Substance abuse is an inappropriate response to stress. 

Lastly, these topics are important to me and the information that I have learned from this course. It will help me move forward now that I have knowledge on what stress is and how to maintain a healthy mental state. I think these are connected topics so I know that my stress is connected to my anxiety and psychological health. I learned that I need to take time to focus on myself and know what will calm my stress and help me change my lifestyle to promote healthy habits.

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