How Your Environment Can Affect Your Mental Health
More and more people are becoming aware of how they can take care of their mental health. There are a wealth of resources available for that, many of which are recommended. Part of looking after your mental health is to know how your environment affects it.
Many people might be confused about this. If you don’t know how your environment affects your mental health, then you can’t deal with these factors. Understanding how certain things will affect you is the first step to overcoming them.
These can be broken down into physical or social factors. Each can affect you in various ways and can’t be dealt with differently. As such, it’s worth knowing what they are.
How Environmental Factors Impact Your Mental Health
Physical Environment
Your physical environment will have a much larger impact on your mental health than you’d think. That’s driven by various aspects, including what’s in the walls around your home. That could mean having a chemical analysis done around the home, in case there is anything that could be harming you.
Not every physical factor is this big, however. It can include several other things, including:
Substance abuse;
Hazardous conditions at work, and;
Extreme weather conditions.
With some work, and possibly some help, you can address the majority of these factors. That should help you improve your mental health over time, alongside making your life easier in general.
Social Environment
Social environmental factors can refer to a broad range of things. Some of the more notable of these are race and ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic status, and much more. These can add significant stressors to your life, which will impact your mental health.
While some factors can’t be changed, some can be worked on, such as your socioeconomic factors. These are often the most difficult hurdles to overcome, however, and can take a significant amount of time.
A lack of social support among your peer group can also be a large factor in your mental health. There can be multiple other factors involved in this. Prominent among these are:
History of abuse;
Early loss of a parent;
Poverty;
Lack of self-care, and;
Social stigma.
Having a supportive social group can be a strong foundation to help you overcome many of these issues. You may also need to consider therapy for some, as it’ll help you work through these problems.
Wrapping Up
Once you know how your environment affects your mental health, you can take appropriate steps to deal with them. On some occasions, these can affect you positively. In many others, though, they’ll have a negative impact on you. That means that you should work to get rid of them.
That can be harder to do in practice than in principle. Once you’ve done so, however, you should start feeling better mentally. While that might take a little while, you should feel some relief relatively quickly.
Over the long term, you should see your mental health improve drastically. That’ll only be in combination of other techniques with is, such as therapy and medication, if needed.
