Mental health is just as important as physical health. In fact, it’s hard to maintain one without the other.

Unfortunately, our world is just as stressed and depressed as it is overweight and unfit. The mental health chapter of Supermorning is here to do its little bit to address this critical global challenge. 

Short-term stress management

Many of us are already highly stressed. If we’re not very careful, the effects of this stress can easily trigger various vicious cycles, leading to even greater stress. 

Here are some useful tips for breaking such cycles before they get started. 

1. Develop a game plan for stress management. There are several proven stress-reduction techniques available, but we need a proactive game plan to make them practically useful. 
2. Let go of unnecessary stress. We’re often stressed about things that are not so dangerous, highly unlikely, or totally outside our control. Mindfulness makes it easier to let go of such useless stress. 
3. Find your Most Efficient Next Action (MENA). There are also many times when your stress is legit. Pouring all this restless energy into doing something about it results in very natural stress reduction. 
4. Stop digging. We have a tendency to keep doing the thing that caused our stress in the first place. Recognize when this happens and do the positive things in the previous steps instead. 

These ideas offer effective treatments to the ailment, but long-term mental health requires more proactive actions. 

Long-term stress reduction

Prevention is better than cure. This is just as true for mental health as it is for physical health. We covered four ways to proactively prevent chronic stress. 

1. Proactively prevent overwhelm. Overwhelming yourself only reduces your ability to get things done. Understanding why you get overwhelmed is the key to a more manageable life. 
2. Take special care of your health and relationships. Environments for automatic healthy diet and fitness are great stress reduction tools. Master the key moments to prevent relationship stress.
3. Win over your biggest critic: yourself. Invest, fail, learn, repeat. Getting comfortable with this cycle is key to the healthy self-respect needed to stop stressing about your own life. 
4. Make a big stress reduction move if really necessary. Sometimes you need to get out of things like a damaging relationship or a bad career choice.

On the other side of stress lies a much happier and more fulfilling life. But we also need to recognize that happiness is not simply the absence of stress…

Chasing happiness

We all want to be happy, but most of us go about it the wrong way. 

1. Directly chasing happiness is pointless. The amount of time and money spent on instant pleasure activities is a good measure of unhappiness. Instead, focus on things that give meaning to life.  
2. Materialistic pursuits of happiness have their benefits, but also some serious drawbacks. Although the pursuit of material success brings little lasting happiness, it has fueled great human progress. But this motivation has a dark side in terms of environmental destruction, social injustice, and self-destructive behaviors.
3. The combination of liberty and purpose offers an attractive solution. This philosophy can bring lasting life satisfaction and further accelerate human progress without any of the downsides.
4. Informed gratefulness can make big contributions to happiness. Gratitude increases happiness because it can reset our benchmarks to more reasonable levels. 

A world full of calmer and happier people will certainly be a much better place to live in. Let’s take great care of our mental health and make this world a reality 🙂