Mental health is so fleeting in the modern world. It is simultaneously super important and super misunderstood. Those who find it understand just how powerful it can be and understand that it isn't the easiest thing to explain to others. To make it a little easier to find, I'll be going over 5 things to avoid for impeccable mental health.

All too often, we are bogged down by things that don't matter. We overload ourselves by our own volition and wonder why we suffer so much.

At the same time, we don't take the time or effort to increase our capacity for suffering. As a result, our resilience stagnates.

There are plenty of options for improving mental health and I encourage you to experiment. For now, here are the 5 things I recommend to avoid for impeccable mental health.

1. Lack of physical activity

It's common knowledge these days that moving makes your overall mood and health get better. It's for these reasons that physical activity is crucial for obtaining good mental health.

Our base instincts are to survive and reproduce. In order to survive, we need to be strong enough to handle our environment.

Doing physical activity makes you stronger which makes your brain more confident in your ability to survive. This reassurance makes your brain relax and stress out less.

The perfect picture to paint this is that of a little dog barking at a big dog. The little dog believes it must behave in a ferocious manner because it knows that it would lose in a fight against the bigger dog.

Meanwhile, the big dog just sits there because it knows it could win against the little dog any day. 

By partaking in physical activity, we become the big dog of our lives against a swarm of little dogs in our minds.

2. Lack of quality sleep

How many of you have pulled all-nighters? I know you're out there because I've done it too. Little did I know back then that all-nighters were contributing to my declining overall health.

Sleep is recharge time for the body. The machine docks in the hangar and goes into maintenance mode for a prolonged period of time.

When you don't get enough sleep, you don't get to do that maintenance. You're left with residue in the morning that weighs you down.

That nightly maintenance keeps your mind free from clutter and your body in tip-top shape. It's bad enough when one is thrown off, but both are catastrophic.

By now you've heard the usual advice surrounding sleep: 8 hours of sleep a night at the minimum. If you aren't getting at least that much sleep then I highly recommend you get on it.

Of all the things you could do to improve your mental health, getting proper sleep is the simplest.

3. Negative self-talk/self-destruction

Of all the things you can do to acquire bad mental health, negative self-talk is the fastest way to achieve it. For this reason, we want to avoid it.

Your brain is like a computer and your mind the operating system. If you're running negative self-talk through your operating system often, it will start to influence your programming.

Marcus Aurelius once said, "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts." If all you think of is negative messages, then your mind adopts that as its outlook.

This isn't to say that you should always be happy. This is to say that you should be realistic and balanced.

To help with keeping your thoughts constructive, I suggest you journal about them. 

Write them down, add commentary to them, and ask yourself questions about them. Dig into those tough thoughts and distill them down into their useful bits.

The mind is a powerful asset; don't taint it with excessive negative thoughts.

4. Living according to other's desires

It's very common these days to see people living life the way others want them to rather than the way they want to. This can be traced back to parents only loving their kids when they behave the way they wanted them to. Little do they know that this will become a festering problem in their kids' futures.

Even those who are people pleasers want something; they want to be accepted. We all have desires and we all wish to see them fulfilled. However, this style of living means you will pretty much never get what you want.

Living the way others want you to live is a one-way stop to misery. Deep down, we know how we want to live but we don't fight back because of the way we were brought up.

To truly achieve good mental health, you need to be authentic with yourself and your desires. There is no way around this.

When you can be authentic about yourself, others will sense that. They will know you're being authentic and many will respond in kind.

When you don't live authentically, you invite misery into your life. Don't do that to yourself.

5. Black-or-white mentality

In this era, many people want to see things through the lens of black or white, good or evil. They want this because it's less effort, not exactly because it's more effective. Although it's less effort, it leads to problems down the line.

Thinking in this way is thinking in extremes. Thinking in extremes is incredibly toxic and makes you an unbearable person to be around.

On top of this, thinking in extremes also fries your understanding brain. Because this way of thinking just lumps everybody together, you don't even stop to consider the circumstances that led somebody there in the first place.

The reason why this thinking doesn't work is that nobody is exactly the same. Sure, we have similar behavior patterns but individually, we are different.

Taking the time to uncover those differences while recognizing the patterns is how you come to understand others and stop stressing over people who fall out of the box.

Your mind is yours, never forget that

It seems like a lot of people these days seem to forget that they are their own person. They follow the orders of somebody else, even if they don't want to.

It all begins in your mind. To achieve impeccable mental health, you must fortify your mind so it can weather many storms. These 5 things I've shared today will help you with that.

- Karl