World Mental Health Day 2022

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Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay2022! Exercise is proven to be excellent for everyone's mental health, as well as obviously physical health too, because it naturally boosts your happy hormones 🙂 and generally being sedentary can make you feel more 'down' than you actually are.

Healthy mind in a healthy body! 

Dance is great for this because it combines exercise with music so it's uplifting and boosts your mood,💃💃🏿 as does creating art, which is why there is such a thing as Art Therapy. 🎨🖌️🖼️

Art is and always has been a strong passion of mine alongside music. They are who I am which is why I chose aesthetics (which includes Philosophy of Art, Music, Dance, Theatre/Literature, Nature, hence my love of Philosophy) as one of my 3 specializations at uni (the other 2 being Politics, and Ethics). For me, art, music, dance, theatre, philosophy and nature are the main things that keep me mentally (emotionally and physically) healthy. Life without these is, as far as I'm concerned, unhealthy in every way. 

However, it's not all just about art, music, theatre, appreciating nature, dance and general exercise - it's also about meaningful self-care, by which I mean embracing your identities eg LGBT+ 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️, racial identity/identities/ethnicity, culture/mixed cultural background, nationality, appearance, age, ableness, political identity, educational identity (education, background), class, religious, non-religious identity (especially those who suffer widespread discrimination eg those with a Jewish identity, agnostics, atheists, freethinkers). It's important not to allow people/society to try to make you feel internally conflicted about them or feel badly about yourself 😥 thereby endangering your mental health externally by imposing biased views and beliefs onto you. Certain concepts in Intersectional Feminism help with this, such as not absorbing and internalising patriarchal, sexist, homophobic, genderphobic, transphobic, racist, anti-Semitic norms and beliefs about all women and their looks or capabilities, physically and intellectually. 

To a large extent, many mental health issues arise from external causes (unexpected situations, life events, discrimination, harassment), only a few mental illnesses have internal causes (ie a mental illness that someone develops irrespective of their life circumstances and situations so it constitutes a psychological abnormality eg certain, serious, clinical mental conditions). However, nowadays, there is a tendency to conflate normal, non-happy psychological responses to, for instance, lockdowns during the pandemic, with actual mental health issues. Furthermore, there's an increasing lack of distinction between normal, proportional moods/reactions to situations, for instance, feeling 'low' about experiencing harassment, and symptoms of clinical mental illness! Research has shown that being happy all the time isn't healthy and it's actually a good thing to have 'down time', to slow down and rest so you have time to recuperate and recharge your batteries, while at the same time not suppressing a range of emotions you may be feeling.

Mental health and wellbeing is nurtured by loving yourself 🤗💖 as you are, not as others would have you be!

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