These 2 Mindset Shifts Have Revolutionized The Way I Approach My Mental Health

There are so, so many components that go into our mental health, how we feel on a day-to-day basis, and our relationship to ourselves in general. There's also no shortage of mental health advice out there—from how to eat, work out, meditate, and more—making it difficult to know what will actually work for you.

I'd definitely heard this one before, but was I actually embodying it? In some respects, sure, I was teaching and practicing yoga and eating clean for the most part—but some of the less obvious factors, like underlying stress, toxic relationships, and spreading myself too thin, weren't exactly "temple" material.

If I was really going to treat my body like a temple, that meant respecting and honoring my own boundaries. Boundaries can look like declining plans for the sake of downtime, cutting off a bad relationship, or even setting a boundary with yourself to commit to a new regimen or routine.

We know that everything from stress to other people's moods can directly impact our nervous system, so treating your body like a temple is about way more than the food you eat and working out. That's a big part of it, of course, but when you're in a literal temple, you're also graceful, respectful, and in connection with the divine.

There's a lot of talk about loving yourself in order to heal, or learning to love yourself before you can love anyone else. I'm not saying you shouldn't love yourself, but if that's a struggle for you, this widely circulated Tumblr post might resonate with you more.

To paraphrase, the post essentially says that rather than focusing on loving yourself, you can try loving being yourself. In other words, if you don't love yourself right now, you can find things you love to do in order to create a life you love.

As someone who's always had mixed feelings about the whole "love yourself" bit, this post truly threw me for a loop. It was like someone gave me a permission slip to stop fixating on how I felt about myself and instead prioritize what actually made me feel good. (And sometimes, all we really need is that permission!)

I've continuously come back to this idea of loving being yourself since I first saw the post earlier this year, and slowly but surely, I'm loving being me more and more every day. It's a bit of a mindfulness exercise in that way, and the more I practice it, the more I find joy in everyday moments like cooking, walking to my favorite cafe, or cuddling my cat.

We all have unique stories when it comes to our mental health and our relationship with our selves, and those stories aren't always the happiest. But if there's one thing I've found to be true in my own life, it's that mindset matters—often more than we want to believe.