May 16, 2024
What Impact Does Your Environment Have on your Mental Health ?
Your mental health can be impacted by a variety of factors, including your home, city, and state of residence, as well as the local climate, social environment, and workplace. Your physical and emotional health may be significantly impacted by these places where you spend a lot of time.
So it makes sense to focus on the impact of the environment on mental health. However, with so many variables at play, you might be unsure of which ones to prioritize in order to enhance your mental health.
Here, we examine how your environment affects your mental health as a whole, how to determine when a change is necessary, and what you can do to start feeling better.
Environmental Influences on Mental Health
Hate can spread negative emotions. It can have an impact on both personal and professional relationships. The chemistry of the brain is altered by hatred. It stimulates the area of the brain responsible for movement planning and execution. This part causes aggression while feeling hateful, causing you to defend or attack.
Poverty, violence, and environmental racism are some environmental issues that can have a big impact on mental health. For instance, studies show that a person’s living situation might affect their well-being. Another study discovered that crime and the fear of crime had a significant impact on mental health.
Environmental racism, which is characterized as racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, has also been connected to a number of other environmental factors that have a negative impact on the mental health of BIPOC people and communities.
How to Determine If Change Is Necessary ?
The first step is realizing how important the environment is to one’s mental wellness. However, you must also be able to tell when a modification is required.
Snow argues that it’s crucial to pay attention to the links between your feelings and the things that make them arise. Then, she continues, “You can make modest changes to your current surroundings to see if that large change is actually essential.”
The first step is realizing how important the environment is to one’s mental wellness. However, you must also be able to tell when a modification is required.
Snow argues that it’s crucial to pay attention to the links between your feelings and the things that make them arise. Then, she continues, “You can make modest changes to your current surroundings to see if that large change is actually essential.”
For instance, Snow advises doing more peaceful things at home if you live in a city and are constantly feeling overstimulated and nervous. Snow continues, “If that doesn’t affect your mood but you realize that every time you spend a weekend outside the city, you feel at ease, that’s a clue that something needs to change.
Scott emphasizes that for many of us, moving permanently from one area to another is not always an option. However, one approach to see if your physical surroundings affect your mood is to temporarily relocate to the country or possibly closer to the water.
- “I would say you have some key evidence to support your decision,” Scott says. “For instance, if you notice that you experience less stress being outside of the city lights, there is less smog in the air and less noise for you to contend with, and as a result, you are sleeping better and thinking more clearly.
