Men’s Mental Health and Search for Wellness
Men’s Mental Health and Search for Wellness
Last week I wrote a blog on the top men’s skincare trends to look out for in 2021. While the trends in that skincare blog were important, there is an even more important men’s trend on the horizon: mental health and wellness. I can guarantee that throughout this year, you will continue to hear brands promoting wellness. The purpose for this week’s blog is to outline what wellness means and how to prioritize it in our lives.
So what is mental health and wellness?
In order to understand what mental health and wellness is, I want to start with clarifying what wellness is not. A lot of the time when we hear the word wellness, we think of a yoga, zen-like state of mind that is only achievable with deep meditation. It’s not. Wellness is also not a repost on Instagram of a positive picture. Even further, wellness is not striving to get perfect, clean looking skin.
As people continue to broadcast their lives for the world to see them, there is a desire to promote only the best of their lives. While a lot of these posts do show off moments when we were “happy,” a lot of energy is spent in validating future happiness by what others may think of us when they see that post of a beautiful beach vacation. In fact, a lot of energy is spent in general of trying to validate our own happiness through others’ eyes. This goes deeper than social media.
When you think of a man’s stereotypical goals in life, it follows somewhere along the lines of a high paying job, a big house, and a family to live under it. Most men do not think to put “happiness” or “mental health” on their bucket list.
How to find wellness in our everyday lives
If I have learned one thing from 2020, it is that “happiness” is not an end result. Rather, happiness and wellness are opportunities to extract from life’s every moment. All we have to do is find the right tools to get us there. For the sake of this blog, let’s call these tools our “wellness sparks.” These sparks are those moments in life when everything just feels right. For me personally, it could be standing on the tee box with my closest friends or reading a good book in a small coffee shop.
The concept of mental health and wellness is to identify these sparks. I suggest you keep a running list on your phone of those small moments when everything in life seemed beautiful. The more we identify these moments, we not only appreciate them for what they are, but they also provide a way to retrace our steps when things are not so pretty. This year, I encourage you to chase your sparks and fill life’s moments with more of them.