Reset Your Mind — The 30 Days Mental Health Exercise
By: Renuka Dhinakaran
Tags: Anxiety, Mental Health Awareness, Mental Health, Self Care, Mindfulness

What we need now is a gentle nudge towards reframing our thoughts, guiding our mind to look at the good around us, even in the most desperate of times. This is so that we can use that strength to get us through our difficulties. So I have drawn up a simple 30 days mental health exercise to try and reset our minds. There are a number of 30 days mental health challenges on the internet. While they are all good in their own ways, and you will find a lot of overlap between them and this exercise, there are a few key differences.

How is this mental health exercise different from all the other ones?

First, it is a mental health exercise and not a challenge. Sometimes it is good to be challenged, but being challenged every day is not something that our mind might like. So if good mental health is our goal here, it would be wiser to gently exercise our mind — slowly and steadily — rather than challenge it. d.

Second, it has very simple things and does not expect much of you. It does not ask you to do things that you may find very difficult. For example, a number of mental health challenges ask you to go off social media for a whole day. As horrible as it sounds, most of us may not be able to do it easily. We might actually be more triggered the next day. So this exercise asks you to consider blocking your social media for just a few hours on a chosen day. It even provides you with links that you can use to block these apps.

Third, it comes with in-built links for several of the activities suggested. It saves you the time and energy needed to come up with ideas. Some of these links are informational, giving you an idea of the concept behind the activity (such as practicing gratitude). Some are activity-based — for example, art, yoga, meditation, cooking, etc.

How did this help me?

I drafted this exercise in October, after three weeks of migraine and hospital visits and I found myself sinking back into my deep anxieties. I could not bring myself up to read or watch anything, for fear of triggering a migraine. I did not want to speak to anyone as I was tired of explaining that I don’t know what is wrong with me (nor did my doctors). I didn’t even get to do any of my artistic hobbies for fear of straining my eyes.

This pushed me into a rut of just staring endlessly into my phone (which, as you can expect, did me no good) and becoming disillusioned with everything around me. “What is the point?” was a question that I kept throwing around far too many times that I should have.

I realised that this was dampening not just my morale, but my family’s as well. One day, when my son invited me to teach him how to draw a mandala, I buckled up and did just that. I felt invigorated after 20 minutes and decided I was going to do something new or nice every day, even if it was just for 10 minutes. The next day, I baked amazing brownies after a long time. The day after that, I went for a walk in the nearby park with my husband after lunch.

Each night, when I went to bed, I had a strange sense of calm. I felt as though I had accomplished what I’d set out to do that day and looked forward to what I’d do the next day. This was particularly helpful on difficult days — to have something to look forward to that would bring joy rather than pain.

So, on the fourth day, I sat and wrote down 30 things that I would like to do, including things that I could do even on a flare-up day or really bad day on my pain/anxiety scale. I made sure to include activities with varying energy requirements so that I could have my pick based on how many spoons I had on a given day.

I shared this with my husband and friends, some of whom tried this along with me. It was remarkable what just 10–20 minutes a day did to our mental health! After having a horrible month, I usually take ages to recover. This time, however, I recovered rather quickly (to my usual pain levels). I would go so far as to state that October was the best month I’ve had this year, and that is saying something, especially considering the number of medical appointments I had!

This exercise essentially reset my mind. It made me take some time every day to either be entirely calm and accepting of my existence or speak with myself to see what my struggles were. No matter how good or bad a day was, when I did the activity of my choice from the exercise, it felt like my mind had been reset to start afresh.

The 30 Day Mental Health Challenge

How can you do this exercise?

You can start this exercise on any day of the month — not necessarily on the first. You don’t have to do it in any particular order — pick any one activity for the day and keep going. If you skip a day or two in between, don’t beat yourself up.

This is not a challenge, but a mental health exercise. In fact, it may not be a bad idea to take a break in between. On the last day of this exercise, the activity is to sit and reflect on the month, write your thoughts down. This would give you an overview of how you experienced different activities on different days. It will help you see how they may (or may not) have helped you in coping with your day(s). It will make you realise how you feel at the end of a month-long exercise dedicated to rest and resetting your mind.

How to share?

You can share this mental health exercise as a link — apainfulidentity.com/30days — or download the pdf and share it with your friends and family on social media or Whatsapp. If you plan to do this challenge, do tag @renudhinakaran on Twitter. Do join me, won’t you?