Ask HN: How is your mental health?

How and how well do you keep track of your mental health, particularly for those with a history of mental health issues, and those with a family history of mental issues.

As for me I like to think that I try really hard to monitor my mental health, I suffer from anxiety disorder and my father and mother both had mental health issues at one point in their life, which makes me constantly fear for my mental health and hence my monitoring of my mental state of mind like a hulk.

Use the following strategies: 1. Meditate daily for 15 minutes. Try vedic indian meditations. 2. Keep track of your mood using some app. 3. If your mood is bad for consistently 3 days, then open pastebin and write down about everything you are feeling and going in your head.

Most small problems with mental health can be dealt by bringing in consciousness. Simple example, whenever you are feeling nervous, force you brain to just observe whats going on in your body instead of being an active participant in the process. You will immediately realize you start feeling less nervous. Similarly, you can try for anxiety.

For more serious problems, it is best to seek medical help on periodic basis. A meetup with doctor every 3 months is reasonable.

> How and how well do you keep track of your mental health, particularly for those with a history of mental health issues

I do some good old-fashioned journaling by hand. There's never been software for this sort of thing that I liked, and it feels more cathartic to write it by hand than to type it out. It does get hard at times, admittedly, with things like a lackluster job searching experience, friends also having issues, and a host of other issues that you run into in life, but such is life. I'm just trying to do my best to get through it :) Actively making an effort to spend time around others definitely helps.

Please elaborate. Genuinely curious.

With an anxiety disorder, tracking your mental health more frequently than weekly is very likely seriously counterproductive.