Africa-Press – Eswatini. One of the key contributors to an individual’s mental health lies in their ability to create and maintain a healthy, non-toxic and beneficial socio-emotional environment for themselves.
This we do by basically having the agency to ‘sort and sieve out’ certain individuals, particular activities, specific psychological entities and other bits of every day life we feel do not offer any gratification of note to our beings as individuals.
Boundaries
Many people would, for instance, interpret it as ‘setting boundaries’ – a rather accurate summation of what exactly the opening paragraph of this article was trying to get across. To put it plainly, the ability to set functional, finely balanced social, emotional and psychological boundaries is a skillset that not many possess, and for this reason they bear the potential to constantly find themselves in socially awkward situations, emotionally damaging instances as well as psychologically traumatising events. So, the need to bring this into some sort of light lies in the fact that it would be a lot more beneficial to our society if a lot more people learnt that it is okay to not always be emotionally, physically and psychologically available every other day, however, it is equally important to not allow too many external psycho-emotional influences impinge on your being as an individual.
Selfishness
What I also feel strongly about (and I feel it should be put out there) is the fact that being someone who is very conscious of your boundaries (in whatever form that may be) has very little (to nothing) to do with having an annoying sense of grandeur or perceiving yourself as being ‘better’; no. If you ask me, that is a perception riddled with selfishness and misinformation. Therefore, a good start would be changing those so-called stereotypes and replacing them with a little more appreciation and consideration for ourselves and those around us. It, as much as it is a new phenomenon, would be useful if it became one of the tendencies we adopt and assimilate into our evolving culture. Setting boundaries is about ignoring people who make you in any way negative about yourself, detaching yourself from toxic relationships and limiting unnecessary social activity if it does not bear any benefits for your psycho-emotional self; including every other daily toxicity that attempts to interfere with your mental health. This includes not answering your phone and not socialising when you do not feel like it and most importantly taking time to invest in yourself.
Health
To add on, the relevance of this, I feel is made more prominent by the state of the world right now and how everything going on around us is impacting our mental health. We are in a very socio-economically challenging time right now and most of it is adding to the masses’ stress and anxiety levels. The bi-products of this are, of course, mass mental instability across the population with a lot more cases of such blooming into full blown mental health disorders. It is up to us, in particular in our respective social settings, to be respectful of each other’s personal spaces and the boundaries they may attempt to set. It may come across as cold and distant sometimes, however, it is for one’s personal benefit.
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