World Mental Health Day: 6 Activities to Support Your Mental Health

Six simple ways to step away from performance, interrupt stress and reconnect with yourself.

By Bevin Reynolds
Editor Zowie Palliaer

We don’t have to wait until we’re in crisis to pay attention to our mental health. Photo credit © @andac.kazar.

October 10 marks World Mental Health Day – a day intended to raise awareness about mental health, encourage support and challenge the stigma that still surrounds mental health challenges.

Stigma is one reason many of us wait until we’re overwhelmed, anxious, exhausted or in crisis before we acknowledge what we’re going through. But mental health shouldn’t just be something to address when we’re struggling and at breaking point. It’s something we can give attention to every day through our actions.

Modern life encourages us to turn almost everything into a form of performance. We measure our movement, optimise our rest and judge our creative pursuits by what they produce. But not everything we do needs an agenda. Some activities can exist simply because they give us space to pause, recover and reconnect with ourselves.

Whilst everyday wellbeing practices don’t replace professional support, they still matter. Here are six simple activities that may make a meaningful difference to how we feel.

Being in the water doesn’t make our problems disappear, but it can interrupt their momentum long enough for us to find our way back to ourselves. Photo © @kaloyplar_frdvr.

1. Spend Some Time Beneath the Surface

Whether in the ocean or a swimming pool, freediving or snorkelling, being in the water without a performance or training agenda can be a powerful way to reset the mind and body.

Anxiety and stress tend to thrive on momentum. Spiralling thoughts compound, creating increasingly tense states in the body. Water has a way of interrupting this loop. When we submerge our face, the mammalian dive response kicks in: the heart slows and blood is redirected towards the heart and brain. This automatic shift in the nervous system can help regulate our inner state, and it happens without us having to think our way into it.

Freediving and snorkelling can also feel like a reset because being underwater demands our attention. We become present to the immediacy of the moment: our bodies, our sensations and the aquatic world around us. For a while, there is less room for the thoughts that were pulling us somewhere else.

Being in the water does not make our problems disappear, but it can interrupt their momentum long enough for us to find our way back to ourselves.

2. Take a Few Intentional Breaths

Our breathing often reflects our internal state before we’re even consciously aware of it. When we feel stressed or anxious, our breath may become faster, shallower or less regular. This can reinforce the body’s sense that something is wrong.

Intentional breathwork provides a door into this relationship. By altering the rhythm of our breathing – particularly by lengthening the exhale – we send the body a different message. The breath becomes an anchor for our attention. It also gives us a way to influence how the body is responding without having to reason ourselves into feeling differently.

This doesn’t mean forcing ourselves to feel calm. Sometimes, trying to relax simply creates more tension. Breathwork becomes an invitation to notice how we’re breathing and make small, intentional changes where we can. 

It may not remove the source of our stress, but it can change the state from which we meet it.

Breathwork becomes an invitation to notice how we’re breathing and make small, intentional changes where we can. Photo © @curtistredway.

3. Create a Small Pocket of Quiet

We live with an almost constant stream of input. Messages, news, videos, music and podcasts fill the spaces between one task and the next. Even when we stop moving, something is usually still competing for our attention.

Protecting a small pocket of quiet creates a break in that stream. This could mean drinking your coffee without checking your phone, travelling without listening to anything or sitting outside for ten minutes without digital entertainment.

Your mind may not become quiet immediately. In fact, you may become more aware of just how busy it is. That doesn’t mean the quiet isn’t working.

The purpose is not to empty the mind or manufacture a perfectly calm state. It’s to leave some space between what we take in and what we must respond to. Without another voice immediately filling that space, thoughts and feelings pushed aside may finally have time to settle.

Sometimes, less input allows us to hear ourselves again.

4. Color Outside–or Inside–the Lines

Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped creating for the simple pleasure of it. Our hobbies became skills to improve, projects to complete or things worth doing only if we’re good at them.

Coloring in is an activity that asks very little of us. There’s no blank page to confront and no pressure to produce anything original. We simply choose a colour, begin filling the space and allow our attention to follow our hands.

The repetitive movement gives a busy mind somewhere gentle to land. As we focus on shapes, colours and small decisions, everything else may begin to soften into the background. Not because we’re trying to silence it, but because, for a moment, we’re absorbed in something else.

For World Mental Health Day, Molchanovs has created a free, limited-edition downloadable coloring book inspired by freediving and the underwater world.

Stay inside the lines or ignore them completely. Finish every page or abandon one halfway through.

Download the limited-edition Molchanovs World Mental Health Day coloring book here.

Take a mindful pause with the limited-edition Molchanovs coloring book.

5. Make Some Space on the Page

When thoughts remain inside our heads, they can become tangled, repetitive and disproportionately loud. We move between them without always recognising where one worry ends and another begins.

Writing creates somewhere else for them to exist. 

Journaling can slow our thoughts down enough for us to see them more clearly. An experience that feels overwhelming in the mind may become more specific on the page. We may begin to distinguish what has happened from what we fear might happen, or recognise an emotion we’ve been carrying without naming.

This doesn’t require pages of insight or a beautifully maintained journal. Begin with a simple question: What is taking up the most space in my mind today? Then write without editing, explaining or trying to arrive at the correct answer.

The page doesn’t need us to solve everything. It may simply help our thoughts stop competing with one another, giving us enough distance to recognise what needs us next.

6. Move Without Measuring Anything

In modern life, so much of how we move is tied to performance. We count our steps, track our pace, record our distance and judge whether we’ve done enough to meet our fitness or training goals. 

We sometimes forget that movement can also be spontaneous, unmeasured and entirely free of an outcome. When we move without an agenda, we allow movement to become a form of expression, rather than achievement. We can follow what feels good instead of asking our bodies to meet another expectation.

Walking and dancing both bring us back into contact with our bodies. The rhythm of repeated steps or moving to music can loosen the grip of thoughts that have become stuck on repeat. Our problems may still be waiting when the song ends or when we arrive home, but we’re more likely to return to them in a different state, with a different perspective.

Not every walk needs a destination, and not every dance needs an audience. Sometimes, moving for no reason beyond the experience itself reminds us that our bodies are not only here to perform. They’re also here for our enjoyment.

We sometimes forget that movement can also be spontaneous, unmeasured and entirely free of an outcome. Photo © Dane Wetton.

Support Does Not Have to Begin With a Crisis

There is no single activity that supports everyone in the same way. Some people feel more connected to themselves in the water. Others find that connection through movement, creativity, writing or quiet time.

What these activities share is not a guaranteed outcome. It’s the opportunity to step away from performance, interrupt familiar patterns and respond to ourselves with a little more care.

We don’t have to wait until we’re in crisis to pay attention to our mental health. Nor do we need to approach every supportive practice as another task to complete correctly. Sometimes, we can enter the water, take a breath, pick up a pencil or dance to a song without asking the experience to produce anything.

For a little while, the experience itself can be enough.

Everyday wellbeing practices are not substitutes for professional mental health care. If you are struggling, feel unable to cope or are concerned about your wellbeing, consider contacting a qualified mental health professional or an appropriate support service. Bevin Reynolds is a Registered Wellness Counsellor with a Bachelor of Social Science Honours in Psychology. To learn more about working with her, email [email protected].