How to Maintain a Mental Balance During Unstable Times:

Many people want to know how to maintain a mental balance during these unstable times. As the worldwide pandemic rolls on with seemingly no immediate end in sight, there’s a feeling that it’s getting harder to keep one’s spirits up day-after-day. Isolation has blurred time, merging one day into another and dampening spirits. As work, schooling, social, and travel restrictions are imposed, staying mentally and emotionally positive has become quite a challenge.

Health experts, concerned about the mental wellbeing of citizens, speak of “lockdown fatigue” – those feelings of being dispirited, chronically stressed and socially disconnected from the support of family and friends. They wonder how much longer parents can continue to balance the demands of home-schooling their children, while they are working from home for extended periods of time.  

HOW TO MAINTAIN A MENTAL BALANCE

One powerful way to maintain a healthy mental balance, is to roll up one’s mental sleeves and fight off lockdown boredom and general unhappiness, rather than giving into it. We don’t have to feel lethargic or emotionally drained by what’s taking place around us. We can maintain good mental health and stay buoyant. This is what a parent-friend of mine recently discovered.

Downcast in her thinking and feeling stressed out by home and work demands she started sinking into despondency. Then one day she realized that she needed to find a mental “flotation device” – a spiritually mental life-jacket to help keep her emotionally afloat. So, during this time of adversity, she activated hopefulness, in what she described as a higher, thought-sustaining, Life-force. As a result, her thinking was lifted up and she maintained her mental balance and buoyancy of spirit.

TIPS TO HELP YOU MAINTAIN A MENTAL BALANCE

- Maintain happiness. Don’t wait for restrictions to be lifted before you experience true joyfulness. Grab hold of your mental “life-line” – hopefulness. Let it stabilise your mental balance and stop you titling into pessimistic territory. Be sure to go forward each day expecting to be happy and to achieve good outcomes. Such hopeful confidence helps preserve your mental wellbeing, negates dejection, and keeps you on an even keel.

- Exercise dominion over dispiriting thoughts and actions. A sustaining Power has given you the strength of purpose to continually utilize spiritual get-up-and-go. There’s no need to feel down-in-the-dumps. You can stay resilient and be strong in mind and spirit. “For the Spirit that God has given us does not make us timid; instead, his Spirit fills us with power, love, and self-control.” Bible. II Timothy 1:7

- Be heartened and mentally energized. Unstable times don’t last forever. Right now it’s possible to maintain good mental health - to be happy, uplifted, and active each day.  “Let us feel the divine energy of Spirit, bringing us into newness of life and recognizing no mortal nor material power as able to destroy. Let us rejoice that we are subject to the divine “powers that be.” Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, p. 249.

ABOUT THE EXPERT:  Beverly Goldsmith regularly writes about the connection between spirituality and health and is a Christian Science Practitioner and Teacher of Christian Science healing.