What Is a Bad Headspace?
What is your mind consumed with? Are you able to keep your headspace flexible, or do you find yourself fixated on the negative, no matter what you try?
Your headspace is essential to your overall wellness, and a bad headspace can do more than just make you grumpy.
Creating a positive headspace that can adequately handle the challenges you’re facing is something that takes work, but the benefits are absolutely worth it. Mindfulness and a good headspace could just change your life.
But if you’re stuck in a bad headspace, what can you do to get out of it? What exactly is a bad headspace, and how can you rewire your brain?
Today, we hope to begin to answer that question so you can take charge of your headspace and your mental health to reach the wellness you deserve.
What Does Headspace Mean?
The term headspace is a general term that can mean many different things to different people. But generally speaking, your headspace is the general position of your state of mind at a given moment.
When you’re talking about your headspace, you’re referring to what your brain is currently occupied with.
In a good headspace, you might be feeling confident and capable, thinking about your successes and good relationships, or generally feeling content and happy with life.
On the other hand, a negative headspace is more than just a bad mood; you might feel like a failure, consumed with thoughts about how things didn’t go your way or with stress about the future. A negative headspace can drive negative self-talk and low self-esteem, contributing to unhappiness and frustration.
Your headspace is an important part of how you function, and it’s a good indicator of the status of your mental health.
What Factors Affect Your Headspace?
Today’s world presents many different things that can negatively contribute to your headspace.
It’s complicated and may, at times, feel unpredictable. But the things that affect your headspace are identifiable and can be resolved. With a little digging, you can discover the major reasons why your headspace might not be as positive as you want.
How Do Mental and Emotional Health Affect Your Headspace?
Your mental health is probably one of the most significant factors influencing what goes on inside your mind.
A healthy mind is likely able to take a certain amount of control over its headspace. But a mind afflicted with a mood disorder or mental illness might be at a disadvantage in this area.
Depression causes your mind to dwell on the negative, causing you to have feelings of extreme sadness, hopelessness, or emptiness. Anxiety constantly fills you with worry about the future, about your relationships, or about what’s going on in your workplace.
Obviously, these thoughts will not help you form a positive headspace. Your mental health is of paramount importance to your headspace, and while mental illness can make it difficult to achieve a positive headspace, it is not impossible.
Caring for your mind and treating your symptoms can help keep your thoughts positive.
Can Relationships Affect Your Headspace?
Your friendships, family members, and significant others all make a dramatic impact on the thoughts that occupy your mind. The people in your daily life will either help you keep your headspace healthy or contribute to excess stress that keeps your headspace down.
Good relationships will make time to help you process your stressors and work through them, and you’ll do the same for them. Bad relationships can cause distress and keep you locked in a negative place.
So lean into those relationships that help you succeed, and help those friends and family succeed as well. And if a relationship is causing you too much stress, maybe it’s time to put some boundaries on that relationship — lovingly.
Diet and Headspace
Believe it or not, your eating habits also play a role in how healthy your headspace is. Getting the right balance of nutrients and eating at regular intervals can help improve your headspace — and your mental health.
Your brain needs the proper fuel to function the right way. Getting enough vegetables, proteins, healthy fats, and whole grains will help to support your brain and body, which can, in turn, support a healthy headspace.
On the flip side of that coin, eating irregular meals, not getting enough nutrients, or eating heavily processed foods could put you at higher risk for a negative mental health outcome and a bad headspace.
Why Is Getting Enough Sleep Crucial for a Good Headspace?
Sleep and mental health conditions have a bidirectional relationship. Poor sleep can contribute to worsening mental health, and declining mental health can cause you to get poor sleep.
Because of this unique and complicated relationship, it is all the more important that we protect our sleep. Getting enough sleep each night and going to bed and waking up at the same time every day will help keep our sleep patterns healthy, thus, supporting our minds.
Poor sleep can affect your brain chemistry and, thus, your headspace.
What Substances Can Affect Your Headspace?
Substances can also affect your headspace. Consuming excessive amounts of drugs or alcohol can cause a lot of harm to your mental wellness.
People often turn to substances as a numbing mechanism. But numbing your thoughts does not equate to the right headspace. In fact, substances can often increase your risk of developing a mental illness.
How Can You Break Out of a Bad Headspace?
The good news is that you can take your headspace into your own hands. There are things that you can do to improve your headspace. Practicing mindfulness and taking care of mental health issues can help you fill your mind with more positive thoughts that will benefit you.
Write Down Your Feelings for a Clearer Head
One of the best things you can do is keep a journal for your mental health. If we neglect to externalize and process our feelings, they will swirl around in our heads unresolved, contributing to unnecessary stress that keeps our headspace down.
Journaling is a way to get those negative thoughts out of your head. Once you get them out in the open, you can process through them and find a resolution. Resolving those stressors is key to keeping your headspace clear and positive, ready to encounter the demands that life places on you.
So set a reminder on your phone to journal every day. It can help improve your mindfulness and your headspace.
How Can Ketamine Therapy Change Your Headspace?
Another thing to consider is ketamine therapy. If your headspace is being limited by a mental illness such as depression or anxiety, ketamine may be able to help.
Unlike antidepressants, which target serotonin and norepinephrine, ketamine targets a much more prominent neurotransmitter called glutamate. By producing more glutamate in the brain, ketamine improves your brain’s neuroplasticity.
This allows your brain to form new neural connections and neural pathways. This means that ketamine therapy allows your brain to establish new, positive thought patterns to replace the negative ones. It’s like a healthy factory reset for the brain.
Treating your mental health disorders is one of the most important steps you can take to improve your headspace, and ketamine treatment is one way you can get the help you need.
Some ketamine therapy comes in the form of an oral pill you can take right at home. With virtual supervision to ensure your safety, at-home ketamine therapy may provide the relief you’ve been looking for.
Visit a Therapist
Therapy is another important step in lifting your mind. With the help of a mental health professional, therapy can assist you in processing your traumas or stressors. This is the best way to find a resolution to the things that take up space inside your mind.
In addition, therapy can help to teach you healthy coping mechanisms for stress. It gives you the tools you need to bolster your headspace so that it isn’t shaken dramatically by new life events.
Talk to a Trusted Friend or Family Member
Sharing your struggles with a loved one is one of the most important steps you can take. Your friends and family are there to listen to your struggles. They can let you know that you’re not alone, and they can support you as you wrestle through those things that hold your headspace back.
Having a quality support system can help you maintain a positive headspace, and it can help you grapple with the tough times that come your way. So don’t isolate yourself. Instead, lean into the community around you and receive the support that is available to you.
The Bottom Line
A bad headspace can bring you down, but there are things you can do to lift yourself out of it. Identifying factors that can cause a bad headspace, such as mental health, diet, sleep, and substance abuse, can help you create a better picture of mental health.
Poor mental wellness is not a life sentence; you have permission to change it. So take your headspace into your own hands and walk towards the healing you deserve.
Treatment at Nue Life
Nue Life believes in holistic treatment, which means that what happens before and after your ketamine experience is equally as important as the experience itself. We want to ensure you have meaningful takeaways from your experiences and help you establish positive new neural pathways.
That’s why we provide one-on-one health coaching and integration group sessions with each of our programs. We’re here to help map out the mind and body connections in your brain and help you discover the insights that lead to true healing.
Sources
Drugs and mental health | Mental Health Foundation
How New Ketamine Drug Helps with Depression | Yale Medicine
Nutrition and Mental Health | The Institute for Functional Medicine
Understanding Sleep Hygiene and Mental Health | Northwestern | The Family Institute
