preventing misuse: ‘developing healthy habits’

“Creating positive habits takes time and dedication. Over time, developing healthy habits helps in most every aspect of life from stress relief to achieving your goals.”

“I don’t give myself enough credit for the amount of discipline that I’ve taught myself as an adult, so here I am giving myself credit.” — Oliver-tydalé Schofield.

I’m so proud of me for ‘Developing Healthy Habits’ and not quitting or making excuses, I feel really amazing about it.

You know ‘Developing Healthy Habits’ at young age is way better than growing up and later on suffering with mental and physical problems.

Let’s talk about stress this developing healthy habits to cope with stress is beneficial for everyone, cut yourself some slack when you need it.

‘Developing Healthy Habits’ and having positive self-talk is foundational to creating the person we want to be, this is hard but so beneficial and rewarding in the end. “Give yourself what you deserve.”

There’s so much power in developing healthy habits and building consistency daily. Remember, little by little a little becomes a lot and even though you want to be great you’ll never actually be great if you don’t put in the work. ‘Push yourself daily!’

Last year, I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of quarantine to developing healthy habits and overall becoming a better me.

• I need to start developing healthy habits with food. Cheat days should not even be called cheat days, it’s food.
• Our body needs those type of cravings, it’s normal. When we completely limit ourselves from it, that’s when we start to binge. It’s all about balance!

“Everything isn’t a quick fix, stop sticking a pretty band-aid on a problem that could easily be fixed by developing healthy habits. We need to start thinking long term.”

Things you should do:

1. taking responsibility for your own wellness means developing healthy habits.
2. creating space in your life for self-care.
3. learning to value yourself and your mental health at every stage in your journey.

Mental Health-Care Tips:

• connect with the people you love, cut out toxic ones.
• set boundaries and don’t be sorry for that
• less social media scrolling, more outdoor activities.
• don’t worry about things you can’t control.
• focus on yourself, drink water and eat healthy.

Everyone and everything in my life right now is so genuine, I don’t have a ton of people in my everyday life but the people here are my biggest supporters and have mad love for me. I face challenges everyday, but I face them with a balanced and calm mind because of my environment.

My life completely changed when I realized I have full control of who has access to me, what content I see on social media, my habits and most importantly my faith. All of these contribute to my environment.

There are a lot of things that affect our identity, how we see things and how we construct reality and now due to social media being a huge part of our life, it has started shifting our identities.

Today, let’s dive into how social media affects our identity construction.

I’m gonna talks about what we can achieve through social media such as communication and engagement with others but also the ways that those achievements affect us such as identity crises and loss of privacy.

In one hand, social media helps people to express ourselves on the other hand, it decreases our self-esteem and depen-ability by objectifying us. The friends or follower lists and the likes that we get make it seem like we are always being watched by others.

We may have used way too much social media that it has started to control not only our time and habits but also our self image and world view, it is now time that we understand the consequences of letting social media have impact our life and take back our own identity by who we want really are.

Some Things You Can Control:

• your attitude
• exercise habits
• what you eat and when
• where you spend your energy
• sleep quality and quantity
• self-talk
• mindset and resilience
• your character
• stress recovery and recharge
• activity on social media
• food habits
• mindset and outlook
• the way you treat others
• level of honesty

I feel like one fact overlooked in discussions about online conflict is how modern social media has made it increasingly difficult to curate your own feed without that control, you’re shown more content you don’t want to see made by people who never intended you to see it.

IMO the epitome of this is TikTok, where placing your content consumption in the hands of the algorithm is basically the 100% intended way of using the app.

But also at the same time that reliance on the algorithm is definitely what makes TikTok so engaging as a platform, since ‘Brain Likes To Swipe.’ So it’s easy to imagine why it’s set up that way.

There are certainly also positives to not having complete control over what you see on social media, it can push you out of your comfort zone (in a good way) and introduce you to creators and communities that your typical browsing habits never would’ve encountered.

“The fact of the matter is, society has changed and social media has taken over the lives of many.”

• As a result of social media, people compare their lives to others and seeing what other people post online (often it must be said, only the positives get posted) and as a result the mental health of so many has been detrimentally affected by social media.
• The impact this has had is a rapid increase of mental health illnesses being diagnosed, impacting people’s ability to work and even live what would be considered a 'normal life’.
• Seeing Simone Biles pull out of the Olympics due to mental health is something that has amassed huge publicity and has triggered various responses from viewers (both positive and negative) but the reality is, this may well be something we see more of and does in fact happen (and isn’t publicised)
• The response of those who then abuse like Piers Morgan these people are only added to the growing issue that exists. Let’s go back to the Euros and the players knowing what abuse was waiting for them having missed the penalties they took. They’d have known of this abuse prior to taking the penalty, which would have only added to the pressure they already faced.
• I don’t blame the players for missing penalties, I don’t blame Simone Biles, like Piers does for "letting her teammates and country down,” — I blame those negative people who have added that unnecessary pressure on those people who already work under enormous pressure already.
• Had the England team not experienced those past abusive comments, had Simone not experienced the negative past she’s had to ensure. No doubt we could have been European Champions and Simone a gold medalist.
• If the world was a nicer place, the world would be a better place. What I would say to everyone, is to not listen to the negative views of someone like Piers who has no experience of what it is like to live the life you (or they e.g Simone Biles) do.

“Keep Simone Biles name out of your mouth unless you’re taking about respecting and praising her decision to protect her mental health.”

And I think some people refuse to see that not only is there the pressure of the media, but insane pressure of social media.

Seriously, social media has affected everyone’s mental health to some extent but for public celebrities it is insane. Simone Biles is a super strong woman.

• social media is bad for mental health and leads to multitudes of life-altering issues.
• forcing affected people to avoid in-person interaction even more as they diverge further from the norm.
• social media scans, monetizes and controls the activities of the permanently online.

May and June were really difficult months for me, my mental health was really affected by work related pressures. “Even my social media engagements were significantly reduced, it was quite a struggle for me to share and seek help.” — It was even more difficult to admit it publicly.

But as much as I know it is my story and I reserve the right to how I choose to share it, because I believe that I can share in the struggles of many young people.

“it is okay not to be okay, it is okay to speak about it (if you want to) and it is most important to seek support and help.”

Mental health challenges are consuming young people and I would like us to talk more about them.

Special thanks to:

Oliver Schofield-Tydale (co-wrote)