10 Tips to Improve Your Mental Health (From Someone Who's Been in the Depths)

A little under a decade ago I was buried in the depths of depression.

Not the kind that announces itself dramatically. The kind that creeps in quietly, slowly, until one day you realize you've been going through the motions of your life for two years without really being in it. You're functioning. You're showing up. And you are genuinely, profoundly not okay.

I eventually walked into a therapist's office and started doing the real work of understanding what was happening inside me and why. It took time. It took honesty. It took learning an entirely new set of skills for managing my own mind that nobody had ever taught me.

And that is the thing I keep coming back to, in my own life and in my coaching work with women. Mental health is not something that just happens to you. It is, in significant part, a skillset. A set of practices and perspectives and habits that can be learned, developed, and strengthened. The same way you'd build physical fitness through consistent practice, you can build mental and emotional fitness through consistent practice.

The tragedy is that nobody teaches us this. We spend years in school learning subjects that may or may not be useful to us and almost no time learning how to manage our own minds, process our own emotions, and build the kind of inner life that supports genuine wellbeing. That absence is one of the most significant gaps in how we prepare people for actual living.

This article is my attempt to help fill that gap. Ten techniques that genuinely moved the needle for me and that I come back to consistently in my coaching work with women. Not theoretical. Not abstract. Actionable practices that work because they address the actual mechanisms through which mental health improves.

Why Mental Health Is a Skillset, Not Just a State

Before we get into the techniques, this framing matters.

Most people think of mental health as something you either have or you don't. Good days or bad days. Anxious periods and calm ones. Depression that visits and hopefully leaves. Something that happens to you rather than something you actively participate in shaping.

But this framing is both inaccurate and disempowering. Because while mental health is affected by factors genuinely outside your control, including genetics, circumstances, and experiences you didn't choose, it is also shaped enormously by factors you can influence. Your thought patterns. Your relationship with your emotions. The way you interpret events. The habits you build around movement, rest, and self-care. The stories you tell about yourself and your life.

None of that is to suggest that you simply think your way out of clinical depression or that a gratitude journal is a substitute for therapy or medication when those are needed. It's to say that there is far more agency available to you in the domain of mental health than most people realize. And developing that agency, building the skills and practices that support your own mental wellbeing, is one of the most meaningful investments you can make in your life.

From my own experience and from years of coaching women, these ten techniques are the ones that make the most genuine difference.

1. Control What You Can and Release What You Can't

One of the most reliable sources of mental suffering is trying to control things that are not within your control. Events, circumstances, other people's behavior, outcomes you want but cannot guarantee. The gap between what you want to control and what you actually can control is where anxiety lives.

The shift that makes the most practical difference is learning to deliberately redirect your energy from the uncontrollable to the controllable. Not as a forced exercise in positive thinking but as a genuine habit of attention.

Take a situation where you're in a job that doesn't align with who you are. The ultimate goal might be to move on. But while you're still there, there are almost always things within your control. The quality of your relationships with colleagues. The skills you're developing. The way you show up in your work. The specific contributions you make. Identifying those controllable factors and investing in them doesn't mean accepting a situation that needs to change. It means creating small genuine wins within your current circumstances rather than suffering through each day in helpless frustration.

The same applies to every area of life. In any difficult situation, ask: what do I have genuine influence over here? And then put your energy there rather than into the ongoing futile effort to control what you can't.

This practice, developed consistently, produces a specific kind of mental relief. The relief of no longer fighting against reality. Of choosing your battles accurately. Of finding genuine agency within constraint rather than collapsing into powerlessness because full control isn't available.

2. Use Affirmations to Retrain Your Brain's Filter

Your brain has a filtering system. It cannot possibly process all the information available to it at any given moment, so it prioritizes what to notice based on patterns you've established through your beliefs and thoughts. What you've trained your mind to expect, it tends to find.

If your inner dialogue runs primarily on messages like I'm not good enough, people always let me down, or nothing ever works out for me, your brain will faithfully collect evidence to support those beliefs. The colleague who was unkind will be noticed and remembered. The twenty who were warm will barely register. The mistakes you make will feel defining. The things you do well will fade into the background.

This is not a character flaw. It is confirmation bias. And understanding it is the key to understanding why affirmations actually work.

When you consistently practice a new, more empowering belief, you begin to train your brain's filter to look for evidence of that belief instead. I am capable. People can be trusted. Things work out for me more often than I notice. These are not denials of reality. They are more complete and more accurate descriptions of reality than the distorted negative filter was producing.

The affirmations that work best are the ones that feel like a genuine reach rather than an obvious truth. The slight internal resistance you feel when you say something like I trust my own judgment or I am worthy of love and respect is the signal that you're working with a belief that actually needs building. Practice those ones. Say them out loud. Write them down. Say them when the inner critic is loudest, as a direct counter.

Over time, the new filter strengthens and the old one loosens its grip. Not instantly. But genuinely, over time.

3. Rewrite the Story You Tell About Yourself

Your narrative is the story you've been telling yourself about who you are. It's a collection of beliefs about your character, your capability, your worth, and your place in the world. And if that narrative is built primarily on self-doubt, self-criticism, and the accumulated wounds of experiences that weren't your fault, it's shaping your life in ways that deserve examination.

Stories like I am not smart enough, I always mess things up, I am difficult to love, or good things happen to other people not to me — these are not neutral observations. They're active forces. They drive the choices you make and don't make. They determine what you attempt and what you assume is beyond you. They shape how you respond to both setbacks and successes.

The important thing to understand about these stories is that they are not the truth. They are interpretations, usually formed under specific circumstances and in response to specific experiences, that have been running on autopilot ever since. And autopilot can be interrupted.

Rewriting your narrative is not about replacing honest self-awareness with false positivity. It's about introducing accuracy into a story that has been distorted by pain and repetition. I am learning and growing. I handle difficulty and survive it. I am capable of more than I've attempted so far. These are not inspirational fantasies. They are more accurate descriptions of who you are than the harsh self-critical story you've been telling.

The practice is simply to notice when the old story is running and consciously offer the alternative. Not once dramatically but consistently, as a habit. Every time you catch the old narrative, you have a choice about whether to believe it or question it. And the more often you question it, the less automatic authority it has.

4. Choose an Empowered Perspective Over a Victim One

When difficult things happen, which they will because difficulty is part of life, there are fundamentally two ways to relate to them. From a place of powerlessness or from a place of agency.

The powerless perspective asks: why is this happening to me? It experiences life as something that happens to you, over which you have little meaningful influence. This perspective is understandable, especially in the aftermath of genuinely painful experiences. But it is not sustainable as a primary orientation because it keeps you stuck. If life is just something that happens to you, then your only option is to endure it.

The empowered perspective asks a different question: what am I meant to learn from this? What can I do from here? This doesn't mean pretending difficult things aren't difficult or that you should feel grateful for pain. It means recognizing that even within circumstances you didn't choose, you have genuine agency in how you respond, what you do next, and what meaning you assign to what happened.

As we explored in depth in victim mentality vs empowered mentality, this shift from passive to active, from happening to me to choosing my response, is one of the most significant and most transformative changes available to anyone working on their mental health. It doesn't change what happened. It changes everything about what comes next.

5. Build a Genuine Gratitude Practice

The mind notices what you've trained it to notice. And most people, without deliberate intervention, have trained their minds to notice what's wrong, what's lacking, what's not working, what they don't have yet. This is partly evolutionary — a negativity bias that helped our ancestors survive by staying alert to threats. But it's not well-suited to the pursuit of genuine wellbeing.

Gratitude practice is the deliberate decision to train your brain's attention in the opposite direction. Not to pretend problems don't exist. Not to bypass genuine pain with forced positivity. But to consistently, intentionally, turn your attention toward what is genuinely good in your life alongside everything else.

The specificity matters enormously. Generic gratitude, I'm grateful for my health, my family, my home, is better than nothing but it tends to stay intellectual. It doesn't land emotionally. The practice becomes genuinely transformative when it gets specific. I'm grateful for the way the morning light looks in my kitchen right now. I'm grateful for that conversation yesterday that made me laugh unexpectedly. I'm grateful that my legs carried me through that walk today. Specific, sensory, present-moment gratitude lands in the body in a way that vague gratitude doesn't.

Morning and evening are both powerful times for this practice. A few minutes at the start of the day sets an attention orientation that carries through. A few minutes at the end gives the day a different emotional close than it might otherwise have. The Morning and Evening Reflection Journals I created are designed specifically for this kind of daily practice and include guided prompts to help you go deeper than the generic list.

6. Move Your Body Every Day

I am not an advocate for intense workout culture or the belief that you need to train hard to take care of your mental health. What I am an advocate for is daily movement of some kind, because the mental health benefits of simply moving your body are profound and well-documented.

Walking is my personal practice and the one I recommend most often. A twenty to sixty minute walk does something specific and reliable to the mental state. It reduces cortisol, the primary stress hormone. It increases blood flow to the brain, supporting clearer thinking. And it triggers the release of endorphins, those particular neurochemicals that genuinely shift mood and produce a quality of ease that is hard to manufacture any other way.

There's also something that happens cognitively during a walk that doesn't happen at a desk or on a couch. The brain shifts from a reactive, problem-solving mode to something more open and generative. Many of my best ideas, including the idea of sharing one mental health tip a day for the month of May that eventually led to a whole content series, have arrived during walks when I wasn't trying to solve anything.

One addition that genuinely amplifies the benefit: leave your phone at home. Not always, not as a rule, but sometimes. The experience of walking without input, without something to listen to or scroll through, without the ambient noise of other people's content filling every moment of quiet, is its own specific kind of mental restoration. The quiet has something to offer that you can't receive when it's always filled.

Whatever movement practice fits your life, build it in daily. Not as a discipline you force on yourself but as a gift you give yourself. Because your nervous system needs it and your mental health benefits from it in ways that compound significantly over time.

7. Stretch and Release Physical Tension

The mind and body are not separate systems. They communicate constantly and influence each other in both directions. When your mind is under stress, your body tenses. Jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach. The tension is real and physical even when the source is mental.

And this runs the other way too. A tense, contracted body sends signals to your brain that reinforce the stress state. It becomes a feedback loop where mental tension produces physical tension which produces more mental tension.

Daily stretching interrupts this loop from the body end. Even five or ten minutes of gentle, deliberate stretching sends a signal to your nervous system that it's safe to release. It works with the physiology of the stress response rather than trying to think your way out of it.

This doesn't need to be elaborate. Morning stretching before you start your day. An evening routine that helps your body transition from the doing of the day to genuine rest. Even a few minutes of conscious movement in the middle of the afternoon if you've been sitting for hours. The practice is simple. The effect on your overall mental state, done consistently, is more significant than its simplicity suggests.

8. Live in the Gain Rather Than the Gap

Most of us habitually measure our progress by looking at the distance between where we are and where we want to be. That gap is always there. There is always more to achieve, more to become, more to reach. And if your sense of how you're doing depends on that gap being small, it will almost always feel like you're falling short.

The concept of living in the gain, which Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy explore in their book The Gap and The Gain, offers a different and considerably more sustaining measure. Instead of measuring from your current position to your ideal, measure from where you started to where you are now. Look back at the progress you've made rather than only forward at how far you still have to go.

This shift sounds simple and produces a genuinely different emotional experience. When you look back, you almost always see more progress than the gap-focused view allows. Things you've navigated. Skills you've developed. Versions of yourself you've grown beyond. Ways in which your life is different and better than it was.

The gain perspective is not about abandoning ambition or pretending you don't want more. It's about giving yourself accurate credit for how far you've already come. And that credit, genuinely felt rather than just intellectually acknowledged, produces the kind of momentum and motivation that the gap perspective consistently undermines.

9. Use Micro Goals to Break Through Procrastination

Procrastination is one of the most reliable generators of low-level mental suffering. The task that sits undone. The thing you know you need to do that you keep not doing. The gap between intention and action that quietly drains your energy and self-respect over time.

The reason procrastination is so persistent is that it usually involves tasks that feel overwhelming in their full scope. The whole project, the whole conversation, the whole change. The brain looks at the full thing and finds it aversive, and so it delays. And the delay makes the whole thing feel bigger and more aversive, which leads to more delay.

Micro goals interrupt this dynamic by removing the overwhelming scope. Instead of I'm going to clean my entire apartment, the micro goal is I'm going to clean for ten minutes. Instead of I'm going to write the whole article, the micro goal is I'm going to write for fifteen minutes. Instead of I'm going to exercise today, the micro goal is I'm going to put on my shoes and step outside.

The magic of micro goals is twofold. First, they make starting easy. The barrier of beginning is dramatically lower when the commitment is small. And starting is the hardest part. Second, they produce the specific neurochemical reward of completion. Your brain registers the achievement of a micro goal as a genuine win. The satisfaction of finishing ten minutes of cleaning is real even if the apartment isn't spotless. And that satisfaction motivates the next small action.

Build the habit of converting overwhelming tasks into their smallest possible starting version. Not what do I need to do but what is the smallest first step I can actually take right now. That shift alone removes an enormous amount of the mental weight that procrastination generates.

10. Focus on Process Over Outcome

Outcome-based goals, the big visible results you're working toward, are useful for direction. They give you a sense of where you're going. But they are genuinely terrible measures of daily mental health because they're mostly outside your direct control.

You cannot control whether the business succeeds. You cannot control whether the relationship develops the way you hope. You cannot control whether the effort produces the result on the timeline you want. And when you measure your sense of how you're doing primarily by outcomes you can't control, you hand your mental wellbeing over to forces that have nothing to do with your actual effort or character.

Process goals are different. They focus on the actions and behaviors that are entirely within your control. Not make the sale but make twenty genuine outreach contacts this week. Not find a relationship but consistently put yourself in situations where genuine connection is possible. Not write the book but write five hundred words today.

Process goals produce a specific kind of daily mental health benefit. You can always succeed at a process goal because success is defined by your own behavior rather than by external outcomes. When you commit to a process and follow through, you generate the satisfaction of genuine achievement regardless of what the outcome eventually turns out to be. And that satisfaction, available every day through your own consistent action, is one of the most reliable sources of genuine mental wellbeing available.

The Bigger Picture

Mental health is not a fixed state. It's a daily practice. A collection of habits and orientations and skills that you build and maintain through consistent, intentional effort.

Coming out of depression taught me that more clearly than anything else could have. Because I didn't just recover. I learned. I built something new in myself, a relationship with my own mind and my own emotional life that I simply didn't have before. Not because the difficult experiences went away. Because I developed the skills to navigate them differently.

These ten techniques are part of what I built. They are not a substitute for professional support when professional support is needed. If you are in a dark place, please reach out to a therapist or mental health professional. These practices complement that work rather than replace it.

But for the ongoing, daily work of building and maintaining mental wellbeing, they are genuinely useful. Worth practicing. Worth returning to. Worth treating as the serious investment in your own quality of life that they actually are.

Ready to Learn to Improve Your Mental Health With Genuine Support?

If you recognize yourself in this article and you're ready to build genuine mental and emotional wellbeing with real support, coaching is a powerful space to do that work. As a certified life coach for women specializing in self-love and authenticity, helping women build stronger, healthier inner lives is central to everything I do.

Book a free consultation call here. No pressure, just an honest conversation about where you are and what you want next.

Or explore my 1:1 coaching packages here.

And if this resonated, these articles might too:

Eight Key Ingredients to Transform Your Life

Victim Mentality vs. Empowered Mentality

Why Self-Love Is Important and Five Practical Tips

Mental health is not something that happens to you. It is something you build, one practice and one honest choice at a time.