Mental Health Awareness Week

Mental Health Awareness Week highlights the importance of mental health for children and young people. The theme for 2022 Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘Growing together’. Growing Together is about growing emotionally and finding ways to help one another grow. Challenges and setbacks can help us to grow and adapt and trying new things can help us to move beyond our comfort zone into a new realm of possibility and potential.

All of us go through a variety of emotions everyday.
The way a certain emotion affects one person is different from the way it may affect someone else. Emotions can be split into two categories: positive and negative. Positive emotions consist of happiness and joy, while negative emotions can be expressed through sadness and anger. However, the society often fixates on happiness which “fosters a craven disregard for the value of sadness,” thus causing negative emotions to be pushed aside. But how can one benefit from being sad? As it turns out , negative emotions provide substantial benefits to one’s well being that are just as influential as positive emotions. If you have ever felt sad or angry , it is okay to have those feelings. But do not let those feelings inhibit your ability to grow, live and learn. Negative emotions always allow us to introspect and provide us with learning opportunities.

Just like trees and plants need support to help them grow, we need support to help us grow physically, emotionally and mentally. We often need others; these could be our parents, carers, teachers or friends to help us believe in ourselves, to keep us going, and to try to do things a bit differently to adjust to change. These people constitute our support system and help us look beyond our comfort zone.