Social Diary has collaborated with a medical expert to allow our readers to connect and have their concerns answered over their wellness-mental and physical. This week:
Areeba Shameem Asks:
What is the importance of mentorship for mental health?
Even when we are healthy, our mental health requires constant focus. We can create mentally healthy environments through our habits and behaviors. One way to do that is to have supportive, productive, and meaningful relationships.
We always have commitments such as school, university, and work. Still, we seldom seek out people specifically to help us achieve a specific target or goal. Mentors can be beneficial to us at certain times of our lives.
We live in a time when information is available and is always a search button away. But despite being able to access whatever we are interested in, it is no substitute for the honest and genuine opinion of a person with real-world experience. Such associations can be priceless for our professional and personal lives. Mentorship can allow us to have a safe space where we can express our ideas in the presence of someone who would help us analyze them according to our expectations from them. The lack of judgment, encouragement, and mutual respect can allow us to pursue our objectives better.
Ultimately, a healthy mentor can help you to have a better perspective and, therefore, can contribute positively to your mental health.
The feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, and despair often are accompanied by bouts of self-doubt. Moreover, the approach where you absolutely have to do everything on your own makes you isolated from those around you, who would genuinely like to help and would be happy to do so. When we are in our productive phases, the mentality to take all the burden by ourselves can often lead to a spiral that leads us right back to the cycle where we end up in an unhealthy mental state because we over-exert ourselves.
Anyone can be your mentor so long as you feel that they have the experience to provide you with advice in times that you seek it. They are people who listen to you and place as great an importance on things that trouble you as you do. It matters to them that your path is one that leads to professional and personal development. Furthermore, such relationships help us to learn how to form relationships that we are not involved in every day but which, nonetheless, are based on trust and concern. It’s an arrangement that assures us that we are not alone, even in times of isolation. At the same time, because of the nature of the relationship, you are also not too close, which helps us learn that we can have strong alliances without having to be present in others’ life all of the time.
In adolescence, this can especially be helpful as it can help determine career paths. Mentors do not just make themselves available for crucial discussions. They also help you draw up plans to go about your goal. We should seek mentors, and if we are able, we should become mentors to those around us.
