5 Ways Freelancers Should Look After Their Mental Health
As a freelancer, it’s crucial to take care of your grand lake mental health.
See, freelancing exposes you to a few unique challenges that are different from the types of challenges you would tend to encounter in a traditional work environment.
More than anything, you may end up feeling isolated—and this can increase your anxiety.
Also, since you’re your own boss—if something goes wrong, inevitably, the responsibility will fall to you to either make it right or lose out on your income.
And this can definitely put some pressure on you.
So in this post, we’re going to discuss five ways that freelancers should look after their mental health and avoid workload paralysis as well as mental health tattoos.
These techniques can help you to avoid the trap of feeling too anxious or depressed while you build your career and leverage your business to be profitable and fulfilling.
Ways to look after for sound mental health
Let’s dive into it.
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Get Plenty Of Exercise
If you tend to be a creative freelancer, you may come to find that you spend the majority of your time at a desk.
If so, then this tip is especially crucial.
Sitting at a desk can actually be a very unhealthy activity, especially if you do it for long periods of time.
Therefore, it’s vitally important to make sure that you’re getting up, getting out, and getting plenty of exercise away from the desk.
If at all possible, you may even want to incorporate a standing desk into your office.
At the very least, make sure to take breaks where you get up, stretch, and take a walk before sitting back down.
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Maintain Positive Social Circles
If you’re a freelancer who tends to work by yourself (i.e. alone in your office, in the bedroom, in the corner of the coffee shop, etc.), then it’s really important not to get too isolated.
It can be easy to spend all of your time working alone, and to never forge any real positive physical social relationships with other people.
You should always make sure that you incorporate time for friendships, loved ones, and positive acquaintances into your life.
As humans, we are social creatures.
And it’s crucial that we socialize for the betterment of our mental health.
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Don’t Continue To Work With Negative Clients
As a freelancer, you’re going to be tasked with finding clients to work for.
But here’s the thing.
The quality of your clients will play a huge role in the quality of your mental health.
If you work for an incredibly stressful, rude, or disrespectful client who doesn’t treat you well or value you, then that will in-turn take a toll on your own levels of stress.
Simply put, great clients are a challenge to find—but they’re worth their weight in gold.
It may be difficult for you to think about walking away from a bad client, especially if you’re relying on that income to pay your bills.
However, it’s always a better idea to go ahead and find different work if a particular client just isn’t working well in helping you to achieve optimal mental health in your life.
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Maintain A Healthy Sleep Schedule
Sometimes, freelancers can be tempted to get into patterns where they sleep at irregular times.
But here’s the thing.
Serotonin, which is a hormone that’s directly related to our levels of happiness, is greatly affected by our natural circadian rhythm.
If you tend to stay up at night and sleep during the day, you’re going to miss out on that amazing sunshine that would otherwise serve to make you happier.
As humans, we truly do tend to fare better during the day.
So sleeping at night (and getting up early in the morning to start the day at sunrise) is almost always the best scenario for success.
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Constantly Be Working To Grow Your Business And Income
As a freelancer, struggling to make ends meet and feeling like you have to constantly ‘grind’ to stay on top of things can really cause your anxiety to go through the roof.
This is why it’s important to continue to work on growing your business to be more successful every single year than you were the year before.
Sure, this is hard work.
However, in the long run, this is going to serve you much better than just treading water and cruising along at the same level.
Putting some money away in savings and preparing for those ‘rainy days’ gets much easier when you increase your income and grow your business.
Always be seeking to craft a more secure place for yourself in the professional freelance world.
This will help you to feel safer and more secure—and thus, will also help you to improve your mental health along the way.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these five tips will help you to make your mental health even better than it’s ever been.
It’s really important to take care of yourself, your health, and your wellness—and to understand that these things are just as much mental as they are physical.
