Mental Health Relapses: Causes and Prevention
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your mental health will nose dive. You were doing well, keeping good habits, and enjoying yourself. However, now you feel yourself reverting to old thoughts and habits.
This is not a rare experience and is often caused by external events. Things like serious illnesses and major life changes can have negative effects on your mental well-being.
Relapses aren’t specific to addiction. Even with comprehensive treatment, it’s possible to re-experience symptoms of mental health disorders. However, you can prevent them and recover.
What Does Relapse Mean in Mental Health?
We tend to think about substance addiction when we hear relapse. However, relapse can be applied to many mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and more.
A mental health relapse means worsening or reappearing symptoms. Someone experiencing a relapse of anxiety disorder may experience more anxiety symptoms than they’ve had since leaving or starting treatment.
What Causes Mental Health Relapse?
Mental health relapses are usually triggered by something. Generally, stressful situations are the cause of relapse.
These are the common triggers that cause mental health relapses.
Financial Stress
Finances are a major point of stress for most people. When money gets tough, you can expect your mental health to start to waver.
The best thing to do for your mental health during difficult financial seasons is to take some time for yourself and find peace in free activities. Instead of buying yourself candles, seeing a movie, or ordering food
delivery, try spending some time at a park, walking your neighborhood, or doing outdoor meditation.
Substance Abuse
Drug and alcohol abuse is often used as a negative coping mechanism. Behaviors like binge drinking can begin the process of relapsing by worsening your mental well-being.
When substances are abused in this way, mental health relapses can become increasingly dangerous. While substance abuse doesn’t directly correlate to addiction, it is a close cousin.
If you or a loved one is abusing substances to cope with other mental health issues, it’s time for formal help. The SAMHSA’s national helpline can be reached at 1-800-662-4357.
If you’re looking for mental health treatment of any kind, Sequoia Behavioral Health offers inpatient and outpatient care with personalized treatment plans. Schedule a call today to see if we can help.
Lack of Sleep
Proper sleep hygiene is important for keeping your mental health stable. Just like your body needs nightly rest, your mind needs it too. When your brain isn’t getting the rest it needs, your emotions become harder to control.
Sadly, a good night’s sleep is often easier said than done. Especially when there are other stressful circumstances.
Related Articles: Sleep Disorders
Sickness
Being sick causes stress in several ways. Your body is stressed trying to get rid of the sickness, and your brain is working overtime making sure your systems are working correctly. And chances are you’re mentally stressed cause you’ve lost your daily schedule.
Taking a day, a week, or even months away from your regular schedule due to sickness can cause mental health difficulties. You can try to offset that by engaging in these activities:
- Get some sun: There’s a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and depression. Try to get some sun in small intervals.
- Burn Incense or Candles: Aromatherapy is known to improve mood. Essential oils, candles, and cooking or baking can create calm and boost your mood.
- Journal: Keep track of your thoughts so they don’t run away from you, even when you're not feeling your best.
Being sick is not fun. It’s easy to get down on yourself about feeling sick but remember, your body needs the extra rest to get back to being healthy.
Seasonal Changes
The sun is more important for your mental health than you might think. Long nights and cold days mean people will stay inside and get less vitamin D than they’d typically get. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to depression. This is one reason people tend to feel more depressed in the winter than in any other season.
These “winter blues” are called seasonal affective disorder (SAD). It’s a season of depression that, for some, is baked into the calendar year.
Related Article: Seasonal Affective Disorder
Change in Living Conditions
Big or small life changes mess with the daily flow of life. We’re creatures of habit, and when our habits get upheaved, we have a difficult time adjusting. Stressful life events can include:
- Death of a friend or family member
- Moving
- Losing a job
- Starting a new job
- Health events
- Having a baby
- Kid’s first day of school
You can expect to experience mental difficulties while experiencing life changes, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reach out to your support. Keep in contact with those closest to you and open up about what you’re going through.
Related Articles: Grief Therapy, Stages of Grief
Backsliding
During your time in treatment, you’ll learn a lot of good coping skills and habits. Even after these habits are tethered to your daily life it is possible to backslide into old habits. This is normal, and it's ok.
Do your best to stay mindful of how you’re doing and if you sense a relapse coming, double down on the good habits and skills you learned in treatment or therapy. It’s also a good idea to reach out to your support group or check in with your mental health provider when things get hard.
Mental Health Relapse Prevention Plan
No mental health disorder can be 100% cured. The goal of treatment is to equip you with better coping skills and habits so you can be better prepared when triggers arise.
All conditions are at risk of relapse. This includes:
- Trauma relapse
- Anxiety relapse
- Depressive episodes
That being said, relapses are preventable. Below are some ways you can set up defenses against triggers.
Maintain Healthy Habits
One of the best things you can do to prevent a relapse is to maintain the healthy habits you learned from treatment. These healthy habits include:
- Attending group therapy support meetings
- Taking time for yourself
- Keeping a journal
- Taking time in nature
- Staying physically active
- Exploring Hobbies
- Meditation
These habits help keep you active mentally and physically and help boost mindfulness. A skill that is important for our next tip for preventing mental health relapses.
Stay Cognizant of How You’re Doing
Keeping track of how you’re feeling can help you find patterns of thoughts and moods, and how they relate to relapses. You can do this however works best for you.
If you’re a person who loves structure, keep a mood journal to keep track of how you’re feeling. If that’s not a task you can stick with, still take time every day to examine how you’re feeling. This could be a quick meditation in the shower or before bed.
If you notice a downward pattern, that could mean a relapse is coming. At this point, it could be a good idea to reach out to your support group.
Acknowledge Warning Signs
When a mental relapse occurs, your behavior will change. You may stop doing things you enjoy, stop responding to text messages, or start sleeping in.
Keep track of what you’re doing and what’s happening when experience a mental health relapse. If you notice these behaviors starting again, reach out to your support group.
What To Do After A Mental Health Relapse
While mental health relapses can be scary, they are normal. The recovery process takes time, and mental health conditions never truly go away. Here’s what to do during or after you experience a relapse.
Seek Support
If you’ve gone through treatment, you should have a pre-existing support system. One of the best things you can do after a relapse is to reach out to your support system. If you don’t have one, reach out to your general care provider or mental health provider.
When you tell someone you relapsed, it’s important to be direct, honest, and open. If you’re opening up to friends and family, realize they might not be able to give you the full support you need. That’s why it’s a good idea to reach out to your health provider for a treatment plan or steps to move forward.
Holistic Treatment Plans At Sequoia Behavioral Health
When receiving mental health treatment it’s important to receive holistic care. That means treating symptoms as well as the deeper issues.
When you receive help from Sequoia Behavioral Health, you’ll receive a treatment plan that’s designed specifically for you. This plan includes what kinds of therapy you’ll be engaging with as well as recreation therapies and medicine management.
Schedule a call to learn if Sequoia Behavioral Health is a good fit for you.