Bored Panda had a chat about how to make our mental health our priority in life with British psychotherapist Silva Neves. He explained that at the core of our mental welfare lie the ideas that we should be compassionate to ourselves and that we should work hard to make looking after our mental health a daily habit. “Be kind to yourself,” Silva told Bored Panda.

“I think we should make our mental health a priority every day because if we have poor mental health then we cannot function in other areas of our lives,” the psychotherapist explained to Bored Panda that the need to put mental health at the top of our hierarchy of priorities is very clear. If we don’t look after our mental health, everything else can fall apart.

“Looking after our mental health should be a daily routine like we have a daily routine with looking after our body: taking a shower, brushing our teeth, eating food,” Silva said. He noted that taking care of our mental health doesn’t have to take hours and hours: it can involve a series of small steps that, nonetheless, have a large impact on our welfare.

“A daily mental health routine is to take some time to breathe deeply and consciously, having a short moment of quiet and self-reflection enquiring with how you are doing, connecting with a good friend or a pet, having a quiet cup of tea, listening to your favorite music (and dancing to it if you wish), laughing. These are only a few of the very many quick ways you can look after your mental health every day,” he explained.

A while back, I also spoke to Vanessa Bohns from Cornell University about how embarrassment has its positive sides. By fully embracing embarrassment instead of hiding from it, you can reap some seriously great social rewards.

“Displaying signs of mild embarrassment can actually be socially constructive and make people feel more sympathetic towards you in the face of your faux pas,” Vanessa told Bored Panda in a previous interview that showing these signs can actually strengthen your relationship with the people around you. On the flip side, pretending you’re not embarrassed or feeling awkward when you are can cause your social capital to drop.

Vanessa noted, however, that we should strive to prevent our embarrassment from turning into shame. While blushing a bit is perfectly fine and even healthy, deep-seated shame leads to serious long-term problems.

“What you want to be careful not to do is to let embarrassment morph into the more destructive self-conscious emotion of shame, where you feel so badly about a minor mistake that you start to think there is something wrong with you and feel the need to completely disappear and hide away yourself,” she said.

So even if we do mess up and post something cringey on social media or send out a message that makes others feel very uncomfortable, we have to embrace our embarrassment and prevent it from morphing into shame. At the end of the day, we have to forgive ourselves and focus on our mental health. And that means being kind to ourselves no matter our mistakes in public. Though… that requires being aware of these mistakes in the first place!