The Dangers of Bottling Up Mental Health Problems

When you know that you’re suffering from mental health issues, a part of you is always telling you to do the sensible thing like taking time to look for counselling psychologists in Bedford. On the other hand, another competing part of you might be pushing for you to just button up and ignore these problems. They’re nothing serious, right? They’re not making you physically ill, right? 

In fact, there are serious inherent dangers in not acting as required when suffering from mental health problems. Bottling them up and suppressing them may not do what you hope.

  1. Negative Impacts on Personal Relationships

When you try to contain and push down mental health problems, they tend to build up and accumulate to the point where they affect your emotions and spill into your personal life. These emotions can manifest in many forms, one common example being a shortness of temper. Such a quickness to anger and loss of patience without the mental health context can certainly create negative effects on romantic, family and platonic relationships.

The main problem here is misunderstanding. The people around you can interpret these negative emotions as simply bad behaviour towards them, rather than as a manifestation of your mental health problems. After all, if they don’t know about what you’re going through, and you’re actively concealing it, what other conclusion might they reach?

  1. Negative Impacts on Professional Life

Following on from the previous point, those same misunderstandings that can happen with friends and family can also negatively affect your performance and prospects in your career. It might start with your mental health problem keeping you awake at night, meaning that you oversleep most days and end up being late for work. In the absence of any other explanation, your bosses are likely to just see you as irresponsible.

Translating such happenings into the longer term, you will be holding yourself back from advancement opportunities, which may start a vicious cycle of disappointment and depression, leading to more negative impacts on your performance, ultimately leading to worse professional consequences.

  1. Does Nothing to Fight Stigmas

Next, as challenging as mental health difficulties certainly are, there’s another terrible result in bottling them up, and that is that it does nothing to help combat stigmas people hold when it comes to these issues. It could be your own family and friends who assume that “mental health problems” is just an excuse lazy people come up with to explain their failures. Wouldn’t they think differently when they see what such things can do to those nearest and dearest to them? In a sense, we have a broader duty to address and deal with our problems so that society as a whole can better acknowledge and understand mental health issues.

  1. It Can Spill Over to Your Physical Health

Earlier, we mentioned that mental health problems can start to affect your sleep patterns. This is but one of the many ways that stress from mental health difficulties can spill into your physical health. Primarily, ignoring your mental health problems will cause huge amounts of stress and anxiety.

Increased anxiety can result in an elevated heart rate, palpitations, and even chest pains. Your blood pressure is likely to go up, and your chances for things like heart disease also increase.

  1. You’ll Compound Them

Finally, trying to suppress your mental health problems is just an easy way to compound them, make them larger, and their impact on various aspects of your life more serious. It’s not really a question of “out of sight, out of mind” when it comes to these issues. They need to be addressed frankly and directly, and that takes the courage to acknowledge their existence and take proper steps to deal with them.