One of the best ways to keep the mind happy and healthy is to keep it engaged. Now, dealing with mental health issues, or even maintaining your mental health in today’s age can be a challenging task. However, we hope to make this aspect of your life easier and more fun with these 15 mental health games and activities.
Mental Health Games and Activities
A lot of people are not aware, but your brain, along with several other body parts, tends to shrink while you go through mental health issues in your life. In order to combat this, you need to keep your mind active, and thus, these mental health games and activities will help you do just that!
Colour Based Games
It is a proven fact that interacting with and seeing colors like green and blue have a calming effect on the mind. Similarly, the colors red and pink can actually energize your mind. So, if we can make a game out of colors, our minds will certainly benefit from it.
One of the many mental health games that you can play is, to have your partner write the names of colors down using different pencils. Now your goal is to read out the color of the font, rather than the name of the colour that your partner has written. For example: if “Blue” is written in a “Red” coloured pencil, then your answer will be red, not blue.
Creativity Based Games
The best mental health games and activities, push your mind just out of its comfort zone. The fact of the matter is, engaging in creative activities amplifies the brain’s ability to deal with stress, anxiety, and depression and helps keep you optimistic.
One of the many mental health games that will push you to be creative is one that forces you to become an author. So for the purposes of this game, you or your partner will select the ‘X’ number of words. And now the task is to write a story using only those words. As you keep progressing the number of words will continue to reduce, forcing you to be creative in a very tight ambit.
Memory Based Games
Keeping your memory actively working ensures that your brain retains its problem-solving capabilities. And the ability to solve problems promptly is one sign of a healthy brain. Therefore, it only makes logical sense that playing memory games will help boost your mental well-being.
So simply pick any of the million memory mental health games that we played as kids. For instance, in the memory card game, where every card in the set has an exact replica of it somewhere else in the set. Your job is to overturn cards briefly and then try to locate their counterparts after you have overturned them to face the floor.
Use the Weaker Side of Your Brain
This game is designed to make the non-dominant hemisphere of your brain become active. To play this game you simply need to take a pen in your weaker or non-dominant hand and write.
If nothing else, this mental health game will awaken your entire mind, leaving it more capable of dealing with any mental health issues that you might have. Moreover, it is said that the two halves of the brain take care of different aspects of your body’s functionality. Therefore, the right half of the brain is responsible for spatial thinking, the processing of images, and any movement that occurs on the opposite side of the body, i.e., for the right hemisphere, it will be the left side and vice versa.
So if you are a left-handed person, then the right side of the brain is more active. By playing this game, you can boost your cognitive functions by also engaging the left side of your brain.
Looking for Hidden Entities
The brain is quite active when it is searching for something using your eyes. Therefore, playing any game that involves the activity of searching for something, using your eyes and ears is guaranteed to improve the performance of your mind, thereby improving your mental well-being.
One such mental health game that you can play, is a virtual treasure hunt on your phone. You can use interesting clues that the game will generate for you in order to reach the end of a level. As such, the levels will keep getting harder, thus forcing your mind to work harder.
Storytelling
As we mentioned, engaging in creativity ensures good mental health. So here is another mental health game based on creativity. Your job is to pick a genre and write a story based on that genre. The instruction card for this game is quite short. You are only expected to enjoy telling the story in your own manner without caring about the word count. Therefore, should you wish to, you can spin a mind-boggling thriller using your words and paper or you can write the funniest story cramped with top-notch jokes in the history of comedy.
Backwards Game
This game is actually used by cops to check for signs of inebriation and impaired cognitive functions in people they suspect to be intoxicated. This in itself should prove to you how challenging this game is. In this game, you need to run sequentially, starting from the back. Basically, pick any sequence, whether it is of numbers, the multiplication table, or letters, and start from the highest order. For example: if you pick the sequence of numbers from 1 to 200, your job would be to count down from 200 to 1 without faltering verbally.
Take a walk amidst nature
There are plenty of studies to show the positive effect of raw and unadulterated nature on the human mind. So why not use mother nature for our mental health benefit? Simply walking amidst plants and trees can not only give your brain a fresh bout of oxygen but also lower your stress levels and ease your anxiety. Scheduling an hour’s session of walking under the open sky in an area, abundant with trees such as a park is guaranteed to be one of the best mental health activities.
Petting animals
Research tells us that petting animals like cats and dogs drastically reduces cortisol levels in the human brain. Now, cortisol is known as the stress hormone. The lower your cortisol, the more relaxed you will be. So, here is a fun mental health activity for you – Just make it a point to pet as many animals as possible that will let you pet them. It doesn’t matter if it is a dog or a cat or even a hamster, you should pet the fur baby. What could be more fun activity for your daily dose of dopamine than petting adorable animals?
The art of positive manifestation
This may sound like a farce, but the practice of positive thinking in a disciplined manner regularly can actually rewire your brain to think about the good things. The natural consequence of this is that your brain now has limited space to think about stressful or negative things. As a result, this becomes a mental health activity that effectively reduces your stress levels and ensures that you feel grateful for the positive aspects of your life. And we ensure you that there are plenty.
Painting
Once again, this is a mental health activity that harnesses the power of colour and uses it to ease the mind. If you want, you could make painting one of your mental health games by picking a partner to compete against. You can choose to paint the scenery outside the window or your partner’s face or even just something within your direct sight. One thing we can assure you of is that this process will recalibrate your brain and force it to think clearly.
Scrabble
Scrabble with friends is a great way to get out of your own head and connect with your friends. The game will not only give you an opportunity to socialize with your peers, but it will also force your brain to work. And, we are sure you have heard of the saying, “an empty mind is the devil’s workshop.” Since your mind will be too busy trying to think of words, the devil won’t be able to make it to its workshop. If you are one of those people for whom social interaction is draining, then you can simply choose to play with strangers or against the computer.
Engage in Strenuous Physical Activity
Training your body physically is known to have innumerable benefits for your mind such as boosting self-awareness, self-perception, confidence, and social skills. However, many a times people find it immensely boring to head to the gym and pump iron. If you are one of those people, try to switch things up with different sources of physical activities, such as martial arts. The bonus for you is that most martial arts tend to be the perfect vent session because you can actually break things. So simply take your pick of physical and mental health activity.
Yoga
Yoga is known to be a calming mental health activity for people who experience a fast-paced life or high stress in their profession. This is because yoga forces you to reconnect with the basics of your body’s functionality, i.e., your breathing pattern. Effectively, yoga is nothing but a physical activity that is regulated by breathwork. The direct effect that this has on your mental health is that it forces you to gain a new perspective on everything around you, simply by reducing the pace of life. And not to mention, these are all scientifically proven facts.
Take a spa day
Do we really need to convince you to play hooky at work and head to the nearest wellness centre? A spa day would obviously entail a muscle-relaxing massage, peaceful music and basically a day of pampering your physical body. Now, this resulting physical body manifests a calm mind. Moreover, the essential oils that are typically used in a spa session have scientifically proven benefits when it comes to alleviating mental distress and chronic depression, and anxiety.
These are certainly some good ways to work through when your mental health is not doing well and you need to take a step back and breathe. These mental health games and activities will help you rejuvenate and get back on track. In addition to these activities, we also have tons of fun mental health games and activities that you can partake in, on our Blockerx app.
Through the means of this app, you can also connect to a large community of people from around the world who have come together to help one another get through difficult times by sharing each other’s experiences and stories. The community partakes in various activities which help each of our members to live a healthy and happy life with sound and healthy mental health.
Final Words
We all go through such times when it is difficult to get involved with any sort of activity because it seems taxing. However, keeping yourself engaged in mental health games and activities every now and then will ensure a happy state of mind, which is essential for your overall well-being.
