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Your mental health directly impacts your physical health. When mental well-being hits a slump, it can compromise your everyday life. Read on to discover how your mental health can affect your safety.

Reduced Concentration and Focus

It’s common to wander when your focus should be on something else. A short attention span is not always cause for concern, but there are instances where it can endanger your life. Most importantly, it could indicate that you might have an underlying health condition causing this problem.

Reduced concentration and focus are leading symptoms of depression, which can severely impact your quality of life. Moreover, this can interfere with your ability to perform daily tasks. If you have challenges caused by your short attention span, you should speak to your doctor for recommendations to manage your symptoms.

Impaired Decision-Making

Did you know that feeling stressed by the decisions you have to make in your daily life can lead to a phenomenon known as decision fatigue? This can leave you feeling emotionally, mentally, and physically depleted. Experiencing this might have consequences that impact your judgment and result in poor decision-making.

If you are in a difficult situation, feeling a toll on your mental health or faced with uncertainty when you have to make decisions that impact other people, decision fatigue might occur. You will most likely feel overwhelmed, but these are other symptoms to be aware of:

• Being impulsive and being less careful of the choices to make.
• Brain fog.
• Feeling irritable.
• Regretful about the decisions you make later.
• Physical discomfort such as diarrhoea, nausea, tension, and headaches.

Increased Possibility of Engaging in Risky Behaviour

There are activities which have the potential to harm you or increase the risk of injury and fatalities. For instance, if you decide to drink and drive or walk alone at night, there’s a high chance of being vulnerable to life-threatening situations. Your mental well-being influences how impulsive your judgment becomes.

In some cases, if you are experiencing a manic episode, you might find yourself participating in risky behaviour more. Even though these behaviours may be deemed widely practised, such as drinking and driving, the actions are void of consequences or appreciation of how they may impact lives. If you’re engaging in risky behaviour as a means to escape from your mental health concerns, you should use the FREE-to-use iER App to get connected to Social Services for prompt counselling when you need it most.

Reduced Alertness

Research suggests that when you experience reduced alertness, you’re in a state of decreased awareness, which can have severe consequences. While the causes vary, including chronic diseases such as liver disease, there are cases where your mental health affects your heart health to the point where it leads to abnormal heart rhythms. When your heart health is compromised, it affects the blood and oxygen flow necessary to keep certain parts of the brain functional.

This means that you can be vulnerable in areas where you should have situational awareness and become an easy target for various crimes. These are reduced alertness symptoms you should keep an eye on:

• Poor balance.
• Feeling lightheaded.
• Feeling dizzy.
• Fainting.
• Feeling weak in your arms, face or legs.

It’s important to rely on effective strategies to improve your mental health at home and work. Understanding how your mental well-being can endanger your life by exposing you to life-threatening risks is a significant consideration in getting the help you need. The FREE-to-use iER App provides easy and reliable access to emergency counselling services to prioritise your safety when looking for guidance and support to navigate your everyday challenges.

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