If you’re a communicator or marketer, you have most likely written about mental health and its importance. You may have shared mental health resources, run internal or external surveys to assess the mental health of your stakeholders, run self-care campaigns, or have written articles on “How to take care of your mental health during lockdown”. The constant worry to ensure that mental health is communicated properly can be exhausting, and the irony is not lost on me that those who are writing about how vital mental health is may also be struggling with their own.

We don’t need reminding of how emotionally challenging this year has been. For everyone, in employment or not, many changes had to be made to ensure the safety and health of ourselves and those around us. Lockdown brought the loss of the work life/home life barrier. With this, conversations of burnout and mental health picked up pace. Advice on how to manage your mental health in the form of self-care became positively abundant.

The image of self-care is often conflated with bubble baths, face masks and lavender scented candles. And while this angle of self-care does bring its benefits, there’s no denying it comes from a point of consumerism. It’s important to realise that self-care can come in the form of small, but impactful, everyday activities.

Improving your mental health in the form of self-care can be saying no to a project, logging off at the same time every evening, or turning off email notifications on your phone (or better yet, removing work emails off your phone altogether). It can come in the form of going for a daily walk and ensuring that you are sleeping well every night.

Self-care can also come in the form of speaking to your manager or team about your struggles and working to take on actionable changes at work to improve your mental health. I know that for myself, speaking about mental health can be uncomfortable. I’m not one to open up but knowing that I have a great support system at work to talk about when I am struggling has certainly helped.

We are seeing more people within communications and marketing speak up about their mental health. PRCA’s report, Continuing the Conversation: Mental Wellbeing in Public Relations 2020, found 59% of PR professionals are letting someone at work know they are struggling with mental health, compared to 43% in 2019.

For the communicati