Protecting Your Mental Health: Finding Peace in Small Rituals

Life can feel like a whirlwind. Too many tasks, too many tabs open in your brain, and not enough hours in the day. If you’ve ever found yourself overwhelmed, stretched thin, or simply emotionally tired, you’re not alone.

Protecting your mental health isn’t just a nice idea. It’s essential.

Mental health and physical health are deeply connected. When your mind is overwhelmed, your body feels it too. Stress can show up as fatigue, tension, digestive issues, or trouble sleeping. Taking care of your mental well-being is also a powerful act of physical self care.

The good news is that caring for your mental health doesn’t have to be big or dramatic. Sometimes it’s found in the quiet, intentional rituals we create for ourselves. For me, that’s baking and tending to my aeroponic garden; simple daily practices that help me feel calm, present, and in control.

I gather my ingredients, line up my bowls and measuring cups, and follow a recipe. Step by step, I bring order out of chaos. The rhythm of stirring, shaping, and waiting gives my mind room to breathe. Gardening grounds me. I check on my plants, adjust the water, ph balance, trim the leaves, and watch growth happen in real time. It’s a gentle reminder that healing doesn’t have to be loud or fast. It just has to be steady.

When I really need to recharge, my happy places are the beach and the mountains. There’s something about the sound of waves or the stillness of high trees that reminds me who I am beneath all the noise.

You might not be a baker or a gardener, and maybe you live far from the ocean or mountains. That’s okay. The key is finding your thing. A small, steady ritual that helps you come back to yourself when everything feels like too much. Maybe it’s journaling, painting, walking, or simply sitting quietly with a warm drink.

Protecting your mental health is about doing what matters.

What grounds you, soothes you, and reminds you that you are still here. Still growing. Still worthy of care.

You deserve peace. You deserve small moments of joy.

Food Culture, an interview

I found this gem in my draft folder. I can’t remember why I never posted it. As we approach the one year mark of Covid 19, reading this, even though it was only a year and a half ago brought me a wave of nostalgia. So much has changed, there’s been so much loss. Way too much. I thought 2020 was going to be the year I started on a community compost project and planned to partner with schools to get Tower Gardens. Well, the pandemic had other plans, and like a lot of people my mental health has suffered. Loss is real, depression is real, anxiety is real. All of which can be debilitating at times. I’m grateful that I’ve made it though the last year.

Anyway, please enjoy this “little piece of nostalgia”,

October 2019:

Last month my daughter interviewed me for a school assignment. (Which was super fun) It really made me think about my “food culture” and what’s important to me. Here’s the interview, I later added a couple of stories….

What’s the most important part of your food culture?

Healthy eating has always been important to me. I really wanted to raise my kids vegetarian but my husband was a meat eater when we met. I quit eating meat when I was 15. Over the years he changed his view on thinking you couldn’t get enough protein without meat, thankfully now we have a mostly vegan household. 

How has your relationship with food changed, having grown up in the most highly processed food decades (70s and 80s)?

Both sets of my grandparents had gardens in the 70’s and my dad started juicing and shopping at health food stores, so I don’t think I was affected until I went to live with my mom. I remember the natural foods store in Mammoth, I got to have carob chips & banana chips for treats. My dad let me have mandarin lime soda and Have’a corn chips, while the other kids were eating twinkies and cokes. I remember wanting ‘Corn Pops’ cereal so badly, that I threw a temper tantrum in the middle of the grocery store. His compromise was puffed rice central with pure maple syrup and fresh raw goats milk. To a six year old that was “cruel and unusual punishment”. Haha!

Once I went to live with my mom things were quite different, especially after she got our first microwave. She still made a lot of things from scratch (for a while), we canned fruit & jam and she baked bread. But my mom started buying Lean Cuisines and other frozen stuff and a lot of processed foods. I remember Otter Pops being one of my favorite treats in the summer, I also loved canned frosting. Now I’d never let that stuff in my house. All the Artificial colors, flavors and preservatives.....  When my kids were little, it was a lot easier to make sure they were eating healthy but snack & lunch at school changed that some. They wanted “the good snacks” like everyone else had....they didn’t want to be the weird kid. So I started buying chips, fruit snacks and packaged drinks. Again, something I’d never do now. (I was right to begin with and now research supports it!)

Why did you want to start growing your own food?

I remember picking veggies from my grandparents gardens, and having fruit right off the tree and I wanted my kids to experience that too. I planted my first garden when I pregnant with my son back in 1996, it was fun but also a lot of work with a newborn so it’s not something that I kept up on. I did manage to plant a garden at most of the houses we’ve lived in even if they were very small, sometimes only tomatoes and zucchini. I liked the idea of having the kids help, I thought it would be fun and they’d be more likely to eat what they grew. We’ve also had fruit trees at a couple of our houses, we made jam from plums, lots of lemonade from our lemons. One year we had so many peaches that we froze them and used them for peach cobbler, peach salsa, peach smoothies. We also had tons of figs, I tried making fig bars and fig jam. After my kids all left the house, I needed another project, and love spending hours in my garden everyday now.