You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who is 100% positive every day. That level of positivity can be exhausting, but if your low days are starting to outnumber the good ones, then it may be time for a shift in perspective and some productive life changes. These needn’t be as dramatic as you might think. Often, the best strategies for safeguarding your mental health and maintaining a good level of self-satisfaction, are minor changes to your habits and routines. Look for ways to improve the way that you look at yourself, and you’ll find that feeling good about yourself is much easier to achieve. Here are the best places to start.

Address physical imperfection

Not one single person on the planet is 100% happy with their body. No matter how much the media shows us beauty, the fact is that imperfections exist on everyone. It’s a matter of challenging those imperfections. If your happiness is constantly chipped at by a lack of security about the way that you look, then it’s time to tackle those issues once and for all. For unsightly scars, there are treatments available that can reduce their visibility, and for those with skin conditions like acne, the solutions may be easier and more effective than you think. Current acne treatment products can be incredibly powerful and work wonders. Tackling those flaws that affect your mental well-being is a great first step to having a more positive outlook on life.

Exercise your body to improve your mind

You don’t need to start going to the gym every five minutes or start obsessing about pecs and glutes. Even regular light exercise can help boost your endorphin levels and make you feel much better about yourself. There are so many options when it comes to light exercise, so if you’re like the majority of people who claim “I don’t have time to exercise,” then you’re missing the point. You don’t need to lift weights and run a marathon. Instead, incorporate exercise into your daily routine. Put your favorite album on and give the house a thorough spring-clean while you dance and sing. This will get the blood pumping and the heart racing, and that’s all that you need to get those all-important endorphins racing around your body.

Dish out the compliments

It’s all well and good getting a compliment when it comes to feeling better about yourself, but have you considered giving them too? Giving compliments makes us not only feel better about ourselves, but it also improves the view of us that others have. That’s a great foundation for those changes that you make that will help with your own self-image and can seriously affect the way that you feel about yourself over time. Never hold back on a compliment, and you might just find that your own mental health starts to show more positive growth.

Stayingpositive is not always easy, but by following the core starting points, you open yourself up to a whole new lifestyle unencumbered by negativity. Smile more, remove toxicity from your life, and you may be feeling better about yourself before you know it.