Actor Puja Agarwal talks on mental health!

#PujaAgarwal believes good mental health is everything. The actor, who was last seen in the short film Happy Anniversary, shares her opinion on issues of the mind and how it has been affecting people across the globe.

“Good mental health might mean different things to different people. For me, it’s a free state of mind when I am able to think, feel and react in the ways that I want so as to live my life as independently as possible. It is about being cognitively, emotionally and socially healthy,” she says.

While people take care of their physical health, they forget to take care of the issues of the mind. To explain her point of view, Puja quotes Jim RohnI’s ‘Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live’ and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘The first wealth is health’.

“Many of us have heard quotes like these since childhood but probably never took it seriously. Health comprises both your physical and mental well being. We do a lot to develop our physical health but forget to work on improving our mental health… If you ask me, the one thing I do is sleep early and wake-up before dawn. No use of any electronic devices one hour before sleep and after waking up. I actually use my grandma’s alarm clock, so that I don’t have to use my cell phone at the beginning of a new day. Working out daily is also an essential part for keeping my mental health good,” she reveals.

On whether she thinks people from the entertainment industry are generally targeted when it comes to depression and anxiety, she replies, “It’s wrong to believe that depression and anxiety mostly exists in our industry. When I tell them about statistics like “India comes in the top five most depressed countries in the world, every 10th person in India is suffering from Anxiety or Depression”, it’s hard for many to believe. Even a mother who’s a homemaker takes stress about what she is going to cook for lunch and dinner. What I mean is, it’s not about the industry, it’s more about the person’s nature.”

The actor usually begins and ends her day with meditation. On days she feels low, Puja prefers going neutral. She binge watches content, orders my favourite dish and does some online shopping.

Reacting to the rising cases of death by suicide in show, she adds, “It didn’t affect me much, till every next person started calling me and started asking all type of weird questions, as if I know it all. Some people also called to check on whether I was doing okay. After all these calls, it did affect me a lot, not because of the cases as I am well aware of the statistics behind the same but because of people not really getting the meaning of depression.”