By Korin Miller

There are so many strategies for cultivating a solid sense of mental health (Rethinking your social-media relationship! Scheduling a girls' night! Journaling!) Still, figuring out what tips really work and what’s just noise is a highly personalized and hardly simple process.

If you were building the ideal emotionally healthy person ― like a Simwho was well-adjusted and definitely not evil ― what traits would you choose?

Time off is what your brain thrives on. It spends hours every day working and managing the constant streams of information and conversation that come at you from all directions. But if your brain doesn't get a chance to chill and restore itself, your mood, performance, and health suffer. Think of this recovery as mental downtime—periods when you're not actively focusing on and engaged in the outside world. You simply let your mind wander or daydream and it becomes reenergized in the process.

After about six months of individual therapy, Audrey A., then 28, felt like her progress had stalled. But she still wanted help working through a traumatic stalking incident that happened earlier in her life. “I chose group therapy to see if talking to others could help shine a light on things,” she tells SELF. “I went to be around people who were in [similar] situations so that I could see I wasn't alone.”

For the nearly 800,000 people who experience a stroke each year in the United States, the aftereffects are likely to be life-changing.