Managing my mental illness is a full-time job, at least for me. I have to do things every day to manage the symptoms of my OCD and panic disorder. The list of things that I have to do includes making sure I'm getting enough rest, making sure I'm eating the right foods, making sure I'm exercising, making sure I have enough "wiggle room" in my schedule to deal with a sudden unexpected spike in anxiety or a full-on panic attack, and making sure I'm using the healthy management strategies and coping techniques that I've learned in therapy. In addition to that, I also have to keep up with my therapy appointments and make sure I'm working on the things my therapist and I talk about in therapy while I'm between sessions.
In addition to all the things I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I always have to take my mental illness into account for every decision I make. I have to ask myself, "Will doing X negatively or positively affect my mental health, or is this something I won't know until I try it?" If the answer is that something will negatively affect my mental health, then I can't do that thing no matter how much I want to. If the answer is that I don't know if something will negatively affect my mental health until I try it, I have to ask myself, "Do I currently have the internal resources to be able to safely manage any possible negative mental health consequences if I try this thing?" (Because it's never a good idea to forge ahead with something when you don't have the internal resources to manage the possible negative effects.)
This is EVERY DAY, whether I'm in a period of good or poor mental health and whether or not I'm experiencing symptoms of my mental illness. (I do even more things to manage my mental health on the bad days.) This isn't something I can take a day off from or only do when I feel like it. (And, yes, managing my mental health and being a paralegal can feel like I have a full plate depending on how well I'm doing with my mental health. It's like having two jobs at the same time.)
When I don't treat managing my mental health like the full-time job that it is, I always regret it. When I don't do the things that I need to do every day to manage my mental health, I don't function at the level that I consider to be my normal. I experience more spikes in the symptoms of my mental illness, and I end up existing in survival mode. I can lose days and even weeks in a blur of anxiety, panic, and unhealthy spirals. I'm also unable to be fully present in my life and my relationships with other people because nobody can be fully present in the external world when they're literally fighting to survive their internal world.
I know it can sound daunting when I refer to managing my mental health as a full-time job. It may even seem tedious to have to think about this THING every day and do stuff so this THING doesn't severely impact your ability to thrive and fully experience life. But...we all deserve to live as fully and as happily as we can, and we deserve to be able to be fully present in our lives as often as we can instead of just surviving.
I'll end with this: People tend to think about managing their mental health as more of an occasional hobby instead of a full-time pursuit. This isn't a good way to think about managing your mental health for anyone, but it's an especially bad way to think about managing your mental health when you live with mental illness. A mental illness that you don't work on or think about until it's interfering with your ability to function can derail your whole life for months or even years. Adequately managing mental illness so that you're not constantly fighting to survive it requires work EVERY DAY, like it's a full-time job.
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