5 Tips for Managing Mental Health in Video Editing

According to statistics, 12.9% of U.S. veterans have PTSD, which makes it crucial to find out which practices help maintain mental health. It’s worth remembering that stress is an absolutely normal reaction to traumatic events.

However, it might hinder your chances for personal development and affect your relationships with other people unless you learn how to manage your emotions.

Psychological trauma may stifle creativity, but it may also make it manifest. In this article, we have rounded up the best tips for maintaining mental health by creating video content. For some, this pastime may be a leisure activity. For others, it can become a full-time job. Regardless of the purpose, video editing may bring unexpected rewards to those who will master new skills and find new ways to bring their message across.

5 Ways to Use Video Editing for Improving Mental Health 

Trauma makes people feel disconnected from who they are. Losing a feeling of authenticity, army veterans stop caring about their future and go into a depression. However, every trauma brings a chance for post-traumatic growth.

If a person feels anxious, exploited, and sad, it’s crucial for them to find some value in what they do. Video editing makes it easy to create something tangible, a documentary, a fun video, or a short clip that allows a creator of such content to establish a connection with their audience and get feedback.

Here are some tips for video editors who want to funnel their creativity into a range of interests that will help them keep living:

1. Find a topic you want to explore and try to create video content that will make your voice heard.
2. Use your experience to tell a story from your unique perspective and challenge existing preconceptions about personalities or events.
3. If you feel isolated, find people who experience the same and create a video where you explore how other veterans are dealing with this issue.
4. Channel your traumatic experience into creative works by going on a trip and creating video content about it.
5. Connect with people with the same problem by asking them to leave comments under your videos.

Whether you already have some experience or just getting started, it is important to select the right equipment and video editing software to create engaging content.

Tips for Creating Engaging Videos

Doing something creative is one of the most common and effective distraction techniques. To take your mind off unpleasant things, it might be a good idea to change the scenery and go on an adventure. If you want to shoot dynamic videos on the go, make sure to purchase a GoPro camera that allows for capturing action footage. Then, you will need to learn how to edit GoPro videos using dedicated software.  Such programs allow you to:

• Add transitions
• Apply filters
• Cut, merge and resize videos
• Stabilize videos during post-processing
• Improve the sound quality
• Add text, including titles
• Add music tracks and voiceovers

When editing raw footage, you can give free rein to your creativity and use various techniques to emphasize your main message. Besides using jump cuts, you can add fade-ins and fade-outs, use cutting on action, or add J and L cuts to emphasize the effects of the scenes containing dialogues.

Summing Up

Video editing may be a tedious task but it brings highly satisfying results as well as helps people cope with uncomfortable emotions. In the long run, working on a movie might become a perfect coping strategy as it will distract you from unwanted thoughts.

It might also be a good idea to become a full-time video editor as the average salary of video editors in the U.S. is about $74,600. Dealing with stress in a creative way will help you decrease the intensity of strong emotions causing distress and learn how to manage them.