Arif Reshad
University of Essex, UK
Bangladesh faces a substantial mental health crisis, with pooled prevalence estimates for depression, anxiety, and stress reaching 47%, 47%, and 44% respectively during the COVID 19 pandemic. Rather than prescribing positive behaviours to adopt, this article synthesises evidence on the everyday habits that actively erode psychological wellbeing in the Bangladeshi context, arguing that eliminating these routines may be as important as introducing new wellness practices.
Reasons that turn into harmful habits
Doomscrolling and Excessive Social Media Use, just to start with. Compulsive consumption of negative online content traps users in emotional loops of fear, sorrow, and rage. Using social media for more than four hours daily is significantly associated with higher odds of depression and anxiety among Bangladeshi young adults. Critically, the mechanism of harm in Bangladesh is not solely passive content consumption but the displacement of productive activities and amplification of preexisting academic and social insecurities.
Rural students who migrate to urban centres for education often experience loneliness and turn to social media as a coping mechanism, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of isolation and digital dependency. This creates a sense of emotional suppression. Ignoring or bottling up unpleasant emotions is deeply embedded in Bangladeshi cultural norms. Cross cultural research confirms that emotion suppression frequency is significantly higher among Bangladeshi adults compared with Australian counterparts.
Among Bangladeshi adolescents, worry focused cognitive emotion regulation strategies are associated with greater psychopathology, while suppression focused regulation relates to borderline clinical depression. Community members in rural areas conceptualise depressive states as chinta rog (worry illness), yet cultural norms around emotional restraint constrain expression of distress, allowing unresolved feelings to accumulate into chronic anxiety or somatic complaints.
Women in rural settings face particularly acute forms of suppression, with social norms punishing emotional expression and making silence the default response to abuse. Such suppression is often tied to overworking and chronic work overload (and mostly with no appreciation), which is prevalent in rural household setting. Overworking is culturally valorised as diligence but constitutes a pervasive threat to mental health.
Among healthcare professionals, burnout prevalence ranges from approximately 20% to over 55%, with emotional exhaustion reaching up to 95% in some cohorts. Garment industry workers face psychologically adverse conditions including rotating shifts that disturb family life, leisure, meal routines, and sleep. Economic necessity drives overwork, which degrades mental health, which in turn reduces productivity and earning capacity, creating a paradoxical cycle.
It is difficult to separate toxic social connections from the already discussed ones. The extended family system, while providing support, can impose significant psychological burdens when intergenerational expectations conflict with individual aspirations. Women in particular face domestic and in law abuse, with social norms around obedience and family reputation discouraging them from leaving harmful relationships. Urban slum dwellers are more than six times more likely to report poor mental health compared with rural residents, reflecting the compounding effects of overcrowded and socially stressful living environments.
Such connections and their mental impact are topped up by poor dietary practices. Skipping breakfast is the most prevalent harmful dietary habit, with nationwide data linking frequent breakfast skipping to poor mental health among adolescents. High fast food and/or street food consumption and inadequate fruit and vegetable intake represent additional risks, with economic constraints limiting access to diverse and nutritious food for much of the population.
Many of these victims or close to victimization are often physically inactive. Only 17% to 23% of Dhaka university students meet WHO recommendations for physical activity. Structural barriers include poor traffic conditions, lack of facilities, excessive waste of time in commuting, communication and dwelling and safety concerns, with gender compounding the problem as females perceive greater barriers and spend more time in sedentary behaviours. Insufficient physical activity is independently associated with psychological distress irrespective of sedentary behaviour.
Poor sleep hygiene follows. During the pandemic, 47.5% of Bangladeshi adolescents experienced sleep difficulties and 73% of the general population reported sleep disturbance. The relationship between sleep and mental health is bidirectional: dissatisfaction with sleep, short sleep duration, and long sleep duration are all linked with depression and anxiety. Late night social media combined with early morning obligations create a particularly damaging pattern.
Tobacco use remains alarmingly high in Bangladesh. Smoking of any type is associated with increased risk of mental disorders among Bangladeshi men and women. Among adolescents, any tobacco product use is associated with depression. Smokeless tobacco consumption among ischemic stroke patients elevates chances of both anxiety and depressive symptoms.
Adding toleration of suboptimal living conditions to this list worsens the overall situation. Normalisation of overcrowded, noisy, and polluted urban environments represents passive habituation to conditions that degrade psychological wellbeing. Migrants who leave families behind face compounding daily stresses including suboptimal housing, financial constraints, adaptation challenges, and loneliness.
Interacting Cycles and Strategic Implications
These habits are not isolated; they interact in reinforcing cycles. Doomscrolling disrupts sleep, which increases stress, which drives emotional eating or tobacco use, which further degrades health. Overworking eliminates time for exercise and social connection, which increases isolation and vulnerability to toxic relationships. Cultural norms around emotional restraint and family obligation reinforce suppression and harmful social ties.
Economic pressures drive overwork and limit access to nutritious food, exercise facilities, and restorative environments. Gender norms restrict women’s physical activity, constrain their ability to leave abusive relationships, and increase their exposure to domestic stress.
Addressing these habits requires interventions at individual, community, and policy levels, with the subtractive approach of identifying and eliminating harmful routines proving as important as the additive approach of introducing new wellness practices, particularly where the baseline burden of psychological distress is already so high.
