I get frustrated when mental health is talked about like it's this lone symptom. Like it’s this mystical animal that just popped up out of nowhere and we don’t know how to tame it.
In reality, the health of our mental state has always been a natural part of being human. Anxiety is an instinct we were born with to allow us to sense danger and therefore aid in our survival and safety.
Now, mental health feels like this buzzword that businesses use to come across as progressive.
My mission is not to advocate for talking about mental health (because marketing seems to be doing a great job at that) but to change the way we’re approaching mental health.
We need to be focusing less on ‘mental health’ and more on the life that’s creating it.
The word "mental health" feels daunting because we don’t know how to control it, but we do know how to control the contributing factors.
One of the key foundations of mental health is sleep. The thing you do every night. The thing that our body needs to survive. The thing that we take for granted over and over again.
Much like how toddlers need their nap at least once a day, adults need about 8 hours to function efficiently. It’s not only about the quantity of sleep; it’s also about the quality. How stressed are you before you fall asleep? Did you wind down with low lights, less screen time? All of these factors into the quality of your sleep.
The next ingredient is movement. Now, that doesn’t mean an overpriced gym membership or a daily walk. If all you can add into your routine is some stretches and a walk to the mailbox, then hey, you’re doing better than before. Adding movement into your daily routine becomes addictive; one minute it's a walk to the mailbox, the next you’re doing a cheeky 10 minutes around the block. Allow yourself to fall in love with the process.
Now we’re moving on to food. How is your relationship with it? Does it fuel your body the best way it can? Do you understand it? Is it a source of stress for you from past history with it? Work that out. The way we fuel our brain affects the way it operates. It shapes the way we process information and how we solve problems. Does this make you want to change your relationship with food? Get more out of it? Take a step, start googling. Understand which foods can set you up with the best moods.
Then we’ve got the voice inside our head. How do we talk to ourselves? Does this voice sound like an influential adult we admired growing up? Does that voice encourage you to be the best you can be or shame you into not trying new things? We tend to think that voice is external, like we have no control over it. Like it’s the great Oz in "The Wizard of Oz" and we are just to listen to whatever it tells us. However, in reality, when you pull back the curtain, that voice is a collection of all the voices we’ve heard over our life. Voices we’ve heard so many times they become ingrained in us. But the best thing about pulling back the curtain is realizing you’re free to be the voice now. You control the microphone.
Now, controlling that voice isn’t easy to begin with. Especially if you don’t spend a lot of time in your mind. If you’ve prioritised the chaos of the world to escape the silence of your mind, then walking up to the voice behind the curtain and snatching the microphone out of their hand might seem horrifically out of character. You might not even know where the curtain is. That’s where spending time in your mind comes in handy. Become accustomed to what it’s like up there. Sit in silence, do crafts, yoga, meditate - all those things you’ve convinced yourself you can't do because they’re hard. Hate to break it to you, but that's the point. The good things in life very seldom come easy. To measure success, we must measure how hard we are willing to endure to achieve a state of ease. Spending time in your mind will feel hard at the beginning because everything's hard at the beginning. But, much like everything else, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
Finally, we have our external ingredients - the things that require more management and less control. Our relationships and environment. It’s easy to pinpoint our environment as a source of pain - "my house is always messy", "my home is always loud". But it's harder to begin to take action. Taking action in our relationships and environment is too often put in the ‘too hard basket’. "I don’t want to bring up the way they talk to me because I don’t want to start a fight. I’m too tired after dinner to clean up, so I always wake up to dishes in the sink. If I move out, it will start an argument, and I don’t want to upset them." Once again, sacrificing the short-term hard for future ease seems like too high a price to pay. However, much like everything else, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
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