What is mental health anyway?

What is mental health anyway?

WE are not entirely sure the answer to this question, however, one thing we can tell you is it feels better when we are together :D

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated” Maya Angelou

Publishing this blog from my old blog wordpress.dweebyrunner18. I spent ages thinking about how to change this blog, how to write it better, shorter, more concise, then I thought, no, keep it real as it truly reflects how I felt then and how I feel now.

Being a human being is hard; sometimes it feels like you are trying to balance on a tight rope on the highest mountain. Whilst juggling learning/education, work, making and maintaining friendships, finding loving relationships, loving family, building connections, eating plants or meat or a mixture (no judgement haha), exercising, getting enough ‘quality’ sleep, social media, reading, oh and then there is mental practice-(maybe meditating or journaling whatever it may be. On top of all the external, we seek to find out who we want to be as people. What our purpose is, and what we want to add to the world.

This process becomes EVEN MORE challenging when we face obstacles, times of hardship and struggle. Times where we doubt ourselves, we lose ourselves and we struggle to bounce back and find our place in this world.

Our outlook, our mental well-being is built up on an array of experiences and is definitely put under pressure when we are going through challenges in life. When we experience stress and negativity, it puts strain on us, consciously and sub-consciously. Over time, we can begin to doubt ourselves and doubt our life journey. This negativity can feed off other negativity, creating a whole lotta negativity in our lives.

If we start letting in that negative self-talk (inner-mental dialogue), it can become all we listen to. “I suck, I can’t do this, I am not as good her/him/them” … Our actions are then based on that negative self-talk. It can change the direction of life, manifesting itself in many different ways. It can stem from one incident or a whole load of them. Leaving us feeling emotionally exhausted, sometimes it is diagnosed as depression or anxiety. Whatever it is, we all have our own pain. Life can be very difficult.

However, WE CAN and will overcome and learn to cope with these struggles with support, belief, empathy and love.

Research shows that our body does need stress to grow. Our body adapts, strives and becomes better when it is confronted with a reasonable amount of stress. A good analogy I used to make sense of this was exercise. During exercise, our muscle fibres develop micro tears, ‘when we feel the burn’, that is a physical signal that our body is experiencing strain. When we stop exercising, eat (replenish our muscles #protein) and rest, our body begins to recover and repair. We become stronger, we gain more stamina and endurance depending on the training we have done. The side effect or adaption of exercise stress is strength and growth.

However, too much stress on the body, physically and mentally can lead to injury. The hard part about identifying mental ‘injury’ is we can’t physically see it, it’s not a gaping wound or broken bone. Mental pain is subjective, I think of it as mushy (like spaghetti) difficult to grasp and hard to describe. Everyone experiences it differently. We all have unique experiences that lead us to different mental states (P.S. when I say mental states, it sounds weird but what I mean is our constant mood, – we all feel and experiences states of happiness and sadness, but we do not all feel pro-longed, deep sadness.

I see it like the planet going through seasons. We as humans may experience a longer winter where we feel disconnected, isolated and withdrawn. We might experience winter a wee bit longer than others. In contrast we might have an incredibly long, bright, inspiring summers full of joy and happiness. Oh, and then like good ole Scotland, we might experience all seasons in one day or maybe one hour. But I guess my point is really, it is ok not to be ok. I want to open up the conversation about mental health, how we truly feel, not how we have to portray our feelings through social medial, but how we truly feel.

Will continue this long blether in the next post, really hope this opens up the conversation, I truly believe this can be for anyone. It could help people suffering from mental health issues and also help people who are supporting them through it. Supporting people with depression can be just as difficult. Seeing someone you love struggle and not reach their full potential can truly be excruciating.

Dr Bill Howatt podcast- http://drgregwells.com/be-better/dr-bill-howatt/ (P.S. Greg wells has lots of great podcasts)

I have so many other amazing resources to share if anyone wants me to share message me.