Is it even possible for us to improve mental health? It seems that no matter what we do and how hard we try to improve mental health we still fall back into our old dysfunctional patterns. Is the pursuit of better mental health is a waste of energy? What are we doing wrong?
First of all, it is absolutely possible and doable to significantly improve mental health, our functioning, and our sense of well-being in the world. However, to increase our chances of successfully achieving better mental health, we must first revisit five basic assumptions and expectations of what it really takes to get there.
How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #1 – Commit to Sustained Action
When we are taking medication for a chronic physical illness we typically take it every single day. We follow doctor’s orders without question. We know that if we stopped taking the medicine, the illness would come back or flare up.
There is no doubt in our minds that our diet and exercise routine also need to be consistent in order to be effective. Any positive gains in how we look and feel will start to wear off as soon as we stop.
We spend years and a small fortune on orthodontics, wearing those annoying braces and uncomfortable expanders to straighten our teeth, to get that perfect Hollywood smile.
We apply the same expectations of discipline and consistency to our jobs and even to cleaning our houses. We know that if we stopped making progress on our objectives at work or taking care of our houses, our job performance would suffer and our houses would get really messy quickly.
It also goes without saying that we have to regularly and consistently wash the dishes, the laundry, take showers, brush our hair, eat healthy, take care of the kids, walk our dogs, exercise. We know that we have to do many of chores at least daily for the rest of our lives.
Yet, we are refusing to accept the same reality when it has to do with our own mental health, our emotional well-being. Even when we realize that we are suffering, when we know there is a problem. We might say that want to improve mental health and we might even believe it. Yet, we are willing to accept only a silver bullet solution, a brief, low-effort ,and low-cost intervention. We want to wave a magic wand, be “cured,” and feel great for the rest of our lives.
Sadly, this magic wand to improve mental health doesn’t exist. There is no silver bullet either.
Just like some of us are born with a fast or a slow metabolism, we are genetically and environmentally conditioned for a certain baseline level of mental health. Due to a combination of bio-psycho-social factors, our organism develops a physiology that may be prone to anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD, or PTSD. These conditions are very much a part of us, a part of our organism, of our make-up.
When we talk about “better mental health” or “how to improve mental health” we are not comparing ourselves to some stereotypical benchmark or to others. Instead, we are trying to improve on our own individual baseline that life has dealt us through genetic lottery and environmental conditioning. Rewiring and reprogramming our organism, that took generations to develop, will require a lot of work, commitment, and perseverance.
The mission to improve mental health is really not that different from addressing physical health. We can think of an illness as a process that goes on in our organism.
Instead of looking at our mental health concerns as a short-term or acute illness, like ear infections that are expected to completely clear up after ten days of antibiotics, it may be more beneficial to see our mental health challenges as a chronic condition similar to heart disease or cancer. Chronic conditions might never be completely cured, but they can be successfully improved upon and managed throughout our lifetime.
Improving our mental health requires a commitment to sustained and targeted action as well as a continuous focus throughout our lifetime, similar to managing chronic conditions, diet, and exercise.
A realistic destination of a journey to improve mental health should not be seen as a magical instant cure (this expectation would set us up for failure from the start). Instead, our mental wellness can be viewed as an informed strategic way of being in the world which makes the condition manageable and ensures that it does not interfere with the felt sense of well-being and successful functioning.
Once we identify that unique recipe that is effective for us and helps us to improve mental health, it needs to become an integral, continuous, and central part of our lifestyle, not just a short-term intervention.
How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #2 – Choose a Lifestyle that Works for You
Before we bring home a new plant or consider adopting a pet, we do research to understand what environment this living thing requires. We ask ourselves: “Would I be able to provide an optimal environment for it to survive and thrive? How would I do that? Do I have everything I need?”
Yet, we don’t ask what is the right environment for us, for our own well-being. Are we living in the right environment? What changes can we make to make our environment more suitable for our own optimal functioning?
We just assume that what is right for everybody else must be right for us. We let society and culture dictate what we should need and want, what environmental conditions we should thrive in. We somehow think that we can be thrown into the harshest environment and make ourselves function successfully just by pure willpower and perseverance. We are conditioned to believe that hard work is the answer to all the questions.
Not being able to “succeed” under the circumstances imposed by our society is considered a sign of weakness. Society’s message is that if we had only tried harder we would be able to successfully navigate the situation.
We don’t expect a fish to just suck it up and live in a tree, just like we don’t expect a gibbon to teach itself how to swim, yet we often push ourselves to go against our unique needs as individuals and do what “society” tells us to do, even if it feels unnatural and wrong for us.
We, humans, are living things. We are organisms that are in constant contact with our environment. We don’t live in a vacuum. We affect our environment, and in return it affects us. Some environments are not great for us, but we might still be able to survive and function in some way. In other environments we might not. There is no one universally perfect environment that ideally fits all humans, despite what society wants us to believe.
Some people like to be social, others prefer solitude. Some people are energized by the hustle and business of the big city, others are drained of energy in crowded places and need to be immersed in nature to feel sane. Some prefer intellectual work, others love working with their hands. Some are comfortable leading, others would rather follow. Some need to be surrounded by bright colors to feel alive, others find the visual stimulation overwhelming.
There is an infinite number of conditions and choices that life throws at us. Unfortunately, most of us don’t even slow down enough to realize that most of the time we actually do have a choice.
Each one of us, humans, is in some ways different from others and requires different conditions to thrive, but we have been trained from an early age to ignore our unique needs and adjust to whatever society wants us to believe is right for everyone.
We don’t even question the expectation that our five-year olds have to sit at desks silently for many hours each day, that we have to stay married to a toxic partner for the sake of the children, that we have to act extroverted at work because networking and water-cooler small talk is good for our careers, that we have to work ourselves to exhaustion to make more money so that we can buy more.
It doesn’t even occur to us that if we have to “act” extroverted in our jobs, or if our jobs leave us depleted and exhausted, maybe we should be pursuing a different career.
Yes, our bodies can and do adjust to meet societal expectations, at least temporarily (until physical illness manifests), but our mental health suffers and fights against our reality by sending us messages disguised as anxiety, depression, anger, attention deficit, or addiction.
What if we saw these mental/emotional illnesses not as our enemies but as our friends who are desperately trying to communicate to us and get us to notice that we are not living our truth, that something in our environment is not working for us and needs to change?
Maybe in our journey to improve mental health, we don’t need to do any more than we are already doing. Maybe we need to do less. Maybe we need to do something completely different.
If we stopped for a moment and truly listened to our bodies, if we opened ourselves to hear what it is they are trying to communicate to us, we would likely get some accurate guidance on what our unique organism truly needs to survive and thrive. If we then started to take the tiniest steps in that direction, we would see our mental illness symptoms (and often physical illness symptoms as well) lessen and eventually disappear.
Unfortunately, in our culture it often takes a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness for a person to stop running in the hamster wheel and reevaluate their lifestyle choices. Often people say that they started really living only after their diagnosis. We don’t have to wait for such a dramatic wake-up call.
How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #3 – Take a Hands-On Engineering Approach
Our organisms are infinitely complex. Our environment is infinitely complex. Our mental health is a function of so many different variables that are constantly changing. Is it realistic to expect that there are simple and universal answers?
For a different perspective let’s look through the lens of engineering.
Before we even begin running any experiments and collecting any data, we define parameters, state our assumptions, establish the definitions and boundaries of the process we are optimizing, create hypothesis, identify control, response, and noise variables (those we can’t control). We determine how much data needs to collected in order to draw statistically-significant conclusions and exactly how the data needs to be collected to ensure the most reliable and reproducible results.
We also realize that no experiment is perfect and proactively identify the limitations and flaws of the study as opportunities for further exploration.
All this work is done before we even begin to analyze data and draw conclusions in order to gain an understanding and hopefully be able to control processes much simpler than our human experience.
It would be reasonable to expect infinitely more complexity when we are trying to understand and control the functions of the living organisms which are constantly changing in response to themselves and their environment, further complicated by the fact that we understand very little about human consciousness, experience, and behavior.
Unfortunately oversimplification of any process can be dangerous and misleading. Consider cooking or baking, for example, which we are all familiar with. Even these simple processes require just the right ingredients in just the right amounts, the right tools, the right temperature, the right length of time at specific conditions.
The process often requires performing many steps in a specific order and with certain skill. Adding baking soda might not make any difference in a recipe (it actually might make baked goods taste bitter). This might lead us to believe that baking soda is bad and even declare it as an ingredient never to be used in baking due to its bitter taste. If we did that, we would miss out on all the great properties of baking soda, because once it is mixed with vinegar in the right proportion something amazing happens as it creates a leavening agent that helps baked goods become light and fluffy.
When desperately seeking a path to improve mental health we often look for quick straight-forward definitive answers to extremely complex questions. We want to know yes or no, black or white, pass or fail. To meet this need there are plenty of sources (books, magazines, digital media) that offer instant off-the-shelf solutions to any problem.
All sorts of media tell us unequivocally what is good for us and what is bad (and what they claim today might not match what they say tomorrow). On our mission to improve mental health it would be much easier for us to just follow the latest fad in the magazine or on social media and not take the time to truly understand, explore the nuances, experiment, and draw conclusions for ourselves and our own unique situation, for our own living organism.
Is it nature or nurture that makes us who we are? Is psychiatry or psychotherapy more effective for better mental health? Does psychotherapy really help people? Are the effects of Qigong and Yoga on mental health scientifically-proven and evidence-based?
These are not straightforward questions. The answer for all these questions is “it depends.” We are byproducts of both our genes and our environment. The combination of both psychotherapy and psychiatry shows the best outcome in published studies. Psychotherapy, Qigong and Yoga help a lot of people, and there are a large number of styles and approaches. Which one is right for you?
Why not try an engineering approach? Trial and error, design of experiments, combinations of several variables? Control your inputs and measure your outputs?
Don’t take anybody’s word. What’s right for them might not be right for you. Try things. Experiment. Tune in and listen to your body.
If something is helping to improve mental health for you, notice it, and do more of that. If something is not working, also notice and do less or none at all. All that is required is for your to be present, collecting data on your own unique experience, and constantly optimizing your own internal process.
How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #4 – Embrace Self-Acceptance
A lot of our mental health struggles are an illusion, a sign that we fell into the trap of society telling us who we are, who we should be, and how we should feel.
We fall into the labels of good or bad, smart or stupid, ugly or beautiful, success or failure. We try these labels on for ourselves. Then we make ourselves suffer because of these self-imposed artificial labels. We feel not good enough. We feel less than someone else.
Even our desire to improve mental health implies judgement. We somehow decided that there is something wrong with how we are, that our mental health is bad. Then our organisms rebel against this rejection of self or just shut down.
Is there really one right way to be in the world?
In Eastern culture it is considered healthy to be modest, serious, and reserved, otherwise you would be labeled as vain and foolish. Here in the West, modesty is considered a weakness of character and not looking cheerful is considered a sign of a mental health problem to be corrected with a lifetime dose of expensive medication. Bragging and exaggerating our accomplishments is encouraged.
We are expected to look happy at all times, to always be “fine” even if that affect doesn’t match the circumstances. Notice, society doesn’t actually ask us to genuinely feel happy, just to appear happy, to pretend, to act, so that we don’t offend others with our grumpiness and make them uncomfortable. Ironically, looking happy frequently and for no apparent reason would be perceived as a sign of mental illness in the East.
In United States a lot of value is placed on being independent. Every person is for themselves, their own interests take priority over family or society. In this country, those rare circumstances where adult children are still living with their parents are seen as a failure to launch, enmeshment, and a dysfunction that needs mental health treatment. In contrast, in collectivist societies, not living with your parents, especially when one’s parents are elderly, is considered a betrayal of family ties and an expression of extreme selfishness.
Is it really a pathology if your personal unique experiences doesn’t match the majority culture of where you are living? Why should we let society dictate our values?
When did we start labeling feelings as good or bad? Is it realistic to expect someone to always be happy (but not too happy), to never be sad (at least not too sad and not for too long)? Aren’t feelings just manifestations of human experience and human expression? Isn’t our sensitivity and vulnerability exactly what makes us human?
If we only opened our eyes and looked around, if we were well-traveled and well-read, if we were not constantly bombarded with predigested spoon-fed dumbed-down information trying to convince us that there is something wrong with us and that we are lacking something (to get us to behave in a certain way), we would immediately notice how fake all of the labels are.
Maybe if we stopped comparing ourselves to artificially imposed ideals of what success and mental health looks like and accepted ourselves for who and what we are, we would no longer need to improve mental health.
We would be a little more compassionate with ourselves and others, we would be more open and curious.
We would be able to observe and learn from our own experiences instead of getting paralyzed by them and needing to numb ourselves with medication, addictive behaviors, or just running from ourselves and trying to be someone else.
How to Improve Mental Health: Strategy #5 – Strive for Continuous Improvement
Lastly, it is important to stress the fact that our journey to improve mental health is a continuous on-going process, not an action.
It is an experience of continuous learning and growing.
We don’t expect the path up the mountain to be perfectly straight and ridiculously easy. There will be setbacks, but with focus and perseverance, with an eye on the goal, we will keep moving towards it and when we get there, it will be so worth it! We will definitely grow and learn a lot about ourselves and the world along the way.
We don’t need to beat ourselves up for how we felt yesterday, how we experienced life, and what actions we took, because we always deal with the world the best way we know how at that point in time. When we know better, we do better.
What are your thoughts on these strategies? Do they feel right for you? What have you tried to improve mental health? What have you discovered to be effective for you?
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