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May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and this month’s first Mental Health Roadmap Series post is about discovering mental health.
In this post, we’ll touch on:
We’ve decided to break our monthly posts down into weekly posts, so next week, we’ll cover:
Our last edition for this month will cover:
In June, we'll move on to Part 2 of the Mental Health Roadmap Series, where we’ll be talking about Exploring Therapy & Self-Help.
This fact sheet by the World Health Organization does an excellent job of giving a full, easily digestible description of what mental health is.
In summary, mental health is part and parcel of one’s health and well-being. Good mental health is not just the absence of mental health disorders or conditions, but the ability to handle stressors and make decisions such that one can live a meaningful life. It’s a continuum on which one sits and is constantly shifting. Our experiences and how we handle them can lead us to states of poorer or better mental health, and various biological and environmental factors can predispose us to better or worse mental health, just as they can affect our physical health.
In fact, mental health and physical health are not separate states of health; they affect each other. For example, if you broke it in a cycling accident, you might become afraid of returning to that activity and have anxiety about bikes. You might also become depressed because you can’t play football on Saturdays while your arm is healing, taking you away from an activity that improved your well-being due to the exercise, time outdoors, and positive social interactions that came with it.
However, not everyone responds the same way to the same experiences. This can lead to some people developing mental health conditions where others might not—and that’s ok. It doesn’t make the person affected weak, or the person who wasn’t affected particularly strong, and it doesn’t mean one person’s experience or trauma is worse than another’s. It just means they probably both have different life experiences and are affected by different factors, such that one person was more likely to respond one way to the experience than the other.
Furthermore, when recovering from any mental trauma, it’s just as reasonable to have accommodations for any limits to your capacity as it is when recovering from physical trauma.
Having more or less experience in life won’t necessarily lead someone to be better “prepared” for what life throws at them. Again, mental health is a continuum. Sometimes you’re at one point, and sometimes you’re at another. You might respond differently to the same event one day than you would have had you experienced it another time.
That said, there are preventative measures you can take to try and build resilience to buffer against what life throws at you, such as reducing stress, increasing your resilience, and improving your self-esteem. We’ll get into some of those in future posts, but today we’ll specifically discuss self-regulation and awareness of one’s emotions.
There are a few ideas in emotions research that scientists generally agree about, such as the existence of universal signals of emotions (facial or vocal) and evidence for five basic emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and happiness. However, scientists do not and historically have not agreed on a central theory of emotion, leading to the existence of six major theories of emotion. A basic understanding and awareness of these theories can be helpful in the process of self-regulation and becoming aware of one’s emotions.
The six major theories of emotion:
These theories of emotions can help one to conceptualize how emotions work and see emotions as physical reactions, which can help one to create some distance from seeing emotions as one’s “fault” or as a defect. Emotions are a natural response to one’s circumstances and how they are relating to the world around them.
Emotions can indicate to us what our needs are and flag what needs are not being met. We can use awareness of the information our emotions provide to better understand what we can do to help ourselves feel better. It’s like the reaction you have when you burn your hand: you immediately pull back and realize you shouldn’t touch something hot because it hurts. Emotional pain is much the same: it tells you there is a need to attend to something that is hurting you.
Becoming aware of your emotions and learning to manage the behavior and feelings that you experience in response to your circumstances and experiences is a powerful skill known as self-regulation. Once you’re able to regulate how you respond to what happens in your life (i.e., stop and think and make a plan), you might find that you’re better able to handle stress and frustration, your anxiety and well-being improve, and that it’s easier to build social connections and achieve your goals. You can read more about self-regulation and effective strategies in this article from VeryWell Mind, and if you want to go more in-depth, check out the Handbook of Self-Regulation, which was compiled by the world’s leading researchers on self-regulation.
So how does one self-regulate? Recognizing that you can control your response to a situation is the first step, but then stopping to think and make a plan is not as simple as it seems, especially when your emotions are heightened and any insecurities are felt. Some strategies you could adopt to help make self-regulation come more naturally to you are (in no particular order):
You can combine any of these strategies or just use one or two, whatever works for you. Some suggestions are more geared toward helping you slow down and stay present (e.g., practicing yoga), while others are more so actual strategies for self-regulating (e.g., cognitive reappraisal). Whatever you do, by making some of these practices and strategies a regular practice or daily habit, you’ll be more likely to make use of them and feel their full benefit when you most need to self-regulate.
One key aspect of learning to self-regulate is finding people you can learn from. A lot of the work you’ll do learning to become aware of your emotions and then regulate them is work that is only really effective when you interact with other people. You can read as much as you want about emotions and self-regulation, but until you put the skills you want to learn to practice, there’s no way they’re going to develop. It’s therefore important to expose yourself to experiences where you can practice self-regulation.
It can be equally as important to learn more about self-regulation from people who are grounded and know how to self-regulate. Look for the people in your life who seem to handle their emotions well and try to spend more time with them. Think about how they respond in stressful situations or situations that could lead to heightened emotions and take note of the strategies they use and that you think could be applicable to your own life situations.
People have historically been less likely to speak up about their mental health. It’s been ok to talk about a physical injury, but not about a traumatic event that’s left you feeling anxious and depressed. Yet it’s just as important to feel able to seek help for and talk openly about those feelings of anxiety and depression as it is to talk about and seek help for corporal ailments.
If talking about challenging emotions has not been modeled for you or encouraged in your family or peer groups, then this might feel awkward, uncomfortable, or even taboo. In extreme cases, you may have even been punished for trying to share your feelings. You may have been led to believe that we individually must work through these feelings alone and that anyone who can’t do so is weak.
The exact opposite is true! We are social creatures, and as such, we were designed to connect with one another. Sharing emotions is one of the primary ways we do this. Know that there are spaces out there where it is safe and even encouraged for you to open up about how you feel. If the people around you are not able to be supportive, then it might help to reach out to a therapist, mentor, coach, teacher, support group, peer, colleague, or really anyone with whom you feel comfortable. And if it doesn't work out the first time, it's ok to try again with someone else, as it can take some trial and error to find situations and relationships in which you truly feel comfortable being open and vulnerable.
Next week, we’ll touch more on relationships, with others and with yourself, and discuss the difference between self-care and processing. Stay tuned!
If you have any questions or are looking for ideas for resources related to what's been covered in this post, check out the Mental Health Navigator website or email us at [email protected].
