How To Fix Your Mental Health (Without "Fixing" Your Mental Health)
Changing a narrative.
What if I told you that most of the way you think about your mental health is wrong?
It’s not your fault.
It’s what we’ve been taught: Your mental health is a subjective measure of how you feel in any particular moment.
What if I offered you an alternative idea?
Here’s two facts for you:
You will never be mentally healthy if your girlfriend is upset.
A father is never any happier than his most miserable child.
Based on those two statements we can posit that mental health isn’t really mental at all, it’s based on circumstances that exist around us. Additionally, it’s not subjective, it’s based on very tangible reasons.
Mental health might be more closely related to the idea that all of the structures in your life that create your identity are working in harmony.
When those structures offer a message that is incongruent with the one you tell yourself, that is when the stress, worry and anxiety set in.
A couple more examples to drive this idea home:
You tell yourself that you love your friends and family but you haven’t seen them in months.
You’re a healthy person that hasn’t gone to the gym in a year.
It’s when you think about these concepts — consciously or unconsciously — that your mental health begins to deteriorate.
Seems easy…
You can change the context of your mind by improving your circumstances and bringing those structures into balance. Making sure your girlfriend isn’t miserable while you have a 6-pack. Or, that your career is booming but your wife never sees you.
Nothing illustrates this better than the idea that exercise is more effective in treating light to moderate depression than medication. Change your circumstances (improve your health), change your mental health.
Exercise doesn’t make drug companies money unfortunately…
You know these things intuitively but silo them as different parts of your mind. Mental health is somehow different from your identity or your place within a hierarchy of responsibilities to yourself and those around you.
These responsibilities also happens to be how we arrive at the purpose and meaning in our lives. A concept we’ve covered a couple times before.
It is no surprise to me that there is an exploding mental health crisis when everyone believes their mental health is reliant on their hedonic needs and not their responsibility to improve the structures around them.
Your mental health is the result of your identity reflected back at you by your the structures in your life (health, spouse, family, friends, community)…
Your life doesn’t get better by fixing your mental health.
Your mental health gets better by fixing your life.
If you’ve got 24 minutes (or 12 if you watch at 2x speed like me), I highly suggest watching the inspiration for today’s newsletter.