Short transcript of a conversation (Simon Sinek and another speaker) arguing that 'mental fitness' is a better framing than 'mental health'; emotions (including negative ones) are normal, the goal is not constant happiness, and an important skill is asking for help (practice: "no crying alone").
We talk about mental health all the time.
And the problem with the term mental health is it's, we treat it like it's the goal, that if you're anything other than perfect, there's something wrong with you.
Right?
Which of course is nonsense, right? That if, if you're anything other than happy all the time, then, then you're.
Then you're struggling with your mental health.
When we know, when we, when we're, when we do physical fitness, sometimes your.
Muscles hurt, sometimes you have a good workout, sometimes you have a bad workout, sometimes you're strong, sometimes you're weak, sometimes you've got a ton of sleep and you can't work out, sometimes you got no sleep and you're like on fire. You have the best run of your life.
And we don't call, there's no goal, it's fitness, like it's something you're constantly working. And I think I stopped calling it mental health and I started calling it mental fitness. And so having emotions, having a down day, being depressed, you know, feeling lonely, like all of these things are fine and they're totally healthy. If you get stuck in any one of them, the, that's a problem. But by the way, if you get stuck in happiness, that's a problem too, you know, and, and so I think we have to work on our mental fitness, which is learning how to have feelings, learning how to just be in our feelings.
Because I think we've set up an unrealistic expectation for ourselves that if you have a negative feeling, there's something wrong with you. And if you have a negative feeling.
Turns out you're human.
And I think the biggest skill that's.
Lacking in all of that is learning how to ask for help. That when we do have negative feelings, where the first thing we should be do is reaching out to a friend, we don't. And I have a rule with my friends and all my friends know this, which is no crying alone.
And I've had some people who are well known entrepreneurs who, you know, many of your class will know, and we've had experiences where the phone rings and they say, can I talk to you? Go, of course. What's on? What's going on? And they start crying, because that's the rule, no crying alone. And we lean on each other very, very heavily because none of us is stupid enough to believe we can do this thing called life or entrepreneurship or career by ourselves. Just not that good, not that strong.
And so talking, talking about anxiety, that episode really helped frame some of the stuff that I work through.
