What is Mental Health? | Mental Health Awareness Month 2022

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this presentation on what is mental health? I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes, and this is the first video of Mental health awareness month 2022. What is mental health? Well, we need to know what mental health is to know what mental ill health is. Mental health is our ability to have motivation to engage in life. If you don't have the motivation to get up off the sofa, then it's going to be difficult to have a rich and meaningful life. If you don't have the motivation to do things that are in your best interest, like get adequate sleep and exercise and get good nutrition and, you know, a bunch of stuff that we're going to talk about throughout the month, then that may indicate that you have a mental health issue. When you've got motivation to engage in behaviors that help move you toward your rich and meaningful life as you define it, that is an indication of mental health. When you have the ability to control your behaviors, you're not reacting too impulsively. Likewise, you're not just sitting there and not reacting. That is a good indication of mental health. People who are angry or anxious, they may act or react from a place of threat. So a lot of times they may be reacting more impulsively, more irritably to things that happen. And that prevents them from having the opportunity to think and decide, how do I want to react or how do I want to act? So instead of acting intentionally, they're reacting automatically. Likewise, when people are depressed, they don't have enough motivation to get up, they don't have the energy to engage in certain behaviors, then they may not even react to a situation that's presented before them. People with good mental health are able to act in response to whatever happens in their environment in a way that will help them move closer to what's important in their rich and meaningful life. People with good mental health can experience a manageable range of emotions. Now, what do I mean by that? All emotions, whether you like it or not, all emotions and have a function. Anger and anxiety. Those are labels that we assign to the chemical cocktail that occurs when we experience a threat. Anger and anxiety are there to protect you. Now, in a lot of people who have mental ill health, their anger and anxiety warning system has gotten too sensitive, too hyperactive. So they have a lot of false alarms, and they experience more anger and anxiety to a much greater degree. So instead of reacting to something with a level three or a level four, they react with a level eight or a level nine, and that can indicate a problem So a manageable range of emotions is being able to experience a situation and react with an emotion, but with an emotion to the appropriate intensity, and one that feels manageable. It doesn't feel completely overwhelming. But you want to be able to experience. I know maybe you don't think you do, but since anger and anxiety are designed to help protect you, you want to be able to experience those at the right time, to the right degree. You want to be able to experience curiosity and happiness and love and joy and, you know, the list goes on. All of our emotions are important to giving us a rich life. When you look at somebody who doesn't experience a wide range of emotions, their perspective on life is often relatively flat. We want to have dimension in our life. People with good mental health are able to tolerate distress. Yeah, I know. Goes back to that whole anger and anxiety thing. None of us likes to feel anxious or angry or in pain or depressed or grieving, but it happens. And people with good mental health are able to acknowledge, mindfully acknowledge what they're feeling and sit with it without being afraid that it's going to completely overwhelm or consume them. They can tolerate that distress. Now, there are going to be times where you may encounter a crisis where it does feel overwhelming. It's a grief or some sort of trauma. That doesn't mean that you're not tolerating your distress. People who are tolerating distress in unusual circumstances may have to reach out for help. Tolerating distress doesn't necessarily mean doing it by yourself, but tolerating distress means acknowledging that, hey, I can feel this feeling. As unpleasant as it is, I can feel this feeling and I can get through it. Now, different than tolerating distress is coping with the stress. Tolerating distress is sitting with that feeling and being able to feel like you can exist and get through it. It's not necessarily changing the situation. In Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Linehan talks about how when we experience distress, we trigger that fight or flight reaction, that emotional dysregulation, and our brain is just flooded with stress chemicals. When we are trying to tread through those stress chemicals, we are not thinking clearly. It is not possible to think as clearly and objectively as we can. When our brain is bathed in cortisol and adrenaline, it just ain't possible. So distress tolerance helps us sit with the emotion, not make it worse by thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to be consumed. Helps us tolerate it until we can get into what Linehan calls our wise mind. Once we're in our Wise mind. Once we are not in trying to tread water in that swimming pool of stress emotions, then we can start exploring how can I cope with this situation. People with good mental health have a variety of coping strategies they can use because not every situation is going to respond to the same technique. Just like not every, you know, problem, not every nail requires a hammer. Okay, I'm gonna mess up that metaphor, but you see what I'm saying? We need to have a variety of tools to help us cope with this situation. And coping can mean a variety of things. It may mean changing the situation. If you don't like it, what can you do to change it? What can you do to improve the next moment? It may be changing your reaction to the situation. Maybe it's something you can't change. My daughter was a couple of years ago diagnosed with a chronic illness and I don't like that. As a mother, it makes me very unhappy to see her struggling sometimes when she has flare ups, but I can't change that situation. There are things I can do to be supportive of her, but I have to change my reaction to that situation. And instead of being angry that she's got a chronic condition, being curious about, okay, use that energy to being curious to finding out what can I do to best support her and help her when she is having a flare up and how can I help her between flare ups, prevent flare ups. What can I do to be supportive? So instead of changing the situation because I can't fix that, I can change my reaction and how I use my energy towards that situation. And there are other times we cope with situations by simply deciding, you know what, that ain't worth my energy. Feeding the trolls online, that ain't worth my energy when I to cope with that situation. I can choose to get embroiled in a back and forth with a troll, but that doesn't do any good for me and in fact it probably rewards that behavior instead. I can cope by saying, you know what, I only have so much energy and dealing with this situation is not worth it. I'm not going to spend my energy on this when I could spend it over here on things that'll help me move toward my rich and meaningful life. People with good mental health are able to think clearly. Many issues that involve mental ill health involve disruption of your circadian rhythms or your sleep, which cause your brain to be unable to get rid of all of the adenosine. I've talked before about our body factory and at night when we sleep is akin to in a factory when the cleaning crew goes through and empties all the trash and gets rid of all the debris and stuff from the day. So the next morning when the workers come in, they have a clear workspace and they're more efficient at doing their jobs. Adenosine is akin to all of that garbage and buildup. And at night your brain clears out the adenosine when you go into deep sleep. But you have to go into that phase of adequate deep sleep in order to clear out all of the adenosine. When the adenosine doesn't get cleared, you feel foggy. The next morning you feel kind of groggy headed. Now, not that I'm advocating for it, caffeine can help displace some of that adenosine, but it doesn't do everything. And it's certainly not a long term solution to thinking clearly. When we have difficulty thinking clearly, we have difficulty learning and remembering things. Think about the difference between when you are well rested and moderately happy versus when you are exhausted and distressed. How effective are you at remembering things in each of those situations? I know for me, when I am well rested and I'm feeling relatively happy, I'm not stressed about something and ruminating on it, then I'm able to remember things a whole lot easier. I can walk into the kitchen and actually remember what I went there for. Imagine that. So people with good mental health are able to focus their attention long enough to learn to commit things from short term to long term memory and to remember things their brain is not focused on, fight or flee. Their brain is actually able to devote attention and resources to learning and memory. How awesome is that? And I know I keep talking about the brain because mental health is not just thoughts or feelings. It's about how that organ, our brain, is actually functioning and how.