WHAT EXACTLY IS MENTAL HEALTH? // Understanding Your Mental Health and How to Define It

What's going on? Welcome back to my channel. Obviously this is a pretty mental health focused channel. If you find me on social media, I talk a lot about our emotional well being mindset and things like that. Because I'm a therapist, I'm a hypnotherapist and I'm a coach and that's what I do. I help people figure out where there's maybe holes in their mindset that's stopping them from achieving the things they want to achieve or, or how their anxiety might be holding them back from relationships or accomplishments. Just how we think impacts our life. So that's what I do with all these different modalities. So it's very mental health focused. But mental health and mental illness are two totally different things. Even though in society and social media they're sometimes used interchangeably, they're not the same thing. So I want to define mental health so that you can understand what it is and you know how to take care of your mental health. Your mental health includes your emotional, your psychological and your social well being. It makes up how you think and feel and behave and act and respond to life, cope with stressors and all of that. So your mental health isn't good, bad, right or wrong. There's kind of a race. Like if you go to the doctor with severe stomach pains and they say, how bad is your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst pain you felt in your life. Sometimes we look at mental health like that. We can rate it and it might fluctuate, depend on what's going on in our life. We've been diagnosed with something, if there's something intense happening or if we're lacking coping skills or there's other things impacting our mental health. So it's kind of a continuum. So it's not good, bad, right or wrong, or white, all or nothing. But there are ways to take care of your mental health once you understand what exactly it is. Mental health is a state of well being. That's just it. It's how you're doing, it's how you cope with the stresses of life and how productive you are in your life. Your mental health doesn't have an on, off, switch like the lights do. It is a continuum. Kind of like when you go into the doctor's office and you have pain and they have you rate it. There are times, depending on what's happening in life or how you're coping that your mental health could be more on the poor end or it could be more on the good END I don't like to identify mental health as good, bad, right or wrong because I don't want you to get in your head this idea that it is either good or it's either bad. We can have really good mental health and someone can be diagnosed with a mental illness, or you can have really poor mental health and not even be diagnosed with a mental illness. So again, the mental illness and the mental health part of this are different, but your mental health is more of a continuum, again based on what's happening in your life, your coping skills and maybe the things that have happened to you up until this point. I don't want to focus on again mental health being good or bad, but I want you to think about if you're more on the healthier end of having good for lack of better term mental health, or if it's something that you struggle with. So if we're looking at if things are going well, if we're doing pretty okay, people who have good, again, I don't like it, but we're going to use that term for general purposes. If you have a good mental health, people tend to feel pretty good about themselves. Yes, we struggle, things come up, things challenge us, life happens. But in general terms, do you believe in yourself? Do you feel pretty good about yourself as a human being? People who have good mental health also can feel a range of emotions, but they don't regularly get overwhelmed by them. Or again, things happen that challenge us, that bring about intense emotions, high highs, low lows, but in a general sense overall and your overall ability to cope with stressors. Can you feel emotions or do you get regularly overwhelmed by them? Can you manage them as they come up and then kind of come back closer to your baseline? Or when you're having a high high or a low low, does it really impact your ability to fun feel other things? We want to be able to feel a range of emotions but not regularly become overwhelmed by all of the feelings that life evokes. The other things that we tend to think about when we look at a good, healthy, positive mental health are people's abilities to have healthy, satisfying relationships, make their own decisions and have respect for themselves. We struggle. I've said that many times, I can't ever say it enough. Nobody's on or 100% all the time. We all have our challenges. But if you overall have pretty good respect for yourself, you know you can cope. That's a good sign that your mental health is pretty healthy. If you lack respect for yourself, you struggle with self esteem, you struggle with confidence. You don't try new things because you don't believe in yourself or you struggle in relationships because you don't have respect for for yourself and you don't know your worth and you're not able to set boundaries. That's a sign that your mental health in some aspects might be a little bit of a struggle for you. So it's again, it's not good, bad, right or wrong. We have mental health just like we have physical health. It's a continuum, it's a range and we need to take care of it just like we take care of our physical health. We all have our ups and downs, we all have stressors, things that challenge us, things that do overwhelm us from time to time and things that come up in life that we're forced to deal with. And good mental health isn't about being 100% confident 100% of the time or having zero problems. Just like being optimistic isn't about being 100% happy 100% of the time. It's about your overall view in coping and having the ability to have an outlook that you tend to think things are going to work out. And so mental health, healthy, good, positive mental health is not about not having problems or not about being 100% on all the time. It's about being able to cope and being resilient to the things that life throws at us sometimes. So mental health, though the occasional problem may pop up, is about coping effectively, being self aware and living well overall. Don't think that you have a poor mental health just because you struggle every once in a while or you might have anxiety or you might have a mental illness. In general, if you feel pretty good about yourself, if you have good relationships, you make your own decisions and the things that we talked about, you might be on the end of having a good, healthy mental health. But if there's things that you struggle with, it might be something that you want to look at. And how we care for our mental health is there are so many ways. We talk about therapy, sleep, how we eat, exercise, journaling, there's tons of techniques and ways that we can care for our mental health on a daily basis. When we talk about self care, that's taking care of your mental health. So look at if you're struggling, where you're struggling and what you need to do to care for yourself and if things are going well and you're feeling good or what you need to do to keep that up. Because nothing is permanent, everything is a practice we need to work on things. So if things are not going well, or if you have a more poor mental health, what do you need to work on? And if things are going well, if you have good mental health, what do you need to do to keep that up? Because again, it's all about self awareness, coping effectively and living well.