Misconceptions That Damage Our Mental Health
Mental health stigma is on the decline, which is a huge relief for all of us. However, a lot of still hold a lot of false beliefs about mental health which can hold us back more than it should...
Let’s discuss the elephant in the room that many of us still shy away from talking about. All of us have struggled with our mental health at some point. You don’t have to have a diagnosed mental illness to admit to that. We have all had those days or weeks where you just feel so drained, anxious, irritated and/or depressed and you just couldn’t see how things were going to get any better.
In the short term, it’s easy to shake off these feelings and tell yourself they’re not worth taking up your attention. You tell yourself that the problems will disappear by themselves, or that you’ll worry about solving them another day. We opt to take the back seat when it comes to our mental health because things don’t seem so bad at the time. And in the short term, this approach seems to work just fine.
But over time these problems and emotions can start to accumulate. You start to feel more emotional and sensitive than usual but can’t pinpoint why. Unresolved issues start to come to the surface. Things slowly start to feel like they are no longer in your control.
Many people think developing a mental illness isn’t something that could happen to them. I used to be one of those people. I used to think I was too ‘mentally strong’ for something like that to happen to me. I used to tell myself things like: “Why take drastic measures now when things aren’t that bad? Yes, things aren’t easy, but I am okay.” I was for the moment at least. Until one day, I wasn’t okay and it was too late. I then realised, these things can happen to the very best of us.
You see, mental health is like a bucket of water that fills up over time. If you don’t pay enough attention to it, the bucket reaches its maximum capacity. This is the tipping point, at which we start to notice a change with our emotions, feelings and wellbeing. We start to feel slightly unbalanced within ourselves. But what happens when you keep adding water at that point? You guessed right — that bucket falls right over; water gushes pretty much everywhere and anywhere. You’re no longer in control of the water at that stage. You tell it to go one way, but it goes the other. You’re suddenly an outsider. You just watch the water surround you. You feel powerless, defeated and just straight-up embarrassed.
Mopping up the mess at that stage is no longer easy. It personally took me a long time to recover from my experience. Of course in hindsight, the warning signs seemed so obvious. I couldn’t understand why I was so reluctant to take action early on before it was too late.
There are so many things I wish I knew before I went through my mental health journey. Things that if I knew back then, could have helped me avoid getting into the messy situation I found myself in a couple of years ago. Below I share with you 3 different misconceptions the majority of people hold about mental health which are damaging ourselves and others around us. Overcoming these misconceptions alone would help avoid a lot of us from falling into a dark place and could even help save lives.
Whenever I recommend seeing a therapist to someone I know, it shocks me how reluctant people are to do so. Their response goes something like: “Oh but it’s not that bad” or “Some people have it worse than me, how can I complain?” Or even worse: “How dare you think that I’m someone who needs professional help?”
Can you imagine if we had the same approach with our physical health? Imagine holding off on going to the doctor purely because you know there are people in the world who are sicker than you. Imagine feeling unwell for quite some time and ignoring it, to then discover you have terminal cancer a year down the line.
I remember times where I felt like I needed the advice and help but avoided going ahead with it as it would validate that I was a failure of some sorts. That I wasn’t normal or in control of my own life. But here’s the thing I was missing at the time. We all have our problems. It’s about how you deal with them that determines your character. It’s accepting that we are all on a journey of growth that never ends. There’s always work to be done on ourselves. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blinded by their ego.
Someone who picks themselves up from a bad place, someone who is brave enough to face their largest demons, someone who is humble enough to admit to the things they need to work on — someone like that sounds like quite the opposite of a failure to me. They’re actually heroes.
Okay, so now the cat is out of the bag and we acknowledge that we all have issues and things we can work on, can we finally normalise therapy, please? I believe that every single person could benefit from therapy at least once in their lives — of course, if it is accessible to them. It’s time to clean out that undealt with baggage that you’ve been accumulating over the years. We all have it. And if you’re worried about the therapist judging you about your ‘stupid’ problems, believe me, they have heard it all before. Yes, all of it. Believe me, I’ve tried and tested it.
This is by far one of the most difficult topics I find to discuss because the relationship between your conscious mind, aka what you define as ‘you’, and your subconscious mind is still not fully understood. But what we do know is that they aren’t the same thing and as a result, are not always directly linked.
As humans, most of us are convinced that we are completely in control of our minds. We couldn’t be more wrong.
”In many cases when people explain why they’ve made a decision, they are simply rationalizing, attributing what sound like reasonable bases for what is in fact a murky, unknowable process.”
Dr. Robert Zajonc, social psychologist at the University of Michigan
Thinking we are in control of our minds can be extremely toxic for our mental health. We tend to take the blame for things that our mind does especially when it contradicts our conscious thought process. For example, blaming ourselves or feeling embarrassed when an unwanted emotion arises, such as feeling the need to cry. Or panicking when we start to feel anxious, which then worsens the feeling of anxiousness even more.
But here’s the thing people miss. You are not your mind. Your brain is an organ. Don’t take it personally. The truth is, most of the time, it’s just functioning like a machine — and it’s only real goal is survival. Did you know that approximately 95% of your brain processes happen automatically without direct input from the conscious brain, aka ‘you’?
Thousands of years ago, back when we were just cavemen, we had to make fast decisions to protect us from danger. Our machine-like brains developed as efficiently as possible to keep us safe. It didn’t have time to think about how automatic reactions/emotions would affect your morale — your emotions didn’t really care about you. If your brain had to consult you about what to do each time you were faced with a wild bear, you’d probably be dead. Your body’s initial reaction is ‘fight or flight’, pumping adrenaline through your body, telling you to either fight the bear or run for your life. This is subconscious and automatic.
These days, we (hopefully) aren’t spending our time running away from wild animals, but still, our lives are filled with stress. Dealing with that difficult client. Preparing for an important exam. Spending hours on social media. All these things can make us upset or stressed, automatically trigger responses in our brains — which at times feel unnecessary. But the cavemen part of our brain doesn’t know otherwise. It doesn’t know the difference between a deadly bear and a client screaming down the phone.
Someone who doesn’t know (or frequently forgets) that emotions can be automatic and out of your control, ends up doing one of two self-sabotaging things.
i) You either shove those shameful emotions under the rug, causing them to accumulate and ignore the warning signs that are telling you that your mental health is deteriorating — which eventually will make you ill; or
ii) you blame yourself for your emotions, feeding into them even more, which then results in you spiralling into a deeper state of depression or anxiety.
So what should you do?
You need to let go of the idea that you are in control and fully responsible for your mind. Detach your identity from your subconscious mind. Treat it like any other organ. Stop blaming yourself for the mind’s automatic reactions and emotional responses. You’re not sad, you are just feeling the sensation of sadness. Listen to what your mind is telling you and ask yourself how your lifestyle and thought patterns are affecting your mind’s wellbeing. If you notice it needs rest, you give it rest, no questions asked. Work on developing your interactions with your subconscious mind. Don’t blame yourself for feeling a certain way. Instead, observe and accept the emotion for what it is at that moment. Don’t feed into its energy and let it pass. And just like that, you’ve let go.
When I started to really evaluate why I didn’t proactively look after my mental health, I realised that a big part of it was that I cared more about people perceptions of me than my own wellbeing.
Turns out, it’s not just me who is programmed this way, it’s actually part of our nature. As humans, we’re creatures who are naturally social species and rely on the cooperation of others to survive and thrive.
In the modern world, this includes keeping toxic friends in your life because you’re worried about what they’d think if you walked away. It includes taking on too much at work because you’re scared to tell your boss that you’re not coping. It includes going to every social event you’re invited to, even when you are exhausted because you’re scared of being left out.
But this lifestyle becomes super self-destructive at some point. I personally realised along the way that most of the people you invested your time and energy into won’t be there for you when you’re not in a mentally good place. Sure, people can help but only you can really pick up the pieces at that point. You realise that only your wellbeing matters because, without it, you’re nothing. Everything else became secondary or irrelevant.
Prioritising yourself and your mental health isn’t always an easy thing to explain to others. Sometimes it requires you to do things some people don’t understand. Your friends might judge you for something like opting out of a gathering when you tell them you would prefer to stay home to rest. They’ll say things like: “You don’t seem that tired, you’ll be fine.”
This is where the issue lies. Most people don’t understand what it means to be proactive about your mental health. It means taking action irrespective of any trigger or visible issue. You may not look tired now, but allowing yourself to rest now will mean you’re not tired tomorrow. It’s understanding that once the warning signs appear, you’ve already acted too late.
Slowing down and prioritising yourself should no longer be a reactive response to feeling too overwhelmed. Your energy is precious, so be picky where you put it. Minimise the time you spend in uncomfortable situations, surround yourself with positive people and put yourself in energising situations as much as possible. Once you start to treat your mind with care and love and start to see the positive impact it has on your wellbeing, you’ll never feel the need to explain yourself to anyone ever again.
As a society, our current approach to mental health is nowhere near perfect. Although we have made some major strides, the world’s approach to mental health remains very reactive. We only take people seriously when the damage is already done.
Mental health is also a topic that still isn’t fully understood by professionals or within our societies. And what happens when we don’t understand something well? We shy away from it. People don’t like to talk or think about things they don’t understand.
But we don’t need to understand everything in order to take action. We might not know how big or small our buckets are in real life but if we are proactive enough about our mental health, we can make sure the water never reaches anywhere near the top of our buckets. And if done well enough, you’ll never need to find out how big your bucket really is or where your mental limits lie.
Only when we embrace this mentality shift within our societies, we will no longer have to keep firefighting problems that have already become too big to manage. We will no longer have to spend a profusion of time, energy and money on problems that could have been avoided earlier on. We’ll proactively put the safety measures in place to start with and avoid the fire altogether.
