Our Mental Health: The Often-Overlooked Part of Our Health

Our mind and body are connected. We work on our physical health but often forget how essential our mental health is too.

Photo by Christal de Lange

 Full disclosure: I am in no way a therapist, trained in psychology, or qualified to give specific advice. The following post is a combination of my personal experience with mental health and research.

I want to paint you a picture – you crawled into bed after a long day. You’ve completed your nightly routine and are ready to close your eyes and drift away into a restful sleep. Just as you feel your body enter a complete state of relaxation, a thought creeps into your head. It’s no big deal; you simply acknowledge the thought is there and let it float away. The next thing you know, a full hour has passed, and your relaxed state is long gone.  You’re tense, and your mind fell down the rabbit hole of thoughts that happened a decade ago.

Welcome to the mind of an overthinker.

The story above was not made up. That painted picture is a personal experience that happens quite regularly. Overthinking sucks.

Now, you may be thinking that this isn’t a huge deal. Everyone has those moments where they get lost in their thoughts for hours before finally falling asleep. You’re right to believe that. At some point in your life, you likely experienced this feeling of overthinking.

The purpose of starting with a story about overthinking is to show how important it is for us to pay attention to what our mind is doing. Our mental health can get dismissed so easily, because if other people go through it, then it’s normal.

Maybe you watched someone’s Instagram story, telling how he or she felt low one day but was able to give themselves a pep talk to power through the day. The same person proceeds to encourage you to do the same thing if you’re ever feeling down.

I’m going to hit pause for a moment to express my thought on this – can we acknowledge how damaging this can be? I know there’s likely no ill-intent meant when someone does this. We’ve all probably done this at some point. What it can do, though, is dismiss a valid concern that should get addressed.

I look back on my journey with mental health and how many times I was told to just get up and do something when I could barely get myself out of bed. The mind-over-matter mentality and because one person can power through the day after a pep talk, that you should too. Want to know how I felt every time someone told me this, or I heard someone talk about it? I felt like a lazy piece of shit. Super helpful.

After three years and counting with antidepressants (my happy pills, as I like to call them), it is only now that I can give myself that pep talk, and it works. That’s still not always the case, though. Let’s remember that something like depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. A pep talk of  ‘just go and do something’ likely won’t be enough. That’s like telling someone who just recovered from knee surgery to go for a run when they’re sore, and it’ll feel better. There are steps you need to take before you can do that.

Can we see a pattern developing yet? Can we see how easy it is to dismiss our mental health because something is deemed normal since other people experience it now and then? ‘Nothing is actually wrong, and you just need to get up and get going with life.’

So, why is it so important to not overlook our mental health?

Let’s look at it from the perspective of working and lost productivity. In Canada alone, roughly 500,000 Canadians a week aren’t at work due to mental illness (and that’s from 2010, so there’s a good chance those numbers are even higher a decade later).

Depression and anxiety alone cost the Canadian economy “at least $32.3 billion a year and $17.3 billion a year, respectively,” according to The Conference Board of Canada.

That’s a lot of money lost due to a health concern that is so easily overlooked.

It’s more than money, though. Your overall quality of life is at stake if we don’t pay close enough attention to our mental health.

Consider these stats from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a world leader in research centres focusing on this topic:

·   1 in 5 Canadians will experience a mental illness or addiction in a given year.

·   1 in 2 Canadians either will have or have had a mental illness by the time they are 40 years old.

·   Women have a higher rate of mood and anxiety orders, but men have higher rates of addiction.

·   Mental illness can shorten your life expectancy by 10 to 20 years. Let me say that one more time – mental illness can cut 10 to 20 years off your life!

·   There’s an average of 11 suicides a day in Canada.

What do we do now?

The following four tips that have either helped me or other people pay attention to their mental health.

Don’t Dismiss How You Feel

Your feelings are a powerful tool to utilize. How you feel in a day will say a lot about what your body and mind are like. Continually feeling sad, low, unmotivated, and overwhelmed could be a sign of something more going on that needs addressing.

A good way to pay attention to how you feel is by keeping a journal to track your feelings. I know to some this may sound cheesy, but it’s a powerful way to physically see patterns in your mind.

Whether it be throughout the day or before going to bed, write a few sentences on how you felt. Were you happy all day until the end when something trigged you to feel sad? Did you wake up unmotivated and found yourself dragging all day? Frequently feeling like this is not something to dismiss.

Learn the Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety

Education is vital in acknowledgement, prevention, and treatment. Now, it’s important to distinguish between consistently experiencing the following symptoms, and them appearing every now and then. That’s why if you find you experience symptoms of anxiety and depression frequently, you should speak with your family doctor.

Common symptoms of depression and anxiety (but not always noticeable) include:

·   Losing interest in hobbies and activities that you used to love, that brought joy into your life.

·   Feeling like there’s nothing you can do to improve how you feel or improve the quality of your life.

·   Changes in habits (sleeping more or less, drinking more alcohol, isolating).

·   Constantly tired – there’s usual exhaustion at the end of the day, but then there’s tiredness from the moment you wake up and stops you from going through the day.

·   Troubles focusing and making decisions.

·   Mood swings – easily irritated, restless, going from happy to immediately sad and upset.

·   Constantly worrying that it interferes with your day.

·   Being alone because you don’t have the energy to be around people and interact (different than staying home to relax or take it easy now and then).

·   Physical symptoms like headaches and digestive problems that don’t go away.

Speak With Someone You Trust

Something that helps me tremendously is sitting down and opening up to my husband about my feelings throughout the day. To start, keeping to yourself and bottling up your feelings is counteractive. Have you ever heard the comparison to covering a boiling pot that will eventually spillover? Doing that with your emotions can have the same outcome – usually erupting and coming out worse than if we discussed them at the start.

Sharing your feelings with someone you trust can help take a lot of pressure off you. Imagine you’re carrying around a box, and every time you feel anxious, frustrated, sad, emotional, or irritated, someone puts a rock in the box. After a while, that box will fill to the top with rocks and gets so heavy that it becomes almost impossible to keep carrying.

Check-In With Yourself

You know best how you feel. When you're sad and anxious, your body shows physical symptoms like tiredness, shaking, and increased heart rate. When you’re happy, you often smile, laugh, and physically look satisfied.

Take time out of your day to do a quick check-in. This is when journaling comes in handy again, but this check-in is different than jotting down your feelings. Ask yourself a few questions that will challenge you to be honest and open:

·   How are you responding to your family and friends?

·   Did something happen today that you responded emotionally to rather than rationally?

·   What did you do today that made you smile?

·   Are there things you can do that will help ease up on any pressure you experience?

Mental health is just as (maybe even more in some circumstances) important as your physical health. Our mind and body are intertwined. When your mind is not functioning at its highest capacity, it will slow down your body.

Think of how much time you spend improving your physical health. We go to the gym, eat our vegetables, go for our regular doctor check-ups, and visit our physician when we’re sick or injured. Why aren’t we doing the same for our mental health?

The best thing you can do is to give your mind the help it craves to allow you to achieve what you want in life.