Below you will find the transcript for our Youtube video podcast about What Mental Health is and Why it Matters. If you would prefer to read our blog post about the exact same topic, click Here.
Transcript
What is Mental Heath and Why does it matter?
Hello Friends! If you are returning to my channel, welcome back! It’s so good to have you! If this is your very first time joining me today, welcome to the start of your mental health journey here at true reality life where we talk about, learn, and grow from the realities of the life around us. So glad to have you joining our mental health family!
If you haven’t watched our previous video introducing true reality life and myself, feel free to go watch that now and come back! I’ll be right here waiting!
Today we are going to talk about what is Mental Health and why it even matters to you.
Let’s start off with you. When you think about mental health, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? If your think about anxiety, depression, or anything related to the struggles of mental health, you are only thinking about ONE aspect of mental health and that is mental ILLNESS. Mental illnesses are the result of neglect to your mental health, just as physical ailments are usually a result of neglecting or ignoring some aspect of your physical health in your day to day life.
So if mental health isn’t the mental illnesses we often think of… What exactly is mental health?
Mental health is how your mind feels and works in your everyday life. It’s about how you handle stress, relate to other people, make decisions, and deal with life in general.
If your mental health is in good conditions, you feel good most of the time and can respond to stressful life situations fairly well. However, if your mental health is in poor conditions, you will easily feel overwhelmed, anxious, sad, tired, or just feel “off” about the simplest things in life.
If you can’t tell, mental health does involve quite alot of hormonal regulation. If your mental health is lacking, your emotional stability follows suit. That is because your brain is responsible for either releasing “happy” hormones like dopamine or serotonin, stress hormones like cortisol or epinephrine, or quite simply the lack of these hormones, resulting in a more “sad” feeling in your body.
Your mental health is closely tied to your physical health because of this. That is why mental health is often neglected, because if people give enough attention to their physical health, then it can ultimately improve your mental health. Diet, exercise, and other physical practices to improve your physical health simultaneously improve mental health as they release “happy hormones” and make you feel good about yourself.
This being said, giving attention to your physical health often gives us just enough improvement to our mental health that we overlook the need to work on our mental health separately too. You can be physically fit, working out everyday. Eating healthy meals and supplements to be considered “physically healthy.” Yet what happens when your spouse says the wrong thing at the wrong time and you snap. You yell or you walk away or simply don’t know how to regulate your emotions.
Or you lose your job, or lose a close family member, or simply sit and beat yourself up because you “didn’t do enough today.” Or maybe you can’t seem to forgive your mom for that one thing she did or didn’t do years and years ago.
Despite what your physical health is, your mental health needs attention too. They work together. Improving one will improve the other, and that goes the opposite way too. Neglecting one will become destructive to the other at some point.
So we’ve talked about WHAT mental health is, now let’s dive in to why the heck it even matters.
We’ve started the discussion a bit, but let’s be more specific.
Mental health matters because it affects how you think, feel, and act EVERY SINGLE DAY.
It affects how you handle stress. Whether you allow stress to overwhelm and burn you out or you take a more calm approach to stressful situations where you can come up with solutions to the problems around you.
Mental health influences your everyday relationships. It determines your mood, patience (or like I like to refer to as ‘how long your fuse is before you blow up’), as well as your communication style. The more you work on your mental health, the more present you will be with those around you and be able to connect with the people you care about.
Neglecting your mental health can lead to mental illnesses that tie directly to your physical health such as anxiety, depression and increased stress levels just by simply existing. All of these hormonal responses take a direct toll on your body, leading to things like headaches, poor sleep, and even heart problems in the long term.
Mental health and wellness shapes the way you see and connect with the world around you. Good mental health will allow you to feel more confident, hopeful, and overall enjoy life even when it’s not perfect, or more commonly, when it feels impossible…
Ultimately, when you take care of your mind, most things in life become easier to handle. Who wouldn’t want life to become easier even if the situation around you stayed the same.
You will be suprised at how much better your life seems to get simply by giving your mental health some love that it’s been craving. You will start to see the positives around you and learn to love life despite things you may see as absolute dog shit situations right now.
Now that we have a better picture of what exactly mental health is and why the heck it matters, let’s start on our journey of actually putting our mental health to work.
It’s time to put our words to action and learn about ways to improve our mental health. Stay tuned for next week’s podcast all about baby steps to improving your mental health. Make sure to like and subscribe so you can be notified when our next episode is released.
Thank you so much for joining me here today on True Reality Life. I look forward to our journey ahead. See you next time! Love you! Bye 🙂