A Few Words About Mental Health

In a book worth reading more than once, titled How to Live on 24 hours A Day, there is a line written by author, Arnold Bennett, that rings with overlooked importance. 

It goes: Allow for human nature, especially your own.

You might find yourself, in efforts to live, adopt the idea that the effort you put in to realize an outcome will deliver equal results relative to what you put in. But experience, as it unfolds through your engagement with living life, reveals steadily and surely that cases exist where you give the most of yourself only realize little for your efforts.[1]

One of the things that can arise from experiencing disparity between effort you put in versus outcome you obtain is the manifestation of what can be called ineffective emotions. You can think of ineffective emotions as emotions that stir you away from putting efforts towards realizing your desired outcomes. 

Three are particularly noteworthy: Anxiety, Depression and Loneliness. 

These emotions deserve conscious attention because the their effects on you can be so subtle and go unnoticed that, sometimes, becoming aware of them in your life only begins when things have gone horribly wrong.

The reaction you might have at the onset of these emotions is to dismiss their effects: The reason you now feel tired and sleepy all the time isn’t because you are depressed, it must be that you are stressed from work. The constant twitching in your chest can’t be from anxiety, it has to be the way you have been sleeping over the past few nights. The reason you are scrolling through Instagram for long stretches of time isn’t because you are lonely, it must be that you are simply bored and want to be entertained. 

Of course, it could be that you are truly stressed, or that you have been sleeping with bad posture, or that you are simply bored. But the danger comes not from experiencing these signals but from ignoring and/or rejecting them.

An alternative is to heed Arnold Bennett’s words: Allow for human nature, especially your own.

To get a sense of what it means to allow for your own human nature, it’s best to turn to bestselling author, Guy Winch, whose life’s work is rooted in understanding human nature.

In a popular TED talk, Guy Winch tells the story of a boy. The boy, five years old, was getting ready for bed. Guy tells:
[The boy] was standing on a stool, by the sink, brushing his teeth when he slipped and fell. He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut. Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, but he knew you have to cover a cut so it doesn’t become infected, and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day. 
One reason it’s easy to fall prey to devastating effects of ineffective emotions is because of a failure to give adequate attention to psychological wellbeing, the way you might give adequate attention to your physical well-being. To this point Guy observes:
We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? We’ve known it since we were five years old. But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? Well, nothing. 
When it comes to psychological wellbeing, a part of you that constitutes a decent portion of your nature, it might escape you that paying attention to and taking care of your wellbeing is something you should do. The result of this is the (sometimes unconscious) enactment of behavior that undermines rather than supports efforts to deliver desired outcomes.

The punchline is this: While the pursuit of meaningful outcomes is a remarkable thing, taking onboard the totality of your nature in your pursuits should not be overlooked, for when little things go unnoticed and unattended they compound to deliver big undesired effects. 

Knowing to handle ineffective emotions, like depression, anxiety and loneliness, might be knowledge absent from your skill-set, but getting a handle over their influence in your life can only begin at the knowledge that allowing the givings your nature permits is on the table. Be sure to give adequate attention to your mental health.



Notes

1. A case in point is the experience of a student I know. She was set to, and was told she would, receive an award for best in her class but was denied the award at the last minute because the parents of another girl felt their daughter was more deserving and saw handsomely to it that the award went to their daughter. One can argue that her reward would surely come, that sometimes rewards you get for efforts you put in are not immediate. 

But it rarely feels that way in the moment.



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3 comments:

  1. That one part 'allow for human nature, especially yours" will live rent-free with me for a long time.
    Thanks for the work that you do

    ReplyDelete
  2. This was a great read. Mental health is really not spoken of enough in our communities.

    ReplyDelete

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BasicPulse is written by Paul Uduk.


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