Like everyone else, I strive to be mentally healthy.
What does being mentally healthy mean?
To me, being mentally healthy means being able to deal with the natural ups and downs of life in a healthy way. For example, when anxiety hits, I want to be able to realize that anxiety is just a thought, an emotion, and I can overcome that by looking at why I’m anxious and either dealing with the anxiety or eradicating/reframing whatever it is that’s causing anxiety. Not letting it totally destroy me for days, leading to stagnation and indulging in negative behaviors like drinking.
Not the most simple definition, but that’s why I created this blog in the first place – to gain more clarity. I digress…
There are an infinite amount of things that can disturb my mental health, but after thinking about the root of those various detriments, I have realized they can be summarized in two categories:
- Trying to alter or change the past
- Attempting to predict or control the future
The past is the past
What has happened, happened. Can’t change that.
I was watching Michael Jordan’s documentary of Netflix last night (The Last Dance) and found myself slipping into madness.
What madness?
A madness of thinking I could actually think my way out of what has happened.
Thoughts like,
“I wish I would have sacrificed more.”
“I wish I cared about something that much.”
“I was good, but I wish I was great.”
I was slipping slowly into a depressed, really bad state…but for what reason?
The truth is I didn’t do any of those things I wish I did, but what does that matter now?
I was trying to change the past and, in the process, I was ruining my mental health in the present.
Those thoughts of wanting more from myself aren’t inherently bad, but wailing in self-pity about it was. It was unproductive to do that for an extended amount of time.
Self-reflection is needed, trust me. But it must be self-reflection with the end goal of learning from prior mistakes to not make those same mistakes. With an end goal of altering your actions. Anything else is a detriment to my mental health.
After thinking about the past for a while and once I dove deeper and dealt with those feelings I realized one thing – I still have time. I knew what I needed to do, what I needed to change, so what was the point of continuing to wallow in despair about it?
There was none.
So I got to work on the things I needed to change. And I’m better off from that.
There’s no point in trying to change the past, it happened. All we can do is alter our present actions to ensure we learn from the past.
Doing anything otherwise leads to a ton of unproductive pain and suffering.
Trying to control the future is a mental illness
As I have gained more knowledge of the world around me, I have built the false illusion that I know what the world is going to bring me in the future.
As I have received more “data” and “insights” into how the world around me works, there has also been a rise of my ego in predicting what my life will end up being.
Sure, we can predict what the workout tomorrow will look like or what we’ll eat for lunch with a high probability of being right, but that’s not the future I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the future of the community, the state, the nation that we’re in. Trying to predict the rise and fall of things like the stock market, the nation overall, the presidential election, things basically completely out of our control.
Trying to predict those things so far out of your control is a mental illness (me to myself here).
Just because you’re more “up to date” and “aware” of some things, doesn’t mean you understand major complex environments and issues as much as you think.
Thinking about those macro issues with the intent to predict the future outcome is madness.
It instills fear, anxiety, sadness, and honestly brings out the worst in me.
I’m not necessarily saying avoid those things or just give up because we can’t control them, but I am saying if you spend a majority of your time worried about things out of your control, there will come pain and suffering.
The only things gauranteed
As cheesy as it sounds, we only have now.
Being mentally strong, to me, is being able to decipher what we can and can’t control. It’s being able to be honest with yourself about the life you want and deconstructing what it’s going to take to get there.
In that deconstruction, focusing only on the things in your hands and spending a majority of your mental capacity on those things.
Then, create a plan. Once the plan is creating, a good life (to me) is waking up every day realizing that we live in such a complex world, those plans will probably go wrong.
When they eventually do, instead of getting frustrated, being mentally strong is being able to smile in the face of that uncertainty, take the time to learn from the mistakes you made, alter your plan, and then continue moving forward.
Rinse and repeat.
Potential 