00:00 

Hey there, this is Tanya Hale with Intentional Living and this is episode number 64, "Mental Health." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Hey there, happy to be with you today. I am glad that you're joining me and I appreciate it and I hope that what I've got ready for you today is going to be beneficial. I believe it will be. You know, when I was doing the emotional and mental abusive behaviors content, that got me moving on a different area of learning a little bit more about that and all these things. I started thinking about mental health and what it means to be mentally healthy. So I've done some reading there and I've looked around and I found some things that I think are fascinating. 

00:54 

So if I were to ask you, what would be your definition of mental health? I think so many of us naturally start going to defining what mental health is not. We talk a lot about mental illness in our society and I think all of us could start listing mental health issues we or someone we know or love has struggled with. For example, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dementia, ADHD or ADD, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, which would be PTSD. I found it interesting that one of the first things that Wikipedia said about mental health is that it is the absence of mental illness. Really? So would that mean that if I don't have any of the above or related mental illnesses that I'm actually mentally healthy? That would be like saying because I don't have any diagnosed physical health issues that I'm healthy. I just don't think that's the case. I know a lot of people who are not diagnosed with something physically, but really aren't that healthy. They don't exercise and they eat tons of processed foods, they overeat, they might even smoke or drink in excess or even use drugs, and mental health is the same. Just because there is an absence of mental illness, I don't think it really means that we are mentally healthy. 

02:24 

Also on Wikipedia, it's stated that mental health is the state of someone who is, "functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment." Okay, I don't know about you, but satisfactory level? That sounds horrible to me. But how many of us live our lives in a physically satisfactory level? We don't have the strength or the energy to do anything beyond our basic day-to-day living because we are just satisfactorily healthy. We've just fit in this mediocre place and we're okay with it. 

03:07 

So another site mentioned that mental health "refers to our cognitive behavioral and emotional well-being. It's all about how we think, feel, and behave. Mental health can affect daily life relationships and even physical health. Mental health also includes a person's ability to enjoy life, to attain a balance between life activities and efforts to achieve psychological resilience." Okay, so this is getting us somewhere. Now we're talking about our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. Okay, that should start feeling from sounding familiar to you if you have been listening to me for a while. It's also talking about our emotional well-being, our ability to enjoy life and be psychologically resilient. I love this word "resilient," right? I think that has so much to do with our mental health, and this is where we need to start having some discussions. 

04:08 

Really, what in life can be more important than our mental health? It impacts our ability to handle tough situations, to have healthy thoughts and feelings and behaviors, to be resilient, to be able to come back from these difficult situations in an even better place than we were before. How important is that? And what can be more important than being able to stay centered when the stresses of life bear down on us? And if it really affects our daily life, our relationships and our physical health, why is so much of the world not talking about mental health? Our mental health is one of the most important aspects of our lives and yet one area where most of us receive very little, if any, coaching or training. 

05:01 

For me I feel that my parents were both fairly mentally healthy so it was modeled for me but there were never any discussions at all about anything pertaining to like mental health stuff. We never talked about our feelings or how to manage difficult social situations. We were all just kind of flowing around, trying to figure it out. I remember one time having a tough situation with my friend and at that time it was becoming popular, I guess, for moms to step in and help their kids resolve these issues. I remember my mom just say "no, go figure it out. I'm not gonna call her mom." So she was giving me opportunities to learn it, but I didn't receive any other training other than her just putting it back on me and saying "go figure it out." And I think that's just how it happened. So while we were all flailing around trying to figure it out on our own, there's still way too many of us in our 40s our 50s our 60s even our 70s still floundering in this area. 

06:01 

Alright, so what does it mean to have a sense of well-being? To feel that everything is going well? What about when it's not going well? Does that mean we can't have a sense of well-being? Do we still just talk ourselves into believing that everything is going well? Because is a false sense of things going well, mental health? Is ignoring our issues to talk ourselves into believing everything is going well, a good sense of well-being? I really don't believe that. Mental health does not mean that we are happy all of the time, because we're not. But just because we're not happy all of the time doesn't mean we have a mental illness. It means we are humans having a human experience, because life is about a balance between difficult and easy emotions. It's about negative and positive emotions both playing an important part in our lives. I think that being okay with not being happy all of the time is actually a better indication of mental health than if we think that we are happy all of the time. 

07:10 

Alright, but when was the last time you went to a doctor and they asked you about your mental health? Unless it was a psychologist or a psychiatrist or you went there because you were seeking help for a mental illness problem, you probably weren't asked about it. I don't think I've ever been asked, and I am pretty good about getting into the doctor fairly regularly. So how do people learn to have mental health? I know for me it was mostly example for my parents and other people that I trusted, but even then there were some huge gaps as I went into adulthood. Mostly I've learned about my mental health through trial and error, through a feeling that something wasn't working to my advantage, through seeking for answers, and many of those answers came in huge part through self-help books for me. 

07:59 

But most of the people I know are not really a self-help book kind of people. Although there is a huge market for it, most people aren't immersing themselves in this kind of personal development. And on top of that, these books can be really hit and miss with what we may need. But I really do feel that many books have moved me from a realm of mediocre mental health into a place of much better mental health, especially over the last few years. Last few years specifically, Brene Brown's work and Byron Katie's work have leveled me up to a place that I didn't really even know existed before I encountered their work. 

08:38 

And this has led me to leveling up even more through my training with the Life Coach School and Brooke Castillo's work there. But isn't it fascinating that even though our mental health impacts every other arena in our lives, that there is so little training and guidance as we are children, and even less when we're adults. We're taught in elementary school the basic physical health elements while we're growing up. I remember learning about the four food groups when I was in elementary school, and then it changed into the food pyramid, and now they use the food plate, right? So that's constantly changing. Society is constantly working on helping us understand how to be more healthy physically, and yet so much of our mental health impacts our physical health. 

09:23 

And so much of what we talk about now in our society is how to work with depression or anxiety after we already have it. We don't talk about the things we can do to prevent them, because again, mental health is not just the absence of mental illness or working through it once it comes on the scene. Mental health has to be our ability to manage our thoughts to create healthy feelings, which create beneficial actions. Okay, is this sounding familiar? It is so the thought model. Learning to manage our thoughts is such a vital part of mental health, but when and where were you ever taught to manage your thoughts? The first time that I ever encountered this, I was taught about positive thinking in my eighth grade health class, but I don't remember being taught about emotions or how to manage those or even why that would have been important. But because my eighth grade health class... I was one of those people who grew up thinking that I was supposed to just be happy all of the time, I thought that's what positive mental thinking was. And I came away from that unit believing that positive thoughts were the fix all. But I was never really taught how to deal with the tough emotions that emerged about 50% of the time. And I think most of us weren't. 

10:51 

That being said, I have a friend who posted something on Facebook a few weeks ago and I asked her if I could share it because I thought this was so spectacular. She posted a picture of her five-year-old daughter with this explanation. She says, "this little girl is usually so good at making friends. She loves to have other kids to play with. While we have been living in Quebec she hasn't hesitated to go right up to anyone and everyone. When it's clear they can't understand her she has learned to make motions with her hands while she speaks to encourage them to do what she asked them to do. I love that the kids here try to say whatever English words they know in response to my daughter's jabbering even though it's usually the same word or phrase over and over again. Just lately though she has become more aware and self-conscious when the kids ignore her or run away because they can't understand. 

11:43 

"This past weekend when we went to the park, she wanted to ask some kids to kick her soccer ball around with her. For the first time ever she said to me 'what if they don't like me?' My heart dropped out and memories of the same realization in myself at that age surfaced. I wanted to tell her that of course they would like her but what I said was what I wish I had known years ago: 'Oh my darling girl, not everyone is going to like you in this life and that's okay. You will find the right people for you, the ones who will make your life better, the ones who will love you no matter what. So when someone says they don't like you, keep your head up, believe in yourself and don't be afraid to keep talking to people, because the next person you meet after that could end up being your best friend for life.'" 

12:30 

Okay, so even though I feel my parents were fairly mentally healthy, what I would have heard growing up in the 70s was "stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about," right? Who else, right? Raise your hand. That was such a statement back in the 70s, right? I love that this friend didn't negate her daughter's tough feelings or tell her to just forget about it and go do something else. I appreciate so much that she helped her daughter realize that it's okay if not everyone likes you. It's okay to be hurt, but it's not okay to quit. I just thought this was such a great response for a five-year-old who is encountering some negative feelings in her life. This is great teaching for good emotional health and mental health, right? Good mental health is knowing how to manage the emotional pain, the challenges, and struggles we all encounter. It's being able to overcome adversity. It's knowing how to say "no" and not be a victim to bullying. It's knowing what things we need to do for ourselves to keep us centered in life even if those things require discipline and aren't much fun at all. 

13:45 

A lot of people approach mental health by engaging in self-indulgent activities, things like spa days or manis or pedis, massages, shopping sprees, going out for an ice cream or making cookies or taking a really long nap. Now, I definitely believe that all of these things have their place, but to be honest, they're more like band-aids on the difficulties rather than the kind of self-care that really creates mental health. If the thought model is real, and I 100% believe it is, then our thoughts really create our feelings. Our feelings really impact and create our actions and our actions create the ultimate results we have in our lives. This means that we create everything mentally before we actually create it in life. 

14:35 

And if our thoughts are that powerful, it is so important that we learn to manage them around the difficult situations and circumstances that we encounter. Now, again, I'm not saying that we need to be happy all the time. Sometimes we're incredibly sad and that's entirely the right emotion at the right time. When either of my parents died, feeling sad was definitely a good thing. It's what I wanted to feel. Sometimes it's important to feel anger because some situations are that horrible. But we also need to learn to manage our thoughts so that we don't get thrown into fits of despair or drama over situations that really don't warrant that type of excess emotion. 

15:19 

Someone telling us that they don't like us is just a circumstance. If we get totally depressed and don't want to leave the house for three days because of that, we are not engaging in mentally healthy thoughts. If we create a huge drama fest over it and engage 30 people in a social media war we are not engaging in mentally healthy thoughts. I believe that a huge part  of mental health is moving into the best person we can be. Really learning to manage our thoughts and create healthy relationships. Have stable daily living and good physical health. Managing our thoughts around challenging situations and not letting what others do impact us in ways that don't work to our best interest. 

16:10 

I believe good mental health means that when tough situations arise, we can feel negative and difficult emotions and be okay with it. We don't try to run from them or fight them. We embrace that they are part of our human experience and we get to a place where we consciously choose to feel them and work through them. Mental health is really where it's at. So in the next 10 podcasts we're going to talk about an element each time of mental health. So this list of 10 comes from Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School and I love each of these 10 elements of mental health. So I'll give you a quick preview. This is what they are for the next 10 podcasts. 

16:52 

One, you have future plans. You believe in your potential. We're working towards something greater and bigger, moving into a person that we know that we can be. Two, you have emotional balance. This means that we understand the importance of the 50-50, like half of our emotions are positive and half are negative, and we learn to manage our emotions around that and be okay with it. Number three, you have little or no buffering. This means trying to numb out or buffer out the difficult emotions to not feel them, okay? We manage our emotions rather than buffer. Number four, you take action. You're not just always thinking about it, right? We move past our fears and move through with faith into doing things. Number five, you have internal control, meaning that you realize that you control you, outside influences do not control you. We take that responsibility for our own behaviors and feelings. 

18:01 

Number six, you self-coach yourself, meaning you're also very self-reflective. You are always seeking for awareness to improve your life. Number seven, you make a meaningful contribution to the world. I love that because that creates such a feeling of purpose and direction in our lives. Number eight, you have unconditional self-love. This has a lot to do with being patient with ourselves and not expecting perfection. Number nine, you manage yourself within your time. Some people call this time management. I call it managing yourself within your time because really we can't manage time. We can only manage ourselves. Number ten, you manage yourself around your money. Again, "money management" as opposed to "I manage myself in how I am working with my money." 

19:08 

Okay, so I am really excited to dive into each one of these topics for the next ten episodes. I truly, truly believe that bringing mental health to our awareness and intentionally working toward mental health will make such a huge impact in our lives. It will be a place of growth and progress and those things bring peace. They bring contentment. They bring happiness regardless of the challenges we're going through. So hold on, my friends, gear up to learn some amazing things that can move you forward in an unprecedented pace and let's move on this, shall we? 

19:45 

I love this process of growing up, and I'm glad that you're joining me on this trip of moving forward, because it is making a huge impact and a huge difference in my life. Okay, if you would like some personal help from me, your life coach, you can go to tanyahale.com, and you can send me an email, and I will respond to you, and I can get back, and we can set something up. I give a free consult to get started to talk to you about your particular situation and how life coaching can help you move into a better place. And again, a last thank you for joining me here on this podcast. If this is beneficial to you, please share it with someone else. Make sure you subscribe so that you never miss an episode, and if you will, leave me a review. Again, I'm trying to move toward a hundred reviews on iTunes. I think a couple of weeks ago I was listening to one of my podcasts and I said a thousand. Well, eventually I'd like to get to a thousand obviously, but right now I'm just working toward a hundred baby steps, right? So if you'll do that for me, I would love it. Thanks again for joining me and I hope that you have a really spectacular day and that you start thinking about your own mental health and how mental health impacts your life on a day-to-day basis. Have a terrific one. I'll talk to you next time. Bye. 

21:05 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.