Mental Health - What About Mine?

We're all dealing with it...so am I. So, am I?

How do we think about mental health, in a personal way?

Like many things, it is often easier to consider mental health in the abstract or for a group of people.

But, what does it look like in the day-to-day for you?

Have you, for example, identified the kind of mental care you need to give yourself — like you do, say, for your physical health? Do you think about or organize for your mental health differently? Or, does it seem like your mental health is something closer to the bottom of your health-priorities list than the top?

I recently woke up feeling pretty stressed. I was worn out from some pretty active dreams. I was flat, energy-less, reactionary. I didn't feel good — you know, like sometimes when you just don't feel good physically. This has been happening, not regularly, but also not never recently. It's got me thinking.

Do I believe that I'm not being affected by all that is going in my life? Do I compartmentalize things — associating this feeling with that thing and confining it accordingly? Am I imagining that things do not accumulate or aggregate for me, like they do for other people? In other words, I am fooling myself?

It's not like I don't live in the same context as everyone else, that I don't have some sometimes overwhelming concerns about those I care about, about my well-being, about the future, about the surrounding narratives of our country and world, about...the nature of my own existence.

I can suddenly realize — wow, there's a lot going on for me. What am I doing to care for myself?

On my way to work that day I saw some flowers, they were prolific both in quantity and quality of color and design. I stopped...to look, to notice. As I did so, something shifted in me related to the above. In this case, it was beauty that snapped my attention to something beyond the cycling observations about how good I DIDN'T feel (beauty often does that — moving me past myself).

It got me wondering about other things that do something similar for me. When do I pay attention to those things? Only when I'm in some kind of stress or do I build things into my routines that help me avoid some of that stress? I do this physically, as I work out each day — I've worked it into my daily life structures. But, I don't to do that kind of thing mentally...and I need to.

There's still a few things for me to work through, regarding my mental health assumptions and maintenance and regarding how I care for myself beyond just physical ways. But, I am noticing more and more the kinds of things that impact my sense of self — both in negative and positive directions and wondering how all that works (for me)...something I suspect we each need to do for ourselves.

Mental health is obviously an issue. But, until it moves beyond something generally true for someone else, we can't really do too much about it.

I really do need to stop and ask myself this question about mental health — what about mine?