About Mental Health: on the path to happiness and fulfilment
This is an introduction to a series of articles called ‘About Mental Health’ that gives some indication on how to take care of your own mind.
I’ll start with a (really) hard question: what’s the meaning of life? Being happy? Being free? Achieving things?
For the past few years, a lot of people have written about happiness and finding purpose. It’s a trend that has gotten really big: we’re talking about best-seller books, millions if not billions of video views on Youtube, the rise of the self-help coaching era…
I’ve read many of these books, watched many of these videos, and never felt quite satisfied at the end. In fact, for reasons completely independent from those pieces of content, I found myself drifting into depression.
What depression was like for me
It started slowly. I could feel it there, inside my stomach. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t really want to deal with it, or just assumed it was gonna pass with time.
But time passes, and that feeling — more that absence of feeling — keeps on being there. Worse, it grows inside you. You do your best not to show it to the people around you, because that would surely hurt them. And you’re a grown up, you can deal with your own problems.
It got to a point where the only way to get myself out of bed in the morning was by making a huge effort, and having the reward of smoking my morning cigarette.
Every day had the same routine: fighting hard to get out of bed, and going through the day with as much intensity as my mind would let me. I had a lot of ideas, really good ideas, but was never able to execute them. I found excuses, or was too busy thinking about what was wrong with them.
One day, I realized I didn’t want to continue down this path, because it led nowhere.
It had been 2 years since the idea of going to see a therapist first came up in a conversation. But every time I was on the edge of doing it, I found ways to get better: surrounding myself with friends, reading articles and asking myself really introspective questions.
I always found a way not to go and see a professional. Maybe because I didn’t want to, deep down. I didn’t want people to know I was in a bad mood all the time. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, because that would have meant I was weak. That my life wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
What really got me convinced is the fact that I wasn’t in a bad situation whatsoever: I was the CEO of a company I loved (Koudetat, we’re letting people learn how to create companies by producing entertaining video content), surrounded by a great team, and achieving things I had always dreamt of. But I didn’t feel satisfied at all. I was feeling sad and numb.
At some point, I had a humbling conversation with my best friend. I hadn’t seen him in 3 months, and I had to talk to him about it, quickly. I remember it well: “I have to talk to you. I feel alone, all the time. I’m surrounded by people, and yet I’m lonely. Nobody gets it and I don’t want them to lose time taking care of me.”
“For the last 12 years, I did everything I wanted regardless of what people thought of it. I quit school to become an entrepreneur, I joined and left a really-fast-growing company, where we hired and then fired 25 employees… All this ‘I do what I want’ thing means I’m free, but this freedom comes with a responsibility. And I’m not sure I want it anymore. I’m lost.”
At the end of this conversation, I assessed the fact that I was depressed and really not happy. I needed to see a professional. What gave me the last push was an article, written by Emilie Maret, about entrepreneurs’ mental health.
This article is an amazing inspiration. After reading it, I felt like taking care of my mind wasn’t something so absurd to do. Moreover, it encouraged me to openly share my journey, with the hopes of helping somebody that might go through the same struggles as I did. I’m convinced online content can actually help people get better.
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I finally went to see a therapist, and started learning how to actually live the life I wanted to have. It was a hard journey. The path to healing your mind is overly frustrating, but if you manage to fight through that inner battle, the finish line is utterly liberating.
I had the chance of meeting an amazing — it’s an understatement — therapist, who helped me get better within 6 weeks. Along the way, I fell in love with psychology, psychoanalysis and above all, with people.
I realized that a lot of things were actually about emotions, feelings and instinct, rather than reason and contemplation.
Everything is about mental health. That fear that prevents you from achieving your dreams? Mental health. That loneliness that slowly makes you hate people around you, and prevents you to make actual connections? Mental health. That to-do list you always push back to tomorrow? You got it: mental health!
But there’s a catch with mentally healthy people: they often don’t know they are.
You might know a person that seems to be always happy and excited
There are people who radiate good vibes, who seem to handle things better when they feel bad, and who achieve a lot of things without it being a sacrifice.
You might know them in real life or look up to them on the Internet or on TV. The people who always have amazing stories to tell, who seem to have lived so much even when they’re the same age as you. I like to call them stellar people.
The thing is, for most of these people, it has not always been like that.
These people tend to be those who went through really hard moments. Maybe they’ve always been free to do what they wanted, maybe their education was different… But in the end, this freedom allowed them to experience truly difficult situations they had time to reflect on. They changed. Because people change.
The real problem with these people is oftentimes they forget they were not always like this. So they try to give you advice based on what they experience right now, and elaborate on how they simply feel better at that instant. They become this stellar character we tell stories about without really understanding what makes them who they are.
Another problem with mental health is nobody talks about it
There’s this huge taboo around the topic that makes no sense at all. A lot of people feel uncomfortable talking about their feelings and their problems, which is the first step into getting better.
We live in a world where trying to work on your mental health is looked down on. And I think by talking about it, we can break this pattern.
We have to break the pattern! It’s starting to change, I see more and more people talking about going to a therapist, but still: it’s only the beginning. Let’s talk about more than therapy. Let’s talk about taking care of our minds.
In this series of articles, I’m gonna try and share everything that made me happy
It’s the first time in a looooong while that I feel truly happy. Not because of some external factors, but because I own who I am and I actually feel able to let go most of the time. This happiness is conscious and I’m working on keeping it this way.
Because happiness is something you have to work for, it doesn’t come on its own.
Disclaimer: I’m not a professional. I’m not a doctor, not a therapist, not a psychiatrist and I know very little about how to treat mental health problems. This series of articles is a reflection of my own experience with mental health.
When I started to write this article, I felt like some actual science was needed to make sure I don’t go into absurdity. So I asked my therapist if she could check on every article I publish, to prevent me spreading false ideas, and she’ll leave notes about her own point of view at the end of some articles.
It’s time for us to take care of our own mental health
Think about it this way: for the past few years, we’ve been talking a lot about how to take care of our bodies. Do sports, eat better, have a well-balanced way of life…
While listening to the Body Health Coach is a really good idea, we have to do the same with our minds. There are doctors to heal us when we’re sick. There are therapists to heal us when we’re depressed or mentally unhealthy. There are ways of taking care of your health when you’re actually healthy. There are ways of taking care of your mental health when your mind is healthy, in order to keep being happy and live the life you want to live.
‘About Mental Health’ is all about that: living the life you want to live, being the person you want to be.
The topics we’ll talk about
I realized there are a lot of things that actually help me stay mentally healthy and fit. Little things. Everyday things. And I’m gonna share them all with you.
The first article will be about what it’s like to go and see a therapist, because it’s the first step in getting mentally healthier. It’s the step that enables all the other ones.
Then we’ll talk about a lot of things: the experience of time that influences the way you live your life, how to manage your time in order to be happy, making people around you feel happier by producing hormones in their brains, how to create actual connections with people, the art of giving feedback and receiving it… Well, a lot of things.
Stellar people are an anomaly today: many famous people, what we call “leaders” are often people that are mentally healthy. Because they do what they want, no matter what people think as long as they have followers, people who love them.
They can choose to do good, or bad, it doesn’t matter: they’re leaders. We won’t be talking about what to do when feeling mentally good, only about how to get there.
Leaders seem to be a rare breed, and I think it’s something we should address: I really think everyone can be a leader by having the right mindset, and by being mentally healthy.
The more leaders there are, the more we can achieve. And I feel like the world needs a lot of achieving right now, as we are facing many of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced.
Ready to jump in?
Read the first article of the series:
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Also, thanks Irina for the feedback and the help with the English writing.
