If you wanted to lose weight, would you have cake for breakfast? Maybe. For now let’s start with the wikipedia definition of mental health:
Mental health is the level of psychological well-being or an absence of mental illness. It is the state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment.
Okay…. well what’s that mean? I actually have a lot of qualms with that definition, but we’ll touch upon that later. Maybe another definition from mentalhealth.gov will clarify:
Mental Health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.
Sounds super important. Even so, from that definition, it’s not crystal clear what that mental health actually means. It’s quite vague and there’s a lot of parts to that definition. It’s emotional, psychological, and social. It impacts how we think, feel, and act. It’s also impacts how we cope with stress, relate to others, and make decisions. It’s also prevalent from childhood to adolescence through adulthood? Pretty much what defines you as a person. For pretty much anyone’s entire life.
All of those factors were more qualitative as opposed to quantitative. So let’s try and correlate with something that’s much more well-defined and much less ambiguous: physical fitness.
Physical fitness is a state of health and well-being and, more specifically, the ability to perform aspects of sports, occupations and daily activities. Physical fitness is generally achieved through proper nutrition, moderate-vigorous physical exercise, and sufficient rest.
Physical fitness serves as a great example, as it’s well-defined in society today. In fact, it’s at the top of most peoples’ minds as a New Year’s resolution, with the top 3 resolutions (diet, exercise, weight loss) being related to physical health. Let’s even use that as our example. As our New Year’s resolution, we want to live a physically healthier lifestyle, through diet, exercise, and weight loss and are seriously committed. After all, new year, new me.
If I were looking to seriously lose weight or shape up, I would probably get a personal trainer or fitness coach. They would then build out a plan focused around, you guessed it, diet and exercise.
Let’s focus on diet first.
If I wanted to eat healthier, what might I do? Well, I would be counting calories to start. I would also want to pay attention to what I’m eating, carbs, sugars, fats, starches, proteins. How often I’m eating, as it may impact my metabolism, along with the kinds of foods I’m eating. Definitely would want to be consuming leaner meats (if at all). Would have to cut out dessert (ugh). I hear salads are healthy (even when drowned in dressing?). We probably want to plan our diet. Let’s go with this one I happened to find from goodhousekeeping.com.
To recap our diet: We’re only going to consume 1200 calories everyday. Each and every single meal is laid out for us with a strict and specific quantity of every ingredient. Forgot what you’re eating for breakfast on Day 6? It’s this:
This is exactly what you’re eating for breakfast on Day 6. I didn’t actually look through every single meal since thinking of dieting and looking at overly healthy food makes me anxious (ironic), but you get the point.
So what about exercise?
Well, if I’m getting serious at the gym (as I do every January, only for January), I would definitely figure out how I’m exercising. Am I taking fitness classes? Yoga, Pilates, Cycling, Kickboxing, Swimming, Climbing, Muay Thai, or just putting time in at the gym? Weight lifting, running, abs? How many times a week? For the purposes of our example, let’s go with sessions at the gym. Lots of folks in the weightlifting community (far more educated on the topic than I) would likely split this into muscle groups.
Weight lifting is generally broken up into focusing on specific muscle groups for each gym session. Usually 1–2 muscle groups are focused on per session, with 2–5 exercises for each muscle group. Monday’s always chest day. Even I know that. Cool, so we’ve decided that we’re going to focus on different muscle groups on different days throughout the week. In fact, let’s even pull it straight off bodybuilding.com:
- Day 1: Legs/Abs
- Day 2: Chest
- Day 3: Back/Abs
- Day 4: Rest
- Day 5: Shoulder/Abs
- Day 6: Arms
- Day 7: Rest
Wait, what if I don’t know which back workouts I should be doing? Conveniently enough, each and every day of our week has a fully detailed workout regiment:
So in terms of exercise, each and every day is accounted for. We know exactly which muscle group we’re focusing on, along with exactly what exercises we’re doing and how many repetitions and sets.
Let’s take a moment to recap. We have diet and exercise in order to lose weight as our New Year’s resolution. So far, we’ve hired a personal trainer (which we would likely see a couple times a week), come up with a detailed diet, along with a detailed exercise plan. Let’s even throw in a few miscellaneous factors we would want to track, like our weight, sleep, and water consumption. Here’s a few things we’re tracking religiously every single day to lose weight:
Diet
- Calories of every meal
- Ingredients of every meal
- Quantities of each nutrients (protein, sugars, carbs, etc.) every meal
- Number of meals each day (3, no cheating!)
Exercise
- Muscle group for each session
- Which exercises (~5 each) we’re doing for each muscle group
- Number of repetitions we’re doing for each exercise
- The weight that we’re lifting for each exercise
Miscellaneous
- Daily/Weekly weight
- Water consumption
- Caffeine/Tea intake
- Hours of sleep
- Number of steps
After sticking with this regiment long enough, we would want to see some results oriented around one’s weight. Weight a minute (see what I did there?). Why did we just come up with an entire regiment for physical health? Remember when we said mental health was super important? Why was that again? Oh yeah, it’s because it pretty much defines who we are. So let’s bring it back to why we introduced physical fitness to begin with.
Instead of physical fitness, we wanted to improve mental health? Well, for physical fitness, we have a set of daily restrictions we’re adhering to that eventually show us physical results over time.
We just build a weight loss plan. Can we apply the same ideas and concepts to mental health? What are some of the things we would want to track? What’s a diet for my mind look like? What are mental exercises I would do to improve mental health? How do I track mental health over time? We’ll cover that in another article, but for now let’s stay on track in defining mental health. Remember the original definition of mental health from wikipedia?
Mental health is the level of psychological well-being or an absence of mental illness. It is the state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment.
By this definition, it states that mental health is the absence of mental illness. So you’re either mentally healthy or not? With the “check box” for mental health being the absence of mental illness?
Seriously?
By this definition, you’re considered mentally healthy… up until you’re not. It paints the picture that mental health is a binary classification, which it is not.
The absence of mental illness does not equate to the presence of mental health.
Just like with physical health, mental health also lives as a scale. Just because you do not qualify as morbidly obese does not mean you are physically healthy. Physical health is more about consistently living a healthier lifestyle, as opposed to temporary stints of diets and sessions at the gym (guilty).
The same applies to mental health.
A person wouldn’t go to the gym once a week for 8 hours in a single session. Nor would they eat unhealthily all week, slipping in 1 healthy meal a week. It doesn’t work like that.
The same applies to mental health.
Why do we care about mental health again?
Since that first definition of mental health from wikipedia is pretty trash, let’s revisit the second one from mentalhealth.gov:
Mental Health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.
Mental health is literally who we are. It’s in our social and emotional DNA as individuals. It perpetuates through all facets of our lives, from our performance in our careers and academia, to our relationships with loved ones, friends, classmates, and colleagues.
In another article, we’ll elaborate on exactly why you should care. However, the purpose of this article is to clarify the definition of mental health, which hopefully, we’ve been able to do.
