There's a lot of talk about 'wellness' these days. It has lots of meanings, and some can be deceptive.
Wellness is part of a health movement that emphasizes prevention, rather than curing, illness.
Quality research shows that eating wisely, regular exercise, lowering stress levels and other lifestyle habits can all reduce risk of illness. It focuses on preventative actions that support health, as opposed to seeking treatment and medications to address symptoms caused by lifestyle patterns like overeating, stress and sedentary habits.
Some aspects of 'wellness' get a little squishy, however. Spa experiences, and other feel-good offerings have been whisked into the mix. These entice us to put on the vacation responder and escape for time in saunas, ice baths, or on massage tables. One might be offered a coffee enema, a Tarot card reading, Chakra tune-up, and no doubt some herbal teas and skin creams. These suggest, largely without evidence, that they'll help you chill out, tune in and tune up. It's implied that you get in a head and body space to deal with life's challenges piled up when you get back. Famous actresses do this, maybe you can too.
A few days or hours at a spa could potentially be a beginning of some new healthy habits. But the critique of the spa approach is that for most people, it's unlikely to have long-term impact. Most of us will never build a sauna in our home. There's generally not a lot of research that supports much of this. It's good to consider whether the spa day is a tempting quick-fix approach that is primarily making money for those providing the spa experiences. Research can be deceptive: Some studies have shown that health outcomes are indeed better overall among people who do regular saunas (people in Scandinavian countries, for example)- but it likely is more to do with other factors such as more affordable health care, more robust social supports, and other lifestyle factors.
Let's consider wellness and mental health. What does it mean to be well mentally and emotionally?
It means being free of mental and emotional patterns that prevent you from living the way you want to live, living according to your values. Note- it does not mean being free of emotional pain. Feeling sad, anxious, lonely, angry and empty are factory-installed features for human beings. Being 'well' is a capacity to have those feelings- without being significantly thrown off your path. For example, it's normal to feel anxious at times. But if anxiety is preventing you from doing what you need and want to do- that's a problem. Having painful feelings is part of every life. Being controlled or blocked by them isn't.
It's important to get clear about this, because there's a common idea that one shouldn't feel anxious or sad or empty- that those are unacceptable signs of failure, weakness or illness. This is a trap. My profession sometimes unfortunately plays into it with diagnostic terms for the things people struggle with. The word disorder is the main culprit. It is a useful term in that depressive disorder, for instance, correctly indicates that a problematic, life-limiting pattern is present in the person experiencing depression. Where it's unhelpful is that it represents a view that depression is in itself an unacceptable thing. This view sets people up to struggle against, judge, reject and fear their feelings of depression. It can set up a struggle to control and subdue what is felt- which is unlikely to be successful, more likely to be counter-productive.
Imagine someone who has broken a bone and they react by trying to fight and resist it. Instead, the wound needs care, support, patience and healing. It benefits from curiosity, with a question like: How shall I best care for myself as I experience this difficulty? So too do feelings of anxiety, emptiness, depression and anger.
When we struggle against what we feel, it's one of the most futile experiences humans can engage in, because of the few things we can control in this world, our feelings are not one of them. We judge our feelings and ourselves for having them. This is a lot like sprinkling salt in a wound. It can lead to discouragement that we can't control our moods, which is fertile ground for greater depression, anxiety, or both. What's often missing is acceptance. It's okay not to like how some emotions feel. But they can be acknowledged, learned from and accepted, rather than struggled against.
The power of acceptance to change how we feel, and how we engage in living is under-appreciated. It's often taken to mean giving up, becoming passive. It's nothing of the sort. It's a skillful tool to not waste energy fighting things we can't defeat or control.
Similar to eating well and exercising, there are proactive and preventative ways to cultivate mental wellness. There's much opportunity in our thinking to cultivate more helpful thoughts and emotions. This is a kind of mental training, to learn to focus the mind in more helpful ways- such as noticing all that's right or fortunate in one's life, rather than allowing attention to get stuck on the inevitable problems we all encounter.
Our problems tend to get more mental focus for a number of reasons. One is that in our species the mind has evolved to solve problems, including staying alive. It's often said the mind didn't evolve to be 'happy' or free of worry. We learned long ago how to cook with fire, and that not only made digestion easier, but also allowed our bodies to evolve to have smaller jaws and teeth, making room in the skull for bigger brains- with which we could figure out how to solve other problems. Our species learned long ago that scanning the environment for danger was a good way to detect threats, and stay safe. The downside for us now is that our mental patterns continue to focus on 'problems' even in moments when we don't have any.
On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, you're on your way to a co-worker's barbecue. All the conditions are pleasant, no stress. But the mind is prone to see problems: Do I fit in? Am I weird? Does this shirt look stupid on me? Why did no one laugh at the joke I told at the other party? The mind is prone to focus on it unhelpfully, trying to solve something that can't be 'solved'. We continue to think about it, which only worsens our mood and casts a negative quality over the day. It's a 'problem' made out of nothing but thinking and emotions. And it's an evolutionary habit of the mind, it's not 'you'.
Just as you didn't decide to locate your airway dangerously close to the passageway for food and liquid intake, resulting in risk of choking, you didn't choose to make your mind worry about things you can't control. Evolution created this habit that in this age has unfortunate side effects.
Mental 'wellness' teaches that we can identify these mental habits of unhelpful problem-focus, and re- train ourselves to spend less time stuck in them. One way to do that is to understand we all have the ability to change the thoughts that trouble us. If someone often thinks “I'm unattractive”, they can change that thought to “I'm learning to accept myself as I am”, or another more helpful and compassionate thought.
But it doesn't mean the helpful thought will stick. The 'I'm unattractive' thought may well continue to pop up. Instead, one learns that each thought comes up in each unique moment, and in each we have the choice to decide how we will respond to the thought or emotion. We can choose to take the thought as a gospel truth, or as another unhelpful thought among millions of others. We have the choice to notice it, set it aside, and repeat our preferred thought. It's a moment by moment process, and for sure it takes effort. It also gets easier and more effortless over time, most people find.
We can remind ourselves that although we sometimes feel socially anxious, we know most of us humans experience this, and we can remember that we get along with most folks well enough. This is a mental wellness device of taking perspective, which helps us see the glass as half full, rather than just half empty. We can't avoid social disappointments and conflicts, but we can learn to manage them far better, which in itself creates mental and emotional benefits. When something painful happens, we practice working with it more skillfully, helping ourselves through the difficult moments. Seeing that we can help ourselves and be a good friend to ourselves is empowering. We can feel good about how we're learning to help ourselves, rather than trying to feel good by somehow ridding ourselves of anxious moments. Interestingly, as people practice this kind of self-care they tend to have fewer anxious moods, and more acceptance of their emotions generally.
These mental skills are part of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), which is a simple but powerful form of therapy that teaches that we can learn to observe our thoughts, evaluate them for accuracy and distortion, and then- here's the part that pays off the most -decide how we want to relate to them.
This is the subtle but important idea that we all have thoughts and emotions, many of which we can't control and don't actually choose. But what we can control pretty well is how we relate to them.
In this process, people learn to observe, question, and when helpful, change the thought, or change the way they relate to it. The result is greater freedom and flexibility, and greater ease within one's own mind. We learn we don't have to believe all our thoughts, or take them so seriously. We learn to shrug our shoulders and even smile when the distorted thoughts come up. The same applies to our emotions.
CBT, and a related skill, Mindfulness, involve re-training the mind to cultivate more positive emotions, such as love, joy, and happiness, rather than passively hoping we can feel these more of the time. As Abraham Lincoln said: Most people are about as happy as they make up their mind to be. It's the idea that there is a degree of choice about what attitudes we'll cultivate, and those attitudes will drive quite a bit of our mood. The book The Mindful Way Through Depression by Williams, Teasdale, Zinn and Segal is a good place to start.
Unlike the chakra tune up or the spa pampering, mental wellness techniques drawn from CBT and mindfulness have a ton of strong research showing that people report positive outcomes like greater life and relationship satisfaction, and reduced depressed moods after basic instruction in these methodologies. And for most of us they're easier to access than the local sauna.
