“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. ” U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

“Being mentally well means that your mind is in order and functioning in your best interest. You are able to think, feel and act in ways that create a positive impact on your physical and social well-being. ” Singapore Association for Mental Health

Before we start let’s talk shorty on association: There is a negative association to the word Mental. Same as there is still to some extent to words such as Wellness, Mindful, Empathy.

The word Introvert’s association has improved a lot with Susan Cain’s Quiet but I think it’s safe to say that it mainly made introverts feel a bit better or more accurately to get to know themselves better. Outside the Introverted “community” it is still associated to being shy, non-assertive, no social, not daring, not charismatic etc. I am stating it because mental wellness will probably go in a similar route as introversion. And both are only in the beginning of their journey in the path of improving our lives.

So there’s a still a long way for Introversion but back to mental wellness. One of the biggest facts driving the importance of mental wellness is the proven connection between our mental state and our physical state. The most sarcastic Doctor, believing only what she sees in a prestige research magazine will confirm it [see some reference here]. We don’t need research to know that our mood [mind] gets down when we don’t sleep or eat [physical] or that we get sick or feel muscles pain [physical] when are stressed or in the midst of a conflict or a big decision.

Now lets talk some emotions. Emotions are part of our mind, which is a concept many argue about what it includes, how it relates to our brain and body etc., but I think that a good definition might be something like: an abstract layer, buffering between our physical us and the world. We see the world through it and it impacts how we are seen by others. Emotions, therefore, are included in our mind. And the mind plays a huge part in our life, how we experience it and what we achieve.

There are many reasons why emotions are so cool:

1. Many of us were raised by parents that did not share too much emotions
2. We grew ignoring emotions until it was too costly in terms of mental or physical or social meaning
3. Emotions are controlled by a very popular area in the brain – the amygdala. This area reacts to signals before the intellectual smarty part of cortex. So even if we try to “teach” ourselves to control or ignore emotions, they will probably be our gate to the world [count till 10 is not really controlling our emotions]
4. Emotions affect our thoughts and acts so we are really affected by them. They arrive really fast, and we don’t control them too much
5. Some of us want to raise our kids, or develop ourselves as human beings in a different emotional environment than we were raised
6. And now the scary part – one’s emotions might impact other people’s well being! And I’m not talking sci-fi stuff. So any improvement there will have compound effect on our environment

Now you will probably say: Mediation helps us deal with or even lower the impact of our emotions. And this was also proven by research and millions of mindful practitioners. This is true and exciting.

There are many more super interesting aspects to emotions, such as understand what different scenarios and interactions cause us to feel, how to share it with others, how to actually leverage it instead of coping with it and more.

Recap: mental wellness is very important for us. It’s basically the state of our mind. The mind controls how we are in the world. Emotions are part of our mind and are super cool. And more on emotions in coming posts