Your inbox likely contains various emails this month on mental health awareness. How do you distinguish between useful and unhelpful information? Not everything labeled “helpful advice” truly offers value. To understand what it means to be emotionally well-balanced under pressure, we need a clear framework that goes beyond superficial tips.
Journalists interested in the use of TikTok to dispense mental health advice recently asked a panel of mental health experts about the advice that was provided on the platform. The experts concluded that over half of the information on TikTok about mental health was incorrect. If that were not concerning enough, research has demonstrated that anyone regularly using TikTok will be at an increased risk of experiencing depression and anxiety, especially those under the age of 24.
Signs of Trouble
Society has made tremendous advances in technology, science, and health care over the past century. At the same time, very little progress has been made in the levels of emotional wellness that people experience. Considering the increased rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, and overdose over the past 100 years, people are experiencing far more emotional distress now than ever. More adults live alone now (15 percent) than in the 1960s (7 percent). Mental health problems are increasing even though there is more emphasis on personal happiness, self-esteem, and individual fulfillment than at any time in history.
We have been repeatedly told that mental health problems like anxiety and stress stand in the way of building a good life. What if the opposite is true? What if we struggle with our thoughts and emotions because we have not built a satisfying and meaningful life?
We dream of lives free from stress and anxiety. We search for what’s missing and end up drained, fighting our thoughts and feelings.
The way to build a good life and maintain emotional health is to recognize that our problems are not with our circumstances but with how we handle them. We can harness the power of our thinking, doing, and being to build a roadmap for change, one that points to a rich and meaningful life, even when life is difficult.
Rebuilding the Foundation
If we incorrectly explain why we are unhappy, we will use solutions that do not work. Transforming stress and anxiety into growth requires addressing the core problems that lead to the unhappiness and distress we experience. Our struggles point to what is missing in our lives and solutions that don’t work. We can only tame what we can name. To bring about lasting change, we need to work on seven key areas of emotional health to put ourselves back in the driver’s seat of our lives.
- Awareness: We are on autopilot. Learn to slow down and pay attention to the present moment. Our attention is often on the past or the future rather than the present moment. We see the present moment through the fog of our thoughts and value judgments. We fail to see what triggers our distress and how our thoughts, emotions, and behavior connect to our desires.
- Self-Concept: How we see the world can be distorted by our core beliefs. Learn to accept who you are without measuring yourself or others. Perception refers to how we absorb information about the outside world. Our past experiences and core beliefs influence how we see the world. We tend to filter out positive events that might not fit our view of the world and see potential harm or threats where there are none.
- Thinking: We have helpful and unhelpful minds and must know the difference. Learn to replace demands for perfection with preferences and flexible thinking. We have unhelpful, irrational thoughts that distort reality, are illogical, prevent us from reaching our goals, and lead to self-defeating behavior. For example, “I must absolutely not fail at work, and I am worthless if I do fail.” “My family must treat me fairly. If they don’t, they are horrible people and deserve punishment.” “I must not get sick and cannot handle it if I do.”
- Emotions: We avoid our negative emotions and experiences. Learn to embrace emotions with acceptance and willingness without trying to avoid or control them. It is difficult for us to accept and allow negative emotions and experiences to be in our lives. We also struggle to know what we feel, why we feel what we feel, and what to do with the information emotions provide. We fail to recognize how emotions initiate either helpful or unhelpful behavior.
- Behavior: We react rather than respond to the pressures of life. Learn to turn toward your problems, face challenges, and build a better life. We practice our automatic strategies to manage our distress, which include rules like don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t think, don’t feel, and don’t be. To feel less bad, we use distraction, opting out, overthinking, substances, sex, and self-harm. These behavior patterns begin as intentional choices but become automatic over time.
- Character: We neglect our character strengths and minimize our character weaknesses. Learn to identify your character strengths and the strengths of others. We can be loving, humble, responsible, authentic, grateful, content, courageous, self-controlled, hopeful, persistent, and patient. We can also be selfish, prideful, irresponsible, dishonest, entitled, envious, pessimistic, self-indulgent, cynical, unreliable, and impatient. Character weaknesses lead directly to many of our relationship problems and challenges in facing life’s difficulties.
- Purpose: We lose sight of what is important. Learn to clarify what is ultimately important and what you want to look back on at the end of your life and leave behind. We lose sight of what makes life meaningful: our values, what we stand for, who we desire to be, and our life’s purpose. In place of purpose, we pursue pleasure, success, control, and comfort. In time, we experience boredom, which then leads to anxiety, depression, anger, and addiction.
When you encounter quick-fix mental health tips on social media, remember that lasting emotional wellness requires more than surface solutions. Understand the many different needs you have as a psychological, biological, social, spiritual, and ethical individual. Take stock of your relationships, diet, exercise, sleep, substance use, thoughts, stress, past experiences, daily routines, and life direction. Ultimately, building a rich and meaningful life means intentionally working on what matters to you and relying on supportive connections—our real strength comes from those who surround us.
