Evolving the Conversation on Mental Well-Being and Resilience

Recently, I saw a meme on World Mental Health Day and felt a nudge to speak to that.?

But - when I began to look for something to share on social media, here’s what I noticed:?

All the images and messages I found were focused on one of two polarities.?

It was either, “Rainbows and unicorns,” with messages about (just) choosing to be happy,?

OR

Stark, somber dark images reminding you that you don’t have to be alone in your despair / depression.

And I thought: Hang on: There’s more to mental health than happiness or depression, and if we reduce “mental well-being” to one of two polarized states??

We’re still missing something in the conversation.

I sat with these questions:

• What is mental well-being, really?
• What’s the generative conversation we need to be having on this topic…because the quickly aging refrain of “We need to talk about mental health,” needs to advance, evolve, so we as a society can advance and evolve.

Later that day, while allowing these questions to percolate within me, I was led to a Mayim Bialik Breakdown podcast episode with guest Dr. Will Bulsiewicz speaking on gut health and its connection to mental well-being.

According to Dr. Bulsiewicz, your gut health can influence mental health and vice versa. When you have a stress response, a cascade effect occurs in the body that negatively impacts the microbiome of the gut.

?Gut health is not top of mind for most of us when we think "mental health."

?Dr. B points out how today’s lifestyle, including pace, busy-ness, and the prevalence of processed convenience foods, is a set up for continued damage to gut health.

?So, we have two threads here: Mental health / well-being and gut health as a significant factor.

?Fast forward about 12 hours later, when I happened to catch a recent Krista Tippett TED talk. In this talk, Krista points to three “callings” emerging since the onset of 2020’s pandemic.

• The calling to look for the generative narrative, the one that elevates us beyond our brain’s hardwired bias to look for the negative in a situation. With the human tendency to focus first on how bad things are, we can overlook how much good is happening all around us: “It is ordinary that all kinds of people with all kinds of lives are finding ways to be of service…” often despite limited resources and challenging conditions.
• The calling to sit with the questions Life is placing in front of us now, to “engage with a new reverence the questions that are alive in you,” because those lead to discovery and pivot points.
• The calling to wholeness: “We have it within us to figure out what it would mean to cultivate whole human beings with whole institutions, living in whole societies.”

Generative narratives. Engaging the questions. Cultivating wholeness.

That seems very mentally healthy.

Here’s what lands for me, after reviewing these three different talks placed in my path in quick succession:

Mental well-being is about so much more than happiness vs. depression.

• Any conversation on personal resilience and capacities for achievement, for navigating our increasingly complex world, must include updated thinking on mental well-being.
• Speaking of complexities: Humans are complex and our complexities need to be included in conversations on mental health. (One size does not fit all and yesterdays conversations are not working.)

The physical components of mental health are significant, and we're still learning the full impact of the information flow between the body's systems. Our brains and nervous systems don’t work in isolation and neither do our guts.

• It occurs to me our mind/body (and spirit) connections are a hologram of our world and our lived experience as humans on this planet.
• ?Conclusion: ?Until we, as a society, understand / appreciate our own personal, internal interconnectedness, we will remain challenged with appreciating the interconnectedness of all of life - including the health of this planet and all who live here .

Part of the challenge in addressing mental health stems from the fact that we’re still trying to talk about it from within the perspectives of an outdated Culture - the Power-Over, Control-Conquer-Dominate, Go-Do-Push Culture.

• ?This is a set-up to “combat” mental illness along with other forms of illness/disease in our society.
• ?Instead of “conquering” illness, what if we sit – collectively - ?in the questions of what it means to be a whole human…and how we support ourselves and each other with developing the capacities for wholeness?

In our pain-averse culture, pain? - especially emotional pain - is shunted to the shadows unless it is pain glorified as being part of a path of achievement.

Let's change the conversation on pain so we:

1. Stop fragmenting ourselves and each other, and instead,
2. Cultivate the wholeness required for nurturing mental well-being.
3. Create a healthier relationship with pain, which supports greater mental well-being and wholeness as a society.

What you can do to cultivate a society based more in wholeness than outdated Power-Over dynamics:

?Start a new conversation:

• Ask those around you what “wholeness” means to them.
• Let this be an evolving conversation.
• Post the question on a large sticky note or whiteboard and ask others to add their thoughts.
• Use the question on wholeness as a brainstorming focus in a group exercise and curate the responses.

??Practice engaging the questions:

• ?Notice the questions you are holding now.
• See if those questions might be masking deeper, below-the-surface (and more generative) questions.
• Make it a game to have a Question of the Day in front of you / your team.
• Allocate time in staff / team meetings to play with your QOD to see what emerges.

??Practice capacity-building to help you / your team shift to more generative narratives, engage questions differently, and make wholeness a priority:

1. Subscribe to The Peaceful Achiever newsletter here on LinkedIn for more content designed to help you build the personal capacities needed to meet challenges and continue achieving without sacrificing mental or physical well-being.
2. Change your conversation about personal well-being to include a bandwidth audit. (You defrag your PC, right? Clear the cache? Shut down apps you aren't using? Are you doing this for your own mental / emotional well-being?). Contact me to schedule a personal bandwidth audit.

?? Please repost if you find this article useful.