A lot of that comes from being healthy, though. Sleep well, exercise, eat well. Watch your anxiety drop, focus go up, motivation go up, happiness go up. The more you do it, the easier it gets, so then the more it improves, so the easier it gets, etc.
I think so many people would be surprised that many of their life’s problems and self-diagnosis or concerns of a mental problem can be resolved by exercising so they get an eppetite and are actually tired for bed time, rather than living with the fog and anxiety of doing nothing and not being able to get good rest.
It’s hard to sleep well when intrusive thoughts keep replaying your most traumatic memories, or when anxiety has your heart pounding too hard to fall asleep. It’s hard to exercise when just standing up feels like you are lifting ten times your weight and taking a shower would be an insurmountable achievement. And food? Sometimes pouring a bowl of cereal or ordering a pizza are all you have the mental wherewithal to accomplish.
“Have you tried… Exercising?” is quite a tone-deaf response to these matters at this point.
Of course it’s correlated with healthy living. Of course it helps maintain a healthy lifestyle with wonderful benefits for your mental health and anxiety. Sure!
However, when you’re not there (yet), and you have no idea how to get “there”, having someone go “Well actually, it’s not that hard, lol, just start exercising” isn’t helpful. To build such a healthy pattern requires more care and nuance than just the knowledge that exercising helps, or the willpower to drag yourself through the first few days of whatever initial exercise routine, hoping it magically kickstarts this wonderful, new life.
You sound like RFK Jr. Yes most people in our modern world don’t get enough exercise, but it’s not a panacea. Exercise, sunlight, and clean eating alone won’t do more than nudge most chronic illnesses. Hell, the latest on ME/CFS is that exercise can actually worsen symptoms.
“All I needed was exercise and/or a healthier diet and I felt great!” folks were not truly ill to begin with, just slacking. There’s a huge difference, and insinuating otherwise is a giant slap in the face to those who’ve tried these things (and likely so much more) and are still struggling with debilitating health issues. To use a car analogy, regular oil changes and premium fuel won’t compensate for a broken axel.
It completely threw me off when the official statistic was 25% for those with any diagnosable mental illness. 75% of people just don’t have a problem with interacting with the world around them.
The key word is “diagnosable” though, isn’t it. What is the normal levels of feeling down, temporary depression, undiagnosed, etc.? That number seems low, especially since there are so many mental illnesses.
The better questions would be, are you personally having a good day? If not, are you on your way to having better days or finding a way to having better days? If that’s not possible, is there a way to make your day as good as it can be?
TL;DR: The world wasn’t made for the minority that classify as having a mental illness.
My answer to this question comes with the inherent bias of not being in a minority myself, but I have personally found myself at the bottom for the majority of my life due to my own actions. Things only got better when I changed.
That is not to say change is easy or accessible for everyone or even most. I know many people in my life that I don’t know what to recommend for them in the current state of affairs other than to prepare for it to get worse. But on the flipside, I know far more that whine and complain about their current situation and have every opportunity to change it. Those are the people that I feel fit calmly in the 75%.
I have a crackpot theory with only vague experience to back it up, but here it is: Have you ever been to Vegas? Or really any major city mall? When you go there, if it’s a good mall, the only ones still around are fashion malls. And you’ll see hundreds of people walking around with bags upon bags worth of stuff. There’s just all this money moving all around. Every. Single. Day. Who are these people? When you start paying attention, the vast majority just seem to blend in with the rest, taking on almost a general image of what might be “a person”.
But then there’s almost a separate crowd from them. Just like you reading this now. You can pick them out. I can’t give you words, but they are clearly people who have been through THE SHIT. There’s those of us who have and those of us who haven’t. Almost everyone I’ve encountered on Lemmy has been through THE SHIT. We all know what it is. And the moment you find yourself I an accidental conversation with someone who hasn’t, it’s immediately noticeable.
The 75% may potentially have a mental illness as we would think about it. But they’ve never had something bring it far enough to the surface for anyone to cast them out for it. I truly feel that a lot of what Hollywood portrays in the terrible characters they create comes down to a reflection of real people. Without THE SHIT, you don’t have a nearly as much of a chance of truly empathizing with those that have.
Feel free to find a massive flaw in my theory. I’m not a sociologist in the slightest.
Edit: hit save too soon
To circle back, it was only after coming out of it and realizing that I had to change and that the system never would that I managed to bring myself out of my 10-year depression. Not is just in the form of masking and managing my emotions more effectively. Not everyone gets that opportunity due to the oppressiveness of the society around them.
I don’t see a massive flaw in your theory but I think it needs some refinement.
I’ve been trying to understand how „healthy“ people’s minds work and I think it comes down to straight up denial of the state of the world.
The people who have been through THE SHIT as you say have probably all had some traumatic experiences in their lives that dragged them face first through how shitty and cruel this world can be and once you see it you see it everywhere and it becomes a downward spiral if you don’t find a way to catch yourself.
And then there are people who somehow managed to not look too closely all their lives, you will recognize them by their unwillingness to discuss any downer topics. They manage to live in blissful ignorance and by just copying each other they stay in their happy ignorant bubble and voila life is good?
Since this seems to be almost a 80/20 split I’d also like to throw in that about 20% of the population fall into the category of being highly sensitive and thereby prone to notice all the shitty wrong things happening around them. We just can’t ignore it and its wearing us down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_sensitivity
how shitty and cruel this world can be and once you see it you see it everywhere and it becomes a downward spiral if you don’t find a way to catch yourself.
I think you’ve touched on the crux of the matter here. The world can be utterly overwhealming, but the healthy response is, in fact, “to catch yourself” before you start spiraling, or to pull yourself out before it gets too hard to do. That is nothing to do with “denial of the state of the world”, but having the mental facility to acknowledge the state of the world and realising that the most effective thing you can do to improve it is to not let it crush you. When the world, and all its multitudinous troubles have already ground you down, it’s going to be difficult to separate your thoughts from it and build that mental structure, but I think that having it is probably the hallmark of being mentally ‘healthy’.
This means they don’t really process the world around them. They see and live in it, but don’t feel it. It’s a sensitivity/intelligence thing. Must be a lovely life, it’s much easier. Every rose has its thorns.
I’d have to disagree. I’m over 60 and basically healthy. I’m slightly overweight now and take one pill a day to control an enlarged prostate but that’s it.
Now I absolutely process the world. I’m married, I had three children and have suffered the usual share of family dramas / estrangements. I’ve been made redundant, run my own business, struggled to make ends meet, seen my wife suffer health issues (brain tumor, ovarian cyst, knee damage, etc.) and made and lost friends. I’m atheist, socialist and paid both a mortgage and rent. I am currently enraged by the rise of fascism and terrified for my children’s future but I wouldn’t call that mental illness. I still sleep at night, get up in the morning, try to live a good life and make a difference in my community. I’ve never been in therapy and I have had times of deep sadness and times of immense joy.
I doubt very much that I’m unusual.
