Modern Mental Health

Emotional health begins when you stop requiring yourself to be happy all the time.

Are you emotionally healthy?

Before you answer, ask yourself what that means. Does it mean you are happy? Does it mean you rarely feel anxious, frustrated, or sad?

I want to start by separating emotional health from happiness. They are not the same thing.

Believing that health means being happy all the time creates a problem. Every negative emotion becomes evidence that something is wrong with you. Then you spend your life trying to fix an experience that is part of being human.

Why I call this modern emotional health

The environment we live in offers constant opportunities for pleasure. Food, alcohol, social media, and other distractions are available whenever we want them.

At the same time, we see other people's lives presented as happy and beautiful. Everyone appears to have perfect hair, a perfect relationship, and a wonderful day.

We compare that picture with our actual emotional lives and conclude we are the problem.

This is why managing our minds matters in our modern environment. The patterns I call the motivational triad—seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy—do not automatically lead us toward the lives we want.

Seeking pleasure can become overconsumption. Avoiding pain can become avoiding every uncomfortable emotion. Conserving energy can become inaction.

We need to practice delaying pleasure, opening to emotional pain, and generating and using our energy deliberately.

Question the emotional education you received

Many of us learned that other people hurt our feelings or make us happy.

We heard that something we did made a parent happy, or that someone's words hurt another child's feelings. Later, we were encouraged to find a partner who would make us happy.

We also learned that the right circumstances would create happiness. Be thin. Have money. Get married. Fit in. Accomplish the right things.

But we were rarely taught to understand and process our emotions.

Our feelings are the reason we do or do not do things. We pursue an achievement because of how we think it will make us feel. We avoid a conversation because of how we think it will make us feel.

That makes our emotional lives worth studying.

Your thoughts create your feelings

Learning that my thoughts caused my feelings was mind-blowing for me.

I had thought people and circumstances caused them. I had thought feelings simply happened.

The Model gave me a different understanding: circumstances are separate from our thoughts about them. Our thoughts create our feelings. Those feelings drive our actions and results.

If I believe another person is responsible for my happiness, I try to get them to behave correctly. If they do not, I feel let down. I keep trying to teach them how to be the person who will make me happy.

But even if they follow every instruction, my own thinking is still what creates my experience.

And being happy all the time is not the goal.

Make room for the negative half

I teach life as 50 percent positive and 50 percent negative. There is comfort and discomfort, happiness and sadness, good and bad.

The contrast is part of the experience.

If you truly wanted to be happy at every moment, you would also have to want happiness when painful things happened. When someone died, you would have to insist on being happy.

Most of my students recognize that they do not want that. They want to be human.

Being human includes fear, sadness, anxiety, and discomfort. Feeling those emotions does not mean you are doing life wrong.

The people you see online have an emotional life too. Changing your body, income, or relationship does not eliminate the negative half. The subjects may change, but the human experience remains.

Accepting that saves you time. You can stop trying to arrange a life that never includes negative emotion and begin deciding the life you want to experience fully.

Notice the patterns that keep you stuck

When I look at an unhealthy emotional life, I see several patterns. They begin with not understanding or accepting what we feel.

A lack of awareness

You do not notice your feelings or the thoughts creating them. You do not recognize how much they matter to the actions you take.

Without awareness, you cannot see what you are practicing.

Avoidance and resistance

You arrive home stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed. You believe that feeling must be fixed, so you look for something outside you to make it disappear.

You eat, drink, or distract yourself instead of processing the feeling. I call that buffering.

The negative emotion did not require you to escape it. Resisting it can create another problem. You overeat, criticize yourself for overeating, and then eat again to avoid that criticism.

You have added a cycle of rejection to the original emotion.

Blaming and reacting

Sometimes we blame others for causing our emotions. Sometimes we act the emotion out, yelling or trying to force another person to change.

Neither gives us authority over our emotional lives. We are either waiting for someone else to behave differently or reacting without understanding the thought that is driving us.

Hiding from truth and goals

If you refuse to experience discomfort, you may avoid telling the truth about what you want.

You do not set a big goal because you might fail and feel embarrassed. You do not have a conversation because someone might be upset. You keep life as unchanged as possible.

That is a way of hiding from your own life.

Show up honestly in relationships

I see this hiding in relationships when both people believe they are responsible for each other's feelings.

You try to become the version of yourself the other person wants. You also need them to become the version that will make you happy.

Neither of you shows up honestly, even though you both want connection.

What if you accepted that negative emotion would be part of the relationship? What if each person took responsibility for their own emotional life?

You could tell the truth about who you are. You could let the other person be who they are. You could enjoy being together without requiring constant happiness as proof that everything is right.

Begin by noticing your feelings and the thoughts creating them. Allow negative emotion to belong. You do not need to hide from being human to be emotionally healthy.