mental health text content

The core of maintaining mental health for ordinary people has never been to completely eliminate negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, and irritability, but to learn to coexist with emotions, and at the same time have the ability to bring oneself back to a stable state when emotions are overloaded. There is no need to treat "bad mood" as a scourge, and there is no need to force yourself to always stay positive.

Last week, I received a girl who worked in Internet operations. I sat in the door and sat silently for five minutes, and tears fell first. He said that he couldn't sleep until three o'clock for a week in a row. When browsing short videos, he always came across content such as "Emotional internal consumption is weakness" and "Adults have long given up on emotions." The more I watched, the more I felt that I was useless. I couldn't even manage my emotions well, so I definitely couldn't accomplish anything.

In fact, this is also the biggest misunderstanding that most people have about mental health: they regard "no negative emotions" and "always positive and optimistic" as the standard of health. Whenever they are a little irritable, aggrieved, or unmotivated, they first label themselves as having "psychological problems". Instead, they turn small emotions into big burdens.

Regarding this point, different schools of psychology actually have quite different opinions. Psychoanalytic counselors are more inclined to dig down to the roots of negative emotions. They feel that every emotion that makes you uncomfortable is a signal from your subconscious. For example, if you feel irritable when you think about going to work, it may not be because you are lazy. It may be that the job has been consuming your most important needs. For example, you want a sense of accomplishment, but you do repetitive chores every day. You want a sense of boundaries, but you are always assigned work that is not yours. Your emotions are just reminding you that "it's time to make some changes." Colleagues who do cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) will often give you more direct advice: Don’t dwell on where your emotions come from, start moving first. Even if you walk downstairs for 10 minutes, buy an iced drink and cool down, you will often come back and the stuffy thing in your chest just now doesn’t seem that difficult to accept.

To be honest, I have been working as a front-line consultant for 5 years, and I have seen too many people who regard "emotional stability" as a KPI and push themselves into a dead end. A middle school teacher came to visit before and said that she had never lost temper with a student in the three years she had been teaching a class, and her speech volume never exceeded 60 decibels. Everyone praised her for her good temper and being a "model of an emotionally stable adult." However, at the end of last year, she was found to be moderately anxious, and even stood in a panic on the podium. Later, she listened to my suggestion and took a detour after get off work to go to the boxing gym near her home to hit the punching bag for half an hour. She didn't have to worry about her image as a teacher. She poured out all her pent-up anger on the punching bag. After two months of punching, her anxiety score had dropped to the normal range when she went back for a review. On the contrary, she became more patient when dealing with students.

Oh, by the way, I met a visitor who was a programmer before. The method of regulating emotions is more interesting. Every time he fixed a bug until it crashed, he would go to the wet market downstairs and squat for half an hour. He would watch the uncles and aunts bargaining for a few cents, watch the freshly fished live fish jumping in the plastic basin, and smell the aroma of the sauce wafting from the braised food shop. He said that after squatting for 20 minutes, all the messy codes in his mind were put into place. You see, there is no standard "correct adjustment method" at all. You don't have to listen to the Internet saying that "meditation is the best way to regulate emotions" and force yourself to sit for half an hour. The more you sit, the more irritated you will be, which is counterproductive.

The national mental health survey data released by the Chinese Mental Health Association in 2023 can also support this: 86% of domestic adults have experienced emotional overload for more than one consecutive week, and less than 10% of them will develop mental illnesses that require clinical intervention. In fact, most of the remaining people can slowly get back to their state as long as they do small things that make them happy.

I myself was working on an industry report some time ago, and I stayed up for a week. One morning, I got up and sat on the sofa, looking at the table full of information, and suddenly I couldn't bring myself to focus at all. Before, I might have scolded myself, "Why are you so lazy and still trying to fish when the deadline is approaching?" That day, I simply closed the computer and sat on the sofa all morning reading "Tom and Jerry" that I watched as a child. I laughed until my stomach hurt. When I got up in the afternoon, I read the information again, and my thoughts became much smoother.

In fact, mental health is like charging a mobile phone. You don’t have to wait until the battery is only 1% before rushing to find a charger. When you usually have 30% or 40% left, you can plug it in and charge it for a while when you have time. You don’t have to charge it to 100% every time, as long as it is enough. After all, the purpose of our lives is not to be a "perfect specimen without negative emotions". It is already good to be able to cry and laugh, to accept that we occasionally collapse, and to be able to get up and continue to live our lives.