Does your mind always feel healthy? No, it likely doesn’t, and that’s OK

Opinion by Ayah Daniel-Rash

Perfection shouldn’t be our end goal.

I’m not sure I like what the term ‘mental health’ has come to mean. So much of what we see about mental health seems to communicate this idea of striving for a feeling of perfection. Of reaching a joyful nirvana in which nothing negative can affect us.

But really, being mentally healthy isn’t supposed to be that. It’s more about a sense of feeling level, in our natural bodily state, in a state of calmness that doesn’t come with intense joy, sadness, or any other emotion. It’s more about being able to experience any emotion and be able to live with it healthily without becoming overwhelmed.

Let’s take sadness as an example. Sadness is a perfectly normal emotion that serves at least one purpose: to signal to ourselves and others that we need support and time to process our thoughts and feelings. It helps us reflect and learn from what has made us feel it in the first place, so we can reduce the time we spent doing whatever made us unhappy, and to better prepare us for any encounter we have with it in future. It is an emotion that we actively need to retain a healthy life.

Modern-day media would paint a different picture though – one that doesn’t feature sadness at all. Instead, the idea of mental health all too often comes with pushing people to ‘get through their problems’, forgetting the beauty of the process of actually getting through something. A breakup, death, failing an exam, rejection. The beauty in all these things is growth.

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Specifically, ‘post-traumatic growth’, which is a wonderful term I learnt from Dr Kousoulis who I interviewed on my podcast. It is a term that describes the beauty of learning through pain, flourishing through downfalls, letting the wrong doors close so the right doors can open. It means allowing yourself to be with your feelings good or bad and watching yourself evolve through simply experiencing the trials and tribulations of life itself.

Last week I left my oyster card at home. Nightmare. I thought it was in my phone case. Lesson: double check the phone case. Last year I learnt the pain you could feel from losing someone you love. Our lives are a concoction of easy and hard lessons which all impact our feelings and emotion day-by-day, minute-by-minute, without us even realising.

As I learnt from Dr Kousoulis, to be mentally healthy isn’t to be the happiest person on earth, it is to be a witness to your growth, your transformation as a human being, your emotional evolution as a subject of life’s experiences. Being able to look back retrospectively and say ‘I overcame that hurdle and I appreciate it was hard but here I am now’ – a new version of myself with new learnt experiences.

So, rather than buying into the unhealthy version of mental health that we see so often online, embrace your journey and the many emotions you will come across on the way. Everyone has to struggle to become the person they are supposed to be and, although it might not be an effortless process, is a powerful catalyst for growth.