Wellbeing and mental health

Key messages in this episode

• Through all of our previous episodes we have been pointing to the source of our mental health and wellbeing as originating from our ‘being’ and not from our ‘doing’. This episode delves deeper into this perspective.
• How this understanding can be used to help us navigate back to our own wellbeing
• As always we hope that you can relate to this from the evidence of your own experience

The territory for this episode:

• Fundamental question – is mental health something that we have innately? We are suggesting that it is, and this orientation has significant implications for the way that we think about and support our own mental health
• However, we also recognise that this is a tricky subject and there are lots of grey areas. It is very easy for people to take offence at this perspective:
  • from a misunderstanding of what we are saying
  • from a feeling that it is somehow blaming the individual who is struggling
  • that it is somehow disrespectful of someone’s experience when they are struggling
• We share a few examples from our own experience and the experience of  working with people who are struggling. 
• We discuss understanding mental health as where we are not who we are. People often say things like "I am an anxious person" or "I am a depressive". We discuss how this is an unhelpful and an inaccurate description of our mental health.
• How the purpose of a mental health diagnosis is to help us get back to health
• How our state of ‘being’ drives our 'doing' not the other way around - with some examples
• One of the challenges is that this is a reductive understanding, i.e., what do you need to stop doing rather than what we need to do
• How when we settle back into our being we very naturally do things that support our wellbeing, i.e., taking action is often very helpful but only from a certain perspective