Mental health challenges are always somewhat unique from person to person, even if they share common symptoms or diagnoses. Despite that uniqueness, we have a pretty good idea of where a lot of common mental health issues come from, and, relatedly, interventions that tend to be helpful for dealing with many of those challenges.
In fact, in my experience over thousands of hours working with a wide variety of clients, I’ve discovered that three simple strategies can address a lot of what ails us in terms of our emotional health.*
1. Feel what makes sense in the moment
Many of the symptoms we feel related to mental health are a product of suppressing emotion. We avoid feeling and expressing emotion due to socialization or lack of safety or the simple fact that some emotions just don’t feel good. However, when we bury feelings, we bury them alive, and they ultimately come back out, often very differently than they went in —dysregulation, rage, anxiety, depression, addiction, migraines, and over time, even illnesses such as autoimmune disorders and gastrointestinal disease.
Solution: The simple act of feeling what makes sense in the moment, honoring emotional authenticity, can proactively avoid many downstream symptoms and even mental health diagnoses.
2. Spend more time in a parasympathetic nervous system state
A manifestation of many mental health symptoms and diagnoses is the activation of our fight or flight system, which puts us into a heightened sympathetic nervous system state marked by increased heart and respiration rate, release of epinephrine and cortisol in the blood, loss of access to higher cortical brain function (thinking), agitation, anxiety, hypervigilance, and often a “crash” as we come down off the dysregulated nervous system state. Many symptoms and “diagnoses” such as anxiety, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, phobias, addiction, etc. include activation of fight or flight, which when triggered often, result in hypervigilance and increased susceptibility to other triggers. When this happens, our mental health overall degrades and we get stuck in a detrimental feedback loop.
Solution: Engage in a daily mindfulness practice and learn self-calming skills through somatic awareness and relaxation skills to shift mind and body into a parasympathetic nervous system state (which is the antidote to sympathetic arousal).
3. Sleep
It is not an overstatement to say that sleep deprivation is probably the single greatest controllable threat to human health and performance. Research links insufficient sleep to changes in virtually every major domain of human functioning, including cognition, emotional regulation, mental health, physical health, immune function, metabolism, relationships, work performance, and long-term disease risk. As sleep deprivation relates to emotional and mental health, research clearly shows that it correlates with Increased irritability, frustration, and impatience, reduced positive emotions, enthusiasm, and enjoyment, greater emotional reactivity and difficulty recovering from upsetting experiences, reduced frustration tolerance and impulse control, increased anxiety and stress sensitivity, less accurate interpretation of emotional expressions and social cues, and greater difficulty regulating emotional responses during conflict.
Solution: Commit to choices that support sleep, including a “sleep hygiene” regimen.
Summary
It may sound too simple, but finding emotional authenticity, downshifting out of an aroused, sympathetic nervous system state, and getting enough sleep will address a whole lot of what ails us emotionally and psychologically.
* Note that as effective as these approaches are for supporting mental health in many situations, there are many circumstances that require more targeted, specific interventions. Only a formal evaluation by a professional mental health provider can determine what interventions are appropriate in any given circumstance.