About Being Happy and Mentally Healthy

These several days, I’ve gathered numerous data on how well oneself understand what does mental health or mentally healthy means. Gathering more than two hundred qualitative answers, the majority aged 19 to 20 years old with an average of 23 years old, this isn’t about what’s the right definition and the wrong ones.

It is just a simple curiosity regarding how well Indonesian youths understand what does it mean to be mentally healthy.

After working with the data, it could be said that most of them are using “peaceful of the soul”; “ability to control emotions, moods, and thoughts”; also, they feel that mentally healthy meaning they could control themselves so that they feel peace, in order to be happy. In another way, when one is happy, one could achieve a mentally healthy state. Interestingly, according to several studies about ‘happiness’ one that we’ve always taught since we’re little ‘to seek for happiness’ ‘and they lived, happily, ever after’, is the otherwise.

Do you know something?

Humans aren’t designed to be happy.

William Berry wrote in Psychology Today (2019) that the human brain has a negativity bias, according to studies of the brain, the brain activity has demonstrated that it responds actively to the negative images rather than the positive or neutral images. The importance to be aware, acknowledge, and choosing how we react becoming essential. Here’s the thing, to seek for balance, that’s not cliche. That is life.

Let me share a bit of my story in order to explain this better: I always feel like I’ll run out of joy and happiness. If I cried aloud this hour, I might feel better afterward and vice versa. The reality isn’t always like that, but I learn how to seek balance. Another experience is when I think of an activity that I did, I questioned how it will affect on how others perceive me. I overthink what would other people react to it.

I learn how to deal with that lately, it is to seek for a balance thought. So, with every negative thought coming, I will try to reask and confront the thought and if it’s not enough (if I still have the negative thought), I’ll try to look for a positive point of view. First thing I do is to acknowledge that not everything have to be positive or negative. Just like health. It is not in the polar A or polar B. It is in the middle balance if you could imagine a spectrum of horizontal line. So, when feeling happy, in my humble opinion, it feels like we are secure already. Ah, all in place!

The ‘contentment’ that we may need to encounter could manifest in the feeling of ‘enough’, or a state in which according to our own dictionary is ‘enough’ no buts, or other promises, or false expectations.

We undergo a standard of life in achieving 100% all day, all along to be said we are progressing. Are you realizing 1% at a time, or even 0,088xx% is also a progress? The feeling of enough during the process to seek balance, then to move on, is what we need to seek. The happiness (or not) could be the outcome, but we are the one putting the whole magnificent effort.

That shall say something, right?

What say you? I’d like you to answer this quietly first..

Okay, so why it ‘still’ feels like something is missing? Turns out, the negative states help to motivate us to change as our brain would see fit.

So why we forced nature and always seek for happiness?

Tell me you’re not. But the truth is, we seek for happiness everywhere we go, in a person, inside us, thinking how could we bottle those happiness and happy feelings? I begin to analyze it with my bounded rationality. I begin to come up with undone thoughts of happiness, or being happy, or to achieve happy memories/thoughts, it is not a constant state. It is present with as much as sadness, satisfaction, and gratitude. That comes in and goes away. Furthermore, there are a bunch of spectrums that we couldn’t control or name. So many variables!

What if, what we seek further is not happiness? It is a state we are in full control for the things (we ought not to be having control of, such as the weather, or the future, or how people will react to us)?

The most common thing we do: Putting happiness in others and eventually we seek something out of it. We believe we give so we must take all the time. What’s left to us is false expectations and one-sided bounded judgement.

We couldn’t, of course, put boundaries in everything. That would be a dull world without the saying; “Human can only plan but God do the work”. Let’s say, within the many variables and the state of being mentally healthy, one cannot really control everything, everyone, doing anything.

We can do something, control several things, make interactions with several people, and that may be enough.

Maybe not…..

We have to have a control our own mind. It is remarkable how we could have full control of our selves. Carolin Müller, a clinical psychologist who was interviewed by Insider (Lindsay Dodgson, 2019) argued to have control over the mind means the emotions do not have a hold over oneself and hence cannot tell one what to do. Because when we are in control of how we want to behave and react, we use our mind as a tool to help us make sense of the world.

Basically, we are irrational beings. So by using the mind to be able to process things are beneficial. On the other hand, we’re also a complex being because we could feel things and we have sets of emotions and moods. That it is okay to not always be happy and positive all the time.

We ought to feel things! The pleasant and unpleasant, the neutral, the emptiness, the strong feeling.

All in all, we need to work on how we must use it best.

“Being happy does not mean you are no longer insecure of yourself. It does not mean achieving a lot that you do not get jealous of anyone. Being happy is not about being perfect. You can be happy but still get sad or worried sometimes. I’ve learned that being happy can look like you are facing a lot of challenges yet you still have the ability to smile and the courage to go on – because you have learned to love yourself, as well as you have learned to love this life”. (Jerico Silvers)

in silence,

you might hear your conscience.

it might be louder than the human voices you could hear through the ears.

in your happy state,

sadness,

grief,

celebratory moments,

all within the right portion,

maybe it is time to embrace it all.

there’s no need to force the nature,

to always be positive,

to always stay negative,

to always be in between.

maybe all we need is to be where the universe wants us to be.

but for now, we could work with whatever serving us,

whichever lead us to growth,

through the help of others at the right time.

if not, once one could be in the silence.

it could be painful, but it is a journey.

it could lead to a sense of gratitude in doing nothing.

one journey that cannot be compared,

or graded,

or claimed by others.

it is yours.