What are some things that impact us on a mental health level? What changes the way we act towards people or at home? What impacts our emotions? How do you feel?
As I ask these questions some of you might have been able to answer them, but others might have been left with an uncomfortable feeling. The questions themselves got simpler and simpler as they continued, but the answers, the answers got harder. Now a question, that seems simple enough, like “how do you feel”, is a question that we teach young children to answer, usually in the form of pictograms or journal entries, something concrete and visual that will help them understand their own feelings. However, as we age, we are left expected to answer the question with a simple word, but that is definitely not the case. There is never just one answer when a question is related to feelings; nonetheless, we are still in the mindset that it is. We are left confused, because we do feel more than one emotion at a time, but are and never were given the tools to handle it. We are taught how to handle each emotion at a time, but life is not as linear as we want it to be and how we handle each emotion, does not help us to handle them all at once. Without these tools our minds become overwhelmed with the information that it is being forced to process. And at that point, what do you think is going to happen?
I went to a psychology lecture once, and it was years ago, I don’t remember the name or the person presenting, but I do remember them saying that humans weren’t supposed to know what is going on everywhere else in the world. Humans weren’t supposed to see, hear and share all the terrible, tragic events happening in the world. The human mind did not build itself to cope with that much stress and anxiety. Now if we think about it, we see terrible, awful, saddening material on a regular basis and if we are being completely honest, it has to be significantly awful for us to stop and read it, for us to not scroll by. One valuable moment in that lecture was when they said not to feel bad about scrolling past it, not to feel like a terrible human being, as if you don’t care; it is our natural reaction to not process this stressful information in front of us, if we took in all the information that is happening around the world, all the tragic events, our mind did not build itself to cope with that, it would crash. It does not have the tools to be able to process all that anxiety in one sit down, so it blocks it, it doesn’t allow us to process everything, because we wouldn’t be able to survive. Now this was a lecture and I am sure there are plenty of professionals who might have different opinions, different evidence and theories, but this one set well with me on an emotional level.
So, how do you feel? Does that mean that our mind did not build itself to handle all these emotions coming at us at once? I can’t answer that, I’m a coach, I have techniques and strategies, but I don’t feel confident answering a scientific, evolutionary based question, I am not certified. I can tell you what I think. I do think that we put too much stress and anxiety on ourselves in everyday life; I do think that we expect more from ourselves than we should, not because we aren’t capable, but because it will have a negative impact on our minds in the end; I do think that we don’t take enough time for ourselves during the day, to do something we enjoy; I do think that by not decompressing we are creating a build up of emotions and that is what our mind cannot handle and why we can’t answer the question.
So, how do you feel?