There’s something about good mental health that I think is often misunderstood.
A lot of people believe the goal is to have no more bad days. No more triggers. No more anxiety spirals. No more slipping back into old patterns. For some, it’s getting back to how I used to be. Feeling “normal” again. My old self.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except that it’s not realistic. There’s nothing wrong with you when you have a bad day or are in a bad mood. You’re going to have bad days. You’re going to be triggered. You’re going to find yourself in spirals.
More likely than not, you’re going to slip back into old patterns at some point when you’re tired, stressed, or overwhelmed. None of that means you failed. It means you’re human.
What true recovery looks like can also help set realistic expectations which, in the end, leads to better mental health. What is good mental health?
The version of mental health that gets sold to us, the idea that you can reach some permanent state of calm and ease if you just do the right things, is a myth. Progress isn’t linear. And the absence of hard moments shouldn’t be the finish line you’re aiming for.
We’d do people a better service if we normalized hard days, struggling, intrusive thoughts and then taught people how to move through them.
I’ve been a therapist for over 26 years, and I’ve never met a person who arrived at a place where they no longer had hard days. I haven’t gotten there myself either. What I’ve seen, in my clients and in my own life, is something different. People who feel better about their mental health aren’t the ones who stopped having bad moments. They’re the ones who got better at handling them when they showed up.
In my opinion, good mental health includes, but is not limited to, these three things:
- Noticing what’s happening faster
- Course-correcting faster
- Not berating yourself for having slipped up (or in general)
It’s certainly not perfection or even having a life without anxiety. (Anxiety is a normal, healthy emotion, after all.) It’s the ability to catch yourself sooner and treat yourself kindly while you do.
Not beating yourself is the part most people skip.
How to be easier on yourself
When you slip back into an old pattern, the internal commentary can be brutal. “Slipping back into old patterns” can look like:
- Saying yes when you’d promised yourself you’d say no.
- Reaching for your phone, the snacks, the wine, the scroll, the same coping behavior you’d been working on changing.
- Snapping at your kid or your partner in a way you swore you wouldn’t anymore.
- Spiraling into a worry loop you thought you’d gotten out of.
- Going back to checking, ruminating, avoiding, people-pleasing, or whichever pattern is yours.
When this happens, here’s what usually follows: the original behavior, plus a flood of self-criticism for having done the behavior.
I can’t believe I did that again. What’s wrong with me? I’ll never get this right. I’m such a mess.
You probably tell yourself this kind of talk is motivating. That if you weren’t this hard on yourself, you’d never get better. Self-criticism is what keeps you sharp, right?
It’s not.
The self-criticism isn’t motivating, it isn’t clarifying, and it isn’t helping you get back on track faster. It’s just more noise on top of whatever was already happening and turns your pain into suffering. (Yes, there is a difference!) It’s making an already hard situation worse and we’re trying to get out of the business of doing that. Good mental health is noticing the change in behavior (e.g the slip up), course-correcting faster without beating yourself up for slipping.
Ultimately, we’re learning how to Just Do Nothing™ with whatever feelings emerge when we change our behavior. How to stop being so hard on yourself when this happens.
Learning how to be easier on yourself is a skill. And by easier on yourself, I mean we want to be less harsh, less critical, less judgmental. It’s something you can learn by practicing. The more you practice, the better you’ll get.
Here’s how I think about it:
Notice it. Just notice. Not “notice and immediately analyze why I’m such a disaster.” Notice what happened without your judgement/story/interpretation of the situation. Name it without the editorial. I just snapped at my kid. I just spent two hours scrolling. I just spiraled. That’s the data. Just the facts ma’am. (Separating the facts of a situation from our story and interpretation is so important, I made it the first mental fitness skill in Just Do Nothing: A Paradoxical Guide to Getting Out of Your Way.
Skip the pile-on. This is the part to practice. Resist the urge to follow up the noticing with guilt, shame, or a full review of your character flaws. The pile-on doesn’t change what happened, and it makes the next right move harder.
Course correct. Take the next step toward what you actually want. Apologize if you need to, put down the phone, get up, and do the thing you’d planned to do. The goal isn’t to undo the slip. It’s to get back on the path as soon as you can.
Get curious instead of critical. If there’s something to learn, learn it. Were you running on no sleep? Were you missing a piece of the plan? Look at it the way you’d look at a client’s slip if a friend was telling you about it. With interest, not contempt.
Catching yourself in a hard moment without piling on guilt or shame is one of the most useful skills you can build. So this month, if you find yourself in a hard moment or realizing you’ve been doing that thing you were trying not to do, see if you can just notice it. Without the pile-on. Course correct, and keep going.