Doing good things vs. Avoiding bad things with Mental Health
Just had a random insight this morning of something I knew I kind of understood, but I guess it really clicked this morning.
It’s about doing good things vs. avoiding bad things when it comes to taking care of your mental health. At first glance, they seem the same. If you’re doing good things, then by default you are avoiding bad things happening. While the two concepts seem to be one in the same, they actually make a world of difference when you want to be mentally healthy.
It comes down to intentions. To give an example, if you are busy with your life, going to school, going to work, seeing friends, being with your significant other, among other things, are you focused on avoiding being homeless, or are you just focused on living your life? Thinking of it from the opposite perspective, what if you lived your life and did all the things in your life with the focus of avoiding homelessness? You went to your job and it’s been x amount of days you’ve avoided homelessness. You make a few friends and develop relationships so you have a place to crash if you lose your job to avoid homelessness. You go to school so you can get a better job to better avoid homelessness.
You’re still doing positive things, but you’re doing them with an intense focus on getting rid of homelessness. Likely because you’re scared of the consequences and uncertainties of being homeless. Yet, by living this way, you invite those feelings into your life all the time in some fashion.
To give a real example that happened to me, years ago I had a bout of overwhelming anxiety that led to me vomiting. It was not pleasant, but it was scary to me that I was capable of getting so anxious that I would vomit out of nowhere. But it happened and eventually that became a distant memory. It happened about two years ago, but I noticed that I didn’t spend the time since then trying to avoid having that happen, I spent it focused on things I DID want to do. I didn’t hold on to the days I avoided a panic attack, I didn’t center my life and actions around not having a certain outcome happen, I centered my life around what I wanted to see happen. HUGE difference.
A similar thing happened this morning, and that’s when I realized that if you define your life, goals, and activities around preventing something bad from happening or avoiding a certain outcome, you mentally have to keep that fear/uncertainty/outcome around in some way. Your brain wants to make sure you’re avoiding that thing, so it keeps that idea in your conscious. It’s trying to be helpful, but it is inherently stressful constantly living to try and make sure a thing DOESNT happen. Imagine if you walked around trying to make sure you never get cancer.
The brain might end up believing avoiding bad outcomes is the key to having good things happen. If you think about it from a cognitive-behavioral perspective, you are afraid of things because you’re afraid it will get in the way of your life and how you want to live it. But you can show your brain that you can live your life the way you want anyway. Your brain will stop giving you thoughts and ideas that aren’t relevant or meaningful to it, so if you are doing all the things you want to do anyway, your brain has no need to keep your fears around to make sure you’re avoiding them.
I feel like I really get this now. Centering your life around avoiding bad things makes bad things the center of your life. Your brain will throw all sorts of fears, anxieties, doubts, intrusive thoughts, and many other things at you throughout your life, but it’s all just stuff in your head that you can learn to accept as you focus on the things you want to do in life, and not the things you want to avoid.
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