Scars

There is a difference between fighting a disease and improving your health, whether we’re talking about mental or physical. Physically, it’s easier to understand. If you’re sick or injured, you need discrete, specific treatment, but you wouldn’t just take antibiotics or wear a cast all the time, hoping it would improve your overall health. If you wish to improve your baseline physical health, you need to live a healthier lifestyle – better diet, more physical activity, etc.

The same is true of mental health, but we don’t tend to acknowledge it. People can have trauma, grief, or anguish that needs to be healed, but the treatments that work for those aren’t the same as the treatments that will just make you happier or more satisfied with your life overall. If you suffer a specific traumatic event, for example, you should absolutely seek professional counseling, therapy, or the like to help you work past it. But if you’re just sad in general, the same type of professional service isn’t going to help you any more than wearing a cast will help you be physically healthier.

If you suffer a particularly grievous physical injury, you may have a scar long after you’re fully healed. Some scars are permanent, and that’s just the way it is. The same is true for mental health. If you suffer a particularly traumatic event, you may have the mental “scar” for the rest of your life, even after you’ve healed the actual trauma. But we mistake scars for current injuries frequently when discussing mental health, to the point where we often don’t acknowledge that mental injuries can be healed at all. We see a traumatic event as permanent damage, instead of something you can heal from.

This leads us to another type of error, which is believing that anything other than a high level of baseline happiness and contentment must be from specific traumas. People are sad, so they think they need to be “cured.” But being cured is not the same as being healthy. A person with no physical injuries or diseases can be very unhealthy if they live a physically unhealthy lifestyle. The same is true for your mental health. If you’re feeling sad, lethargic, or dissatisfied, that doesn’t mean you need to heal your trauma. It means you need to meditate more, get outside frequently, drink more water, meditate, spend time with your loved ones, and do purposeful work.

Lifestyle interventions and convalescence go hand in hand in maintaining our health, both physical and mental (which are of course also related). You will be injured or sick multiple times in your life, and when that happens, you should absolutely seek the appropriate curative care. But the rest of the time, you need to focus on the life choices that create a healthy mind and body, because “healthy” isn’t the default. You need to work for it.