Communication Basics: What does it Mean to be Healthy versus Unhealthy?

We assume we know the meaning of healthy.  Some psychologists claim that there is no contrast between healthy and unhealthy, there is only a continuum.  In that case, I suppose a bad grade doesn't ever mean failure, but only a grade that is lower than someone else's grade.  The idea of having only a continuum sounds a bit suspicious.  In that case, you can be declared mentally healthy if you are better than schizophrenic.  I hope I grade better than that.  Just because I don't have multiple personalities shouldn't mean that I am healthy.  So what is it to meet the grade of being mentally healthy?  That is a great question we are going to explore and test.  

In October 2015, I finished a book titled, Mental Health for Everyone: For Making Good Choices.  In the title is a summary in seconds of what the book is all about.  All of the words are relatively clear though a person might not know the precision that the title has in it's choice of words.  It is my shortest statement of the point of the book.  

There is one word though that is not real clear as to definition.  It grabs attention, but alludes our grasp.  It is the word - healthy.  It is, according to a dictionary, to be in good health or to be not sick or injured.  How do we measure good health when it comes to the mind - the mental part of ourselves?

I think it is actually fairly clear to me now.  I think the grading system in the school hints at a pretty good way to score mental health.  You can fall into a continuum of healthy to a degree, but there is also a point where we say someone has passed a lowest measure or someone has failed to make that lowest grade.   

I think a person can have a passing grade of health while not being fully healthy.  Likewise one can have a failing grade of unhealthy even while they are not fully unhealthy. In school, I was lucky to make the passing grade a number of times, but that didn't mean I was necessarily as mentally healthy as my grades seemed to indicate.  

Here is the most dramatic example in my life.  While I was getting on the Dean's list in college, my mind was suffering not thriving.  I won't bore people with the details, but if the measure of being on the Dean's List means high intelligence or smarts, then why did it happen that at the very time I reached a pinnacle of smarts that my mind was traveling in the opposite direction at the same time? A smart mind should be a help towards health and not be a hindrance, right?    

Since Sept 2014, I have known what caused my mind to begin to fail the grade even while getting high grades.  I didn't have a way of thinking that fit my mind's natural way of thinking. Some of the way that I had been taught to think, didn't bring peace of mind, but anguish of mind. I was thinking in ways that were too heavy, too restless, too difficult, and too foggy to find peace of mind.  It was too hard.  Or sometimes too things to travel to the opposite extremes.  .   

Then when I sat down to write about mental health for 2 months in August and September of 2014, peace of mind for me came together in 4 diagrams that to this day give me more peace than I ever had previously. The peace of mind I have now matches more with being a cheerful five year old.

The central idea of being mentally healthy is that one has to reach a certain level and column on my 4 x 4 diagrams on page xvi to be healthy.  I call it the rule of 76%.  You have to get past just 3 x 3 (75%).  Likewise I think a passing grade in each level or column could also be the rule of 76%.  

There is one other aspect of my book that is very important.  Martin Luther King once said the first step was more important than being able to see the rest of the staircase, if my memory serves me right.  My book says that is not healthy.  What is healthy is taking that first step knowing at least in a shadowy view where the stairs take you in the end.  In this case the books says we start at square 1 as an interval and end at square 64.  

Now, not all of us are called to lead at or get to interval 64.  We can stop ourselves somewhere before that point.  But what is not optional is the need for respect for those who keep going on to higher and higher heights.  No respect for the higher intervals is not any more healthy than a bench presser not being respectful of another weight lifting who lifts more and with more repetitions.  

So that is my definition of healthy.  Hit 76% to pass as healthy.  75% or less would be unhealthy. Likewise someone who says necessary knowledge all ends at high school (or God forbid in kindergarten) is unhealthy.  Let's communicate clearly through numbers.  

We need real mental health in the United States.  We need to measure it accurately.  In my next entry, I will offer a test of mental health.  Thank you. 

To Your Better Mental Health,

Jon 

  

Communication Basics: When Excess Means Too Much of a Good Thing

There are many good things that can be destroyed by excess.  An apple is a good thing, but a diet of only apples is not.  Protein is a good thing, but just hamburgers at McDonald's for one's entire diet is not!  You get the point.  Well, I want you to get to point about a set of excesses in the case of mental health and not just physical health.

My book on mental health, Mental Health for Everyone, deals a lot with excesses and how to beat the problem of excess. It deals with it through the principle of intervals.  One gets bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter little by little, moment by moment, step by step, and bit by bit.  The attainments that are every child's dream - to become bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter, don't occur overnight except in fairy tales but they can begin that night.  So my approach in this piece will be to get at the basics of defeating excesses!

Let's bulldoze them down together, shall we?   There are four major sets of excesses.  They are:

1) expert excess or amateur excess

2) manic depression excess or procrastination-sleep excess

3) easy street excess or difficulty street excess

4) know everything excess and know nothing excess

You probably have not heard of some of these under these names, but I would guess everyone has experienced these excesses whether it be at school, at work, at play, or at a religious gathering.

Let's deal with each one, one at a time, starting with the first one.  As I deal with each I will be more specific about each generalized grouping.


Expert excess I call "expertitis".  It has a close cousin, a fellow excess, called "amateuritis".  They both fail to lift a light weight more than previous lifts that is necessary to get bigger.  Excess expertise fastens too heavy a load on people's backs.  Excess amateurism fastens too light of a load on people's backs.  They both look foolish, yet day after day the king doesn't realize he's wearing no clothes!  We want people's minds to grow into a greater understanding - it is just that it has to happen little by light to remain light so that people reach a bigger understanding.  The excesses make understanding smaller.  We need to change this in terms of quantity and quality from both excesses.  

Manic-depression excess is what it sounds like.  It is both too high and too low.  It goes outside actual human limitations.  It has a close cousin, a fellow excess, called procrastination-slowness.  The latter pair is my own creation.  Isn't it ironic that on the internet I can plenty of articles on manic-depression and on bipolar that are sicknesses, but I could not find an article on what is its healthy opposite nor on its close cousin of excess?  I had to go to other sources than psychology for a serious concern about being a procrastinator or being too slow - a slow poke.  You find this in the business world primarily. This is interesting because the success of high technology has led us into a steady diet of fast and steady.  Also interesting is that a child's fairy tale has taken hold in psychological circles.  It is part of Aesop's fables and it is called, The Tortoise and the Hare.  This story's fabled moral is a steady diet of "slow and steady wins the race".  Not according to the internet and the rest of technology!  The excesses of both stories - Aesop's and the internet's - are woven into too much of our thinking.  We are people that should be fast and variable - able to rest, sprint, run, or walk depending on the distance and time.  We aren't doing this!  We need to break free in terms of placement and timing from both excesses.


Easy excess can be called easy street.  Difficult excess, its close cousin, can be called difficult street. When it comes to increments it should be easy, but this should not lead to an avoidance of difficulty.  Eventually in our jobs over time, we can handle more difficult processes than we could at first.  If we try to master everything in the beginning, it all becomes difficult and then some even quit.  In other cases, employees can be with a company for years and never master the harder parts of a job.  It should be that we are moving from easy to easy step by step, but not all in one step and not with the end goal that we cannot master hard things.  The greats make the difficult look easy.  Look at your greatest musical artists and at your best athletes - they make even the difficult look easy - so it is both and not excess!  We need to free ourselves from the popular approaches to methods and purposes where we too one day can make the difficult look easy.


The I know everything mentality and its close cousin, I know nothing mentality are both dangerous.  We have got people who run around claiming to know what they don't know.  I see this a lot with predictions of the future. Some things you can know about tomorrow given that certain conditions remain constant, but you don't know that they necessarily will.  There are people who claim to know the end of the earth.  I thought we we human beings who don't know everything?  Having said that though, we also like to play at knowing nothing.  Really?  You really don't know.  Some of this play borders on pathetic.  If we've had teachers, we ought to know some things as do others, we ought to know things others don't, we ought to not know things others do know, and there ought to be things neither person knows; but this last category is only one of four - not the whole deal.  We need to be learning new things in terms of things and kinds and not just be stuck with two old bad cousins.


It is time to close up this discussion.  The point in all of it is to be healthy by avoiding excess.  This article for example can only be so long.  We need to avoid the excesses of experts and amateurs and step up our understanding little by little.  We need to avoid the excesses of the Manic -Depression and the Procrastination-Slow and step up our inspiring moment by moment.  We need to avoid the excesses of Easy Street and Difficult Street (it might be also called Baker Street with the difficult hero, Sherlock Holmes, in room 212B).  We also need to avoid the excesses of know-it-all and know-it-not at all and develop the captivating bit by bit  If you avoid the communication of this article, then please be sure it is not because of one of these excesses.  Improve your ability to listen and then speak  - to communicate - through excess avoidance.  We need to change excesses, break from excesses, free ourselves from excesses, and discover some new things.    Remember too many apples is not a good thing for your diet.  Your mind has a healthy diet too!  Get mental health and then get happy!


Sincerely,

Jon