Healthy as a Horse, Happy as a Clam

Let’s start with a quick exercise today. Very quick, I promise. Take a second after reading these instructions to do three things: 1) take one or two deep breaths, then; 2) keep your mouth closed and loosen your jaw. Let your teeth fall away from one another while keeping your lips gently sealed, then; 3) roll your shoulders forward and back a few times.  

What did you notice? These quick stress relief exercises are common—you’ve probably done them automatically when you’re aware of body tension. When I do this exercise I notice that I am almost always breathing shallowly, and the deep breaths feel like slowing down. I notice that I always have my jaw clenched, and loosening my bite opens up space and sensation in my head. I notice that much of the time, my shoulders creep toward my ears, another common way we hold stress in the body, and rolling the joints offers more comfort. 

I start us with the exercise to point out two things that will be helpful to keep in mind through the rest of the column today. First, we tend to only do stress relief exercises when feeling, well, actively stressed. In other words, something has become annoying, worrying, activating, or intense enough that we consciously feel stress in our bodies. Second, when we do this as a check-in exercise, even during times that we do not actively feel stressed, we likely still find symptoms of stress in our body. Many of us live in a low-level state of stress most of the time, but because it feels so normal, so everyday, we’ve stopped noticing the clenched jaws, the shallow breathing, and the hunched muscles.  

Today I’d like to talk about “Mental Health”—what it means and how we think about our own mental health and emotional well-being. What does it mean to be “in good mental health” anyway? For most of us, we only think about our mental health when we encounter problems, just as we only think about stress when we register discomfort in our brains and bodies. It may be after a first panic attack that we are motivated to think about what it feels like to be calm. It may be after months of a serious depressive episode that we strain to remember (or perhaps cannot even fathom) what it feels liketo experience pleasure or excitement. There is a sense that mental health is a normal, baseline experience of being human, and that the absence of symptoms is the marker of good mental health. Furthermore, there is a cultural narrative linking mental health with happiness, and which supports the assumption that the happiest people are also the most mentally healthy people.  

I’m going to make a quick argument refuting the idea that mental health is always a “normal baseline” for folks, blow up the idea that chronic happiness is the goal (or even remotely attainable), and then let’s talk about finding our own definitions and understandings of what personal mental health might look like for us as individuals. I suggest another round of deep breaths.

There is an ableist foundation to the concept of “normal” mental health, and it is worth recognizing and validating that we humans are all born with variation and difference in bodies and minds, some of which lends to great pleasure and creative ways of engaging with the world, and some of which causes discomfort, pain, or challenges. Just as we have limited control over many of our physical attributes, we often have limited control over emotional and cognitive experiences. This is why it can be so infuriating to receive well-intentioned advice about “fixing” mental health symptoms—how often do people in the middle of a clinical depressive episode have to tolerate friends and family suggesting things like: Exercise more! Have you thought about meditation? Did you take your SSRI today? As humans we will all have different personal baselines for our moods and these will likely change over the course of our lives. I also want to briefly address the notion of happiness being the high-marker of mental health. It’s not. 

Happiness, like other emotions, is a passing state, a response to things happening to us or around us, and it isn’t a sustainable mode of being over long periods of time. This may feel like playing with semantics, but I invite you to think about alternatives to “happiness” that are less about specific emotions and more about ways of existing—a sense of ease, feeling in-the-flow, recovering from hard experiences more quickly—as potential indicators of overall mental well-being. I recently learned that the phrase “happy as a clam” is actually a shortened version of the full expression: “happy as a clam at high tide.” I laughed out loud when I heard this, because it was so in line with the way I think of our psychological states! No clam—I assume—can be happy all the time, but it sure is easier when you’re in a safe, protected water space and the clam diggers and seagulls aren’t coming for you. 

So how do we come to understand our own mental health and what that looks like for us? One way, as discussed above, is to recognize what happens when we feel in poor mental health, and work our way backwards. I am, at my baseline, a pretty anxious person, and when I am experiencing increased symptoms, I notice lots of distractibility, speediness, a pressured need to get things done, and a building sense of worry that I am going to forget something important, hurt someone’s feelings, or mess things up. When I think about the opposite ends of the spectrum, I can conjure up moments in which I felt focused, slow and grounded, existing outside of time constraints, and generally unconcerned. These are not imaginary moments: they exist, and frequently. Still, I had to learn to notice them as they were happening, because otherwise they would just get subsumed into the category of “normal,” or “just the way things should be.” I invite you to spend some time working backwards from your symptoms in this way, not only to make more conscious those moments when you are in your emotional balance, but so that you can try to support more of those experiences. To be clear: just reminding myself to “slow down” is not going to move me out of an anxiety response once it has reached a certain level of intensity. However, if I can remember that slowness works for me just before I schedule another event on an already overbooked day, I may be able to make a different decision and offer myself emotional support by doing so. 

In the spirit of combating the “happiness trap,” I also invite you to think about what is happening when you feel at your very best, and really pay attention to what is happening in your mind and body when having these experiences. When I am feeling great, happiness is not always or even most often the primary emotion. I find that the ability to focus and a sense of ease best describe my more balanced states. I can be focused and frustrated (many days I question the decision to learn cello as an adult!) and I can feel ease while having a difficult conversation with a friend. For me, focus and ease are my companions in mental health, and although I am not in control of forcing those states, knowing what they are helps me set up the conditions that welcome those states, to the best of my abilities. It’s been a gamechanger.  

I also find it a great joy to learn more about other people’s internal experiences when they feel good. In my experience, working as a therapist was as much about helping people explore their own, personalized understanding of “feeling good” as it was to try to help them feel “less bad.” With this curious stance, I also invite you to have conversations with friends or confidantes about what you have learned about yourself and what they know about their own emotional spectrums as a way of connecting. 

I wish you all your own, individual, very particular versions of finding focus and ease, and may you all have at least a few moments of feeling just as happy as those clams at high tide. Until next time, friends.