Good evening, everybody. How are y'all doing? Hope you're getting through the week well.

It's hump day. It's middle. In the traditional week, we're in the middle. So if things aren't going

swimmingly, time to maybe re-center, re-adjust, kind of settle into a different way of moving

through the rest of the week. May is mental health awareness month, so I'm really trying to zero in heavily

on what mental health is this week. We've been talking about it so far. And, you know,

throughout my sessions clinically, as I offer therapy still, I am reminded of some of the pitfalls

or misunderstandings or myths. And we talked about this a little bit yesterday and also the day before, but I wanted to just

reiterate quickly that remember, mental health is not the absence of sadness or anxiety or

frustration.

Mental health includes being depressed at times or anxious at times or sad at times.

Mental health is the ability to feel all of your feelings,

including the ones that we call bad, anxiety, depression, et cetera, et cetera. Mental health is not

only the ability to feel them, but to feel them deeply and fully, but also to self-regulate

around them. So again, their mere presence does not mean you're not mentally healthy. Their

presence means you are mentally healthy if you're able to self-regulate, deal with them

appropriately, drop down into them, but not be overwhelmed and not have them leaking out,

creating problems. That's when they become a little, quote-unquote, problematic or disordered.

And that's when we want to work on it. But, you know, I was working with someone today,

and they just were saying, you know, my mental health isn't great. I'm feeling really sad. And I said,

well, why is that meaning of mental health isn't great? Are we meant to just always have a painted

on smile? That's robotic. That's dehumanized. That's actually not mental health at all. That's toxic positivity. This idea that we should always be happy and smiling,

like, no, that's not real. I worry about people that are always happy. They're just not feeling

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