Mental health is like physical health. It takes practice to make yourself healthier. You can’t eat potato chips and chocolate all day and expect to have your body be physically healthy. You can’t sit on the couch all day and expect your body to be fit. Likewise you can’t just sit there and expect your anxiety or your sadness or your grief to go away. You have to actively work on it. Some people are predisposed to being depressed or to having anxiety. And it is true that trauma shapes who we are. So you  have to take an active role in helping yourself feel better or it doesn’t get better. We all know that a diet pill doesn’t really work. It’s a temporary fix if it fixes anything at all and it always has side effects. We all know it’s a way of life that makes us healthy. This is the same with our emotional well-being. We don’t get to just to take a pill and expect that we’re going to feel better. Medication is helpful in many circumstances, just like one needs medication for fighting cancer or managing diabetes. However there is no pill that is going to make you feel happy or fulfilled, which is at the root our emotional well-being struggles. We have to stand up and recognize what we really want to be doing with our time, with our energy, and with people that we care about. We can choose to spend our time comparing ourselves to others and we will always fail. Or we can choose to notice the moments in our days that remind us of the fulfilling life that we are leading. This takes effort. It is, I promise you, more fulfilling to cook a healthy meal, clean your house, make your bed, or walk your dog than it is to binge watch Netflix,  scroll on TikTok ,or watch YouTube videos endlessly. I promise you this is not fulfilling you. But it is addictive just like chocolate cake is addictive to me and cigarettes are addictive to many and alcohol effects so many. Don’t be fooled. The people creating these things know it is addictive and are working hard to sell that to us in bigger and bigger ways every day. So the choice about your fulfillment and how you spend your time really is in your hands. What choice are you making?\

Holly Jedlicka, MSW, LISW-S