What is mental health

The approach often used in psychology is to focus on whats wrong, on the daises, create big diagnosis manuals to inventory all the diagnoses and symptoms. As well on various treatments that is supposed to fix what is "wrong", one thing that is massively undermined is to actually define what does it actually means to be mentally healthy. A quick Google search for mental health there is hardly any information that defines what mental health is, there is a lot information about various diseases.

It is impossible to live life without pain, failure and eventually death. Most people go through the ebbs and flows of life relatively easy without being paralyzed by the negativity that naturally comes in everyone life. While others get trapped in the negative aspects of life for extended periods.  

Mental health is the ability to transition, when you are being confronted with the three negative inescapable facts of life: pain, failure and death to the opposite of them: pleasure, success and life.

Chronic pain causes a big discrepancy between your emotions and your intentions, because your behavior is pretty much shaped by your emotions now your actions don't match the positive things you want to do for yourself and others. A great example of this is addiction there are so many people that struggle to give up various vices, but because they are in to much pain they always seem to relapse and return to square one.

Because of this discrepancy the mind now adapts and you have all kind of mechanism, like justification, the mental gymnastics we all do to make ourselves feel good when we do bad things. So your minds now becomes spited there is a part of you that wants to change and a part of you that wants to just keep going because of the immediate comfort you are receiving. In some severe cases some people will form various personalities as a cathartic form of dealing with the pain. This is what in psychology is called split personality syndrome.

The pain is what maintains the split in the mind, in order to change the behavior you have to address the emotions in this case emotional pain.

So what do you do about pain?

There is a misconception out there that says that you have to expose yourself gradually to pain in order to desensitize yourself to it. The purpose of pain is to help you avoid dangerous situation or potentially lethal, this is why it is impossible to desensitize yourself from it, the more you experience pain the more that pain is going to persist. Think of it like this if you have a sprained ankle walking on that ankle to desensitize yourself from the pain is not going to help, by walking on the ankle prematurely you are going to get injured even worse and experience even more pain.

Pain is always a transient experience, staying with the pain is going to make it persist and it requires willpower which eventually is going to lead to burn out and cause you to give up, avoiding the pain works as far as keeping you comfortable but you are pretty much wasting your life missing on important experiences. The most effective way i found to deal with pain is to go through it, if you ever had to get up on a stage in front of a crowd of people you might had experienced performances anxiety, as soon as you stepped on that stage your anxiety was pretty much over in seconds.

You don't wait for the pain to go away or run away from it, you go through it. If you wait it will persist if you run it will lower the quality of your life, by going through you actually eliminate the reason why you feel it in the first place.