- 12.5% of adults ages 18 and older in the US have regular feelings of worry, nervousness, or anxiety
- 16.1% of children ages 12-17 have current, diagnosed anxiety
- 4.5% of adults ages 18 and older in the US have regular feelings of depression
- 8.4% of children ages 12-17 have current, diagnosed depression
- From 2013 to 2023, age-adjusted prevalence of adults with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition increased from 5.3% to 7.4%
- Younger adults aged 18-39 had the biggest 10-year increase in rates of cognitive impairment due to a physical, mental, or emotional condition (5.1% to 9.7%)
What is Mental Health?
Mental health can be thought of as your well-being in cognitive capacity, or things your brain can do. Things like memory, concentration, organizing, planning, reasoning, processing speed (time it takes to mentally process information and react), working memory (ability to hold and process temporary information), and decision making all fall under the umbrella of mental health. Another term for many of these processes is “executive functioning”. This cognitive capacity also involves your ability to reason about what’s happening to you and why you are having an emotional experience, and works with your emotional understanding to problem-solve what to do next.
When our minds are stuck in a non-productive loop of worrying, this cognitive load takes up resources in your working memory that prevents you from effectively learning, taking in information, and problem solving. Furthermore, when your emotions become too strong, the thinking-and-reasoning parts of the brain become disconnected from the emotional processing parts of the brain, which leads to more impulsive, survival-based responding rather than careful decision making based on potential benefits and consequences.
Areas of your life that can be impacted by your mental health include learning new things, solving problems at school or at work, keeping track of homework or work projects/tasks, and staying focused despite environmental distractions. Things like stress, strong emotions, poor quality sleep, and health concerns can negatively impact your mental health and make it much more challenging to accomplish what you want to in school, at work, and in your personal and social life.
What is Emotional Health?
Emotional health can be thought of as your processing of emotions. Emotional health involves emotional awareness (ability to pay attention to and identify feelings in your body, thoughts in your head, accurately name the emotional experience), emotional resilience (ability to experience strong and/or uncomfortable emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down), emotional regulation (ability to change the intensity of an emotion, tolerate an emotion, or change it to another emotion), and empathy (ability to understand someone else’s emotional experience). Emotional health supports you in being able to experience emotions without getting stuck in an emotion, being able to experience strong, scary, uncomfortable, or unwanted emotions without getting overwhelmed, and being able to have strong emotions while still staying in control of your actions.
Areas of your life that can be impacted by your emotional health include responding well to daily hassles, maintaining satisfying relationships, having a balanced sense of self, and being able to experience frustrations in school or work without giving up. The same factors that impact mental health also can impact emotional health as well.
How are Mental Health and Emotional Health related?
Mental and emotional health are deeply intertwined and impact your psychological well-being together. For example, many people with depression or anxiety also experience difficulties with concentration, problem-solving, decision-making, and processing speed that noticeably impact their daily life. Neurotypes such as ADHD and ASD that tend to have more struggles with executive function also experience difficulties with understanding one’s emotions, responding to emotions while they are less intense, and regulating intense emotions. Mental and emotional health go hand-in-hand to support your well-being in responding to life’s daily stresses and major life struggles.
See below for some common examples of how mental and emotional health interact:
Mental and Emotional Health Impacted by Depression
With depression, there is a mental component that involves someone having negative beliefs about themselves, negative beliefs about others, and negative beliefs about the future. Your brain preferentially pays attention to and processes negative or upsetting information and also tends to get stuck in negative thinking loops. All of this automatic cognitive processing uses up mental resources, making it harder to focus and redirect attention to where it’s wanted. It’s also harder to remember times when you felt differently, making it seem like the depressed mood and your negative thoughts are all you’ve ever experienced. This negative mental framework impacts how people interpret events in their lives and social interactions, which contribute to emotional experiences such as sadness, numbness, emptiness, and difficulty feeling happy or interested in things. The more you feel like this, the harder it is to motivate yourself to do things like keep up relationships, keep going to school, and engage in your hobbies and interests. This self-isolation and disruption in your normal routine also reinforces negative beliefs that you have about yourself, future, and world.
Mental and Emotional Health Impacted by Anxiety
Our brains are adapted to scan for potential threats in our environment and respond automatically (e.g., fight, flight, freeze, fawn). When we have anxious thoughts about something, our brains are focused on potential threat or harm, even when it is emotional, social, or self-esteem harm rather than physical harm. Our thinking process towards these situations can be overly focused on the negatives while discounting the positives, on only the worst possible interpretation or outcome, blaming ourselves for things out of our control, or assuming ahead of time that it will fail or other people will have a negative reaction. Common emotions that come up can include fear and worry, along with uncomfortable bodily sensations such as shortness of breath, chest tightness, stomachache or headache, nausea, and muscle tension. The mental and emotional components of anxiety often come together to create a flee/avoidance response, in which people find temporary relief by escaping a situation. This can look like staying home from school or work, avoiding going to a social event, not speaking up in class or in a work meeting, or even procrastinating by doing housework or scrolling on your phone to avoid starting a project.
In the short-term, we feel better when we avoid things we are anxious about, but this relief is temporary and may even create more serious problems later on. In the long-term, we also teach our brains that we are not mentally or emotionally resilient enough to go through the experience and that the main way to regulate ourselves is to avoid things. The anxiety-inducing situation becomes mentally more and more insurmountable and we may even have stronger emotional responses as a result. This in turn can cause us to develop negative thoughts about ourselves, negative expectations of what we are capable of and how things will go for us, and contribute to emotions such as shame or disappointment that leads to further avoidance and feelings of helplessness.
What helps Mental and Emotional Health?
The following principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can support you in increasing your mental and emotional flexibility and resilience.
- Mindfulness of the present: practicing nonjudgmental present-focused awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations helps us develop better attentional control, focus more what is important that’s happening in front of us, reduce the amount of time we spend non-productively lingering in the past or future, and free more mental space by letting thoughts and emotions pass on their own instead of trying to force them away or cling onto them
- Cognitive defusion: learning to see thoughts and strong emotions as temporary events in your mind instead of a command or absolute truth that you have to follow helps you to step back, feel less emotionally controlled, and more able to think because you are not busy fighting or minimizing what’s happening
- Self-as-context: learning to separate yourself from your thoughts and emotions instead defining yourself solely by them (“I’m a failure” vs “I am having thoughts that I’m a failure”; “I’m a bad person because I got angry” vs “I noticed I felt angry and I noticed that my mind made an automatic judgment of that emotion”) helps you shift your perspective beyond the rigid labels we give ourselves, be more flexible and understand that emotions and thoughts are temporary, and reduces the power that upsetting thoughts or emotions have on dictating our behavior
- Acceptance: accepting that you will have thoughts and emotions that feel upsetting or unpleasant instead of fighting them, denying them, or trying to never experience them allows you to coexist with these experiences instead of being ruled by them, which frees up mental and emotional energy to focus on doing things that matter to you
- Clarifying values: identifying values that you have for how you want to be as a person and live your life helps to clarify if stress and conflict is coming from a disconnect between how you are acting vs what your values say you should do, others’ expectations for your vs your true values, or the values of your current work, social, or school environment vs your own values
Committed action: taking concrete actions that are authentically guided by your values involves changing behavior patterns that are ineffective, allowing yourself to have emotional and thought experiences that might be uncomfortable but ultimately bring you closer to your values and goals, being mentally and emotionally flexible instead of being rigidly stuck in expectations of how you should think and feel
References:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/mental-health.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK608531/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40991889/
https://drdansiegel.com/hand-model-of-the-brain/
