When to Know if I Should Seek Help: Mental Health and Stigma in Society Part 1 of 2
- Logan Holmes
- Jan 22
- 6 min read
We can’t begin to answer the question of “how do I know I should ask someone for help?” until we are able to answer the question of “what is mental health and where do I fit in?” This may sound like a daunting or vague question to try to answer, but wanting to educate ourselves about what mental health is, is taking those first steps. My hope is that reading on can give you some better understanding of why you might feel like you do, that you are not alone, and that it is okay to seek help - you’ve already made it this far, try to keep going. In Part 2 we will learn more about what therapy is and how we can benefit from it.
“Is it normal to be this exhausted? I can’t afford another day off.”
“I just don’t really want to go. Does that make me depressed?”
“Why does it feel so hard to get on the same page with my girlfriend?”
“How can I help my friend? He’s been inside for days now doing nothing.”
“Why is it so hard to get what I want?”
These are not uncommon thoughts, this is a byproduct of stigma around mental health. Stigma is a societal pressure that makes us feel like “I should keep this to myself. Other people don’t feel the way that I do now.” Yet in fact, at any given moment, nearly half of US residents aged 18-29 years old experience symptoms of anxiety in any given month. And it’s deeper than just symptoms - a third of every American will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. But what is anxiety, and how do I know if I have it? And why is it important to even know? We have to dig in past the top layer to get to the root. This might even cause some of us some uncomfortable feelings or thoughts, when we are tasked with being asked to be vulnerable enough to ask these questions.
Well, if so many people are experiencing similar things though, it must be important to at least ask why. And here comes the why - it’s stress. How many of us have experienced stress? I would bet that this number would be closer to 100%. But this reality makes the topic of stress sound trivial. Sometimes there isn’t much comfort in knowing that everyone has the chance that they feel like I do - sometimes we want to feel like our feelings or experiences live on an island, because this might give them more (or less) meaning and control over our lives, and thus make them easier to leave alone.
But stress is here to stay, and understanding what stress is exactly can be vital in understanding mental health, and even in how to seek support. It is no coincidence that 4 out of every 5 American adults say that the uncertainty of the future is a serious concern of theirs and is impacting their levels of stress. It can be easy to try to be future-focused in our fast paced lives, thinking about what we need to accomplish by tomorrow, who we are trying to take care of, where we need to be, and what we need to do. It would make sense then that one plus-side of understanding mental health is realizing the importance of slowing ourselves down. This is much easier said than done though, and can feel like a big task. There will be more on activities to help yourself slow down, in part 2 of this post.
What can stress feel like? Stress can cause a ton of different things to happen to your body - this is why I include the verbiage of “bodily feelings” too when this post talks about learning stress’ impact on our brains learning. If you may be experiencing stress too often, it can give you: high blood pressure, irritability, tightness in your jaw, bloating in your gut, headaches, tightness (can you feel it if you let your shoulders fall down?), and more. When it comes to doing things, it can make you: avoid doing things you like, lose sleep or have trouble falling asleep, overindulge in unhealthy foods or substances, put tension in relationships, and more. Stress can also be a good thing, though - like how having someone to push you just outside of your comfort zone is the best way to learn new things. This is healthy stress. This article is not saying to avoid all stress-inducing activities, but encouraging us to learn to differentiate the kinds of stress and begin to recognize when we are too stressed too often.
“So now what? I’m stressed. Stress is a normal part of life, and I can’t just stop keeping up with my demands.”
“Yes, and”. The point of this article isn’t to argue that we should try to just stop feeling stress, or to weigh how stressed we might feel compared to others. Understanding that we are not alone is a big step toward shrinking stigma around having mental health symptoms and wanting to seek support. By not feeling isolated, and by trying to have vulnerable and emotional conversations about our shared reality, we can begin to allow ourselves to feel better or find help. What is key is how stress impacts our ability to function - and there is no way to work around this reality, though we may deny it by trying to “push through” tough times without help. When we learn how stress impacts our daily functioning, we are learning more about why we are thinking and feeling the way we do. Then we can begin to accept or change those thoughts and feelings for the better.
The brain is considered the place where a lot of our positive, but also negative thinking occurs. But we can also feel how these thoughts translate into our bodies, through the experience of stress. Stress is a gas pedal that can accelerate the speed and direction of these thoughts. In fact, sometimes, the experience of stress can be ingrained in our brains to the point where we cannot control some of our responses to things that happen to and around us. Think about flinching when you hear a loud noise, or when a snake slithers past you - you almost can’t help but to react, like a reflex. Think about something else that might make you flinch, or maybe you don’t even want to think about it. Our past experiences can change how we think and react to similar and new experiences, by changing the way our brains work. When we experience stress too often, our brains are too busy learning how to adapt and survive, rather than learning how to identify and express our feelings or thoughts.
Stress can change our brain, and it can happen from when we are an infant all the way through our lives. You might not remember if your mother dropped you as a baby or left you to go hungry - but your brain and body can remember. Stress can transcend space and time and things that happened long ago, big or small, and can reach into the present to impact our outcomes in situations. It is not uncommon for us to mislabel emotions related to stress based on our emotional identity. This means that sometimes we mislabel our symptoms because stress has prevented our brains from learning how to identify or express our emotions or “gut feelings”. It is easier to believe that our marital problems, our unhappiness, or our workplace problems are simply because we are “angry” or “sad”, or even by blaming others by thinking “if YOU just did [fill in the blank] differently, then I wouldn’t feel/think/do THIS.” The real culprit is stress, and how it’s changed our brain and our ability to feel.
But there is still lots of hope for us, no matter where we come from. We can defeat stigma by having vulnerable conversations about how we are feeling and by understanding we are not alone - we all have some experience of stress. We can reconnect with our brains by learning how stress affects our bodies and our thinking. And we can begin to build upon our abilities to rewire our brains and accept some of our thoughts, feelings, and learn better ways to communicate our feelings.
So far, we have learned about the importance of stigma, the universal experience of stress, and how stress impacts our brains. In the next post following this, we will explore some ways to help ourselves, how to know if therapy is “right for me”, some of the different ways therapy happens and what to expect by going to therapy, and how to benefit from therapy. We are all at different starting places, and therapy can address our needs by meeting us where we are at.
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References:
Any anxiety disorder. (n.d.). National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder
APA Stress in America 2020 Survey Screening Questions. (2020). [Dataset]. In PsycEXTRA Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1037/e500632022-001
Stress effects on the body. (2023, March 8). https://www.apa.org. https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/body
Facts & Statistics | Anxiety and Depression Association of America, ADAA. (n.d.). https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics#:~:text=NIMH:%20Panic%20Disorders.,to%20be%20affected%20than%20men
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