Difference between our mental health and emotional health

I have written several posts about different topics related to mental health and emotional health. Both are extremely important for improving our quality of life. People often confuse that mental health and emotional health are the same. Yes, they are related, but not the same. To have good emotional health you need to have good mental health, but just because you do not have mental health-related issues that doesn't mean your emotional health is also good. Social stigma associated with mental health still persists, we have made great progress, but we are still not where we should be as a society to appreciate the importance of mental and emotional health. This stigma hinders open and frank discussion about many topics related to trauma and personal struggles that many of us face in our day-to-day lives. 

Our mental and emotional health are crucial components of our overall well-being, yet they include distinct aspects of our psychological and emotional functioning. Understanding the difference between these two dimensions is important for fostering resilience, coping with challenges, and promoting holistic wellness. Our mental health includes issues related to depression, anxiety, and other chronic conditions like bipolar, ADHD, etc. It includes a broad range of cognitive, emotional, and psychological aspects that influence how we think, feel, and behave. It involves factors such as our ability to process information, solve problems, manage stress, and maintain a sense of purpose and belonging in life. Mental health is not only about the absence of any mental illness but it is about recognizing and appreciating diverse types of psychological experiences and challenges that we face in our daily life.

Our emotional health includes our mental health plus social and personal interactions, that is, it depends on how we react to our relationships and surroundings. It includes our ability to recognize, understand, and manage our emotions effectively. It involves being conscious of our feelings, expressing them appropriately, and coping with our emotional challenges constructively. it includes aspects such as self-awareness, empathy, and the quality of our interpersonal relationships. Our relationships include our personal as well as professional relationships as work is becoming an important and integral part of people's lives. So, one can say that mental health is a foundation upon which emotional health is built. A strong foundation of mental health provides the cognitive and psychological resources needed to understand and manage our emotions effectively. Conversely, nurturing our emotional health contributes to overall mental well-being by enhancing resilience, building positive relationships, and promoting psychological balance.  Both mental health and emotional health are interconnected and mutually reinforcing, we cannot neglect one and expect that the other will help us out. A disruption in one dimension can often impact the other, this is why I am highlighting the importance of both. Maintaining both, mental and emotional health is essential for overall well-being and quality of life.

Our mental and emotional health are interconnected aspects of our overall well-being. Even though they are connected, they are not synonymous. Whenever we face any emotional challenges we need to address both aspects holistically, just focussing on one may help us temporarily but we must look into both aspects for permanent benefits. There are many useful practices such as mindfulness, self-care, therapy, and healthy and active lifestyle choices that can help to promote both dimensions resulting in improved resilience, greater fulfillment, and better overall well-being. By prioritizing both, our mental and emotional health we can cultivate the psychological resources needed to thrive and lead fulfilling lives.

Thank you for reading and please share your views on this topic. 

© Vinay Thakur, All rights reserved, Vinay can be reached at thevinay2022@gmail.com

Difference between connection and communication

Social media has changed the way we communicate. One can argue that it has increased our connectivity with the world which was out of our reach just a few years ago. Today, we can connect with anyone active on social media and initiate communication. But the question is are we really connecting with each other or just communicating. One of the reasons is that we are confusing communication with the connection. During my childhood, having more than 10 or 20 friends was almost impossible, we did not know that many people of our age. I and my friends used to meet almost every day and chat for hours, we used to spend so much time with our friends that our parents had to drag us back home. We used to get lectures from our parents regularly about time spent with our friends. Today our friend lists run into hundreds or thousands, but still, we feel lonely or disconnected. Why?

We now have platforms available for us where we can communicate and can communicate continuously if we want. However, communication does not always mean connection. Most of the communication on social media platforms has become a type of broadcast where one party says and another party listens, there is rarely a constructive dialogue. Some platforms have become a place to argue and score points over your opponents. There is a lot of communication, but hardly any connection. This is why even though people are busy communicating, they feel empty. Even though everyone is busy broadcasting how they are having a wonderful time, they have no avenue to discuss their stress and depression.  Even though people are texting each other continuously they hesitate to share their mental health issues. Even though we have these amazing communication platforms at our disposal, we rarely use them to establish a genuine connection, a connection that can stand by us in our time of need, listen to our worries, and comfort us. People have found tremendous ways to share their talents and become influencers, but we still lack ways to understand each other's feelings and share them honestly without being judged. This is why I have decided to focus on connections rather than just communication. I still write my blog and post on social media, but I make a point to connect with people that matter to me. I try to call or message them regularly and am available to talk to them when they need someone to share something. I listen attentively when people have something to say about my blog or about my other opinions and views. This has helped me a lot, and I hope these interactions also helped others who connected and communicated with me. I believe if you want help, start helping someone when they need help and someone will help you when you are in need. This is how we can build an ecosystem where compassion and empathy are organic and not just for display on social media. It is easy to show anger, pity, or sympathy, but it is not easy to show compassion and empathy. Communication will happen automatically when a connection happens, but it is not true the other way around. Let's be brave and try to connect with each other rather than just communicate.     

Thank you for reading and please share your views on this topic. 

© Vinay Thakur, All rights reserved, Vinay can be reached at thevinay2022@gmail.com

Importance of being "well"

We all strive to be healthy, we are told to manage our weight, monitor our diet, and stay away from unhealthy habits, one can add many more items to this list that are recommended to us to remain physically fit or healthy. There are tangible methods to monitor our physical health, we can get our blood work done to make sure all levels of essential markers, like cholesterol, hemoglobin, minerals, and sugar levels are within limits, get X-rays or other scanning results like MRI or sonography. These all will tell us that everything within our body is okay and we are physically fit, but does this mean we are "well"? Is there a difference between being physically fit and feeling well? Of course, there is a difference.

One can be physically very fit, with all numbers within the recommended limits, and not feel well, or there may be some numbers off the mark indicating that you are physically not fit but still feel well. Being physically fit is just one of the aspects of feeling well, they both can go together, but it's not necessary. We need to look at them separately and work on each independently. 

Wellness is more about how we overall feel about ourselves and our surroundings rather than what are our medical statistics. Wellness is decided by a variety of things including our physical health, relationships, social and professional settings, our own expectations, burdens, past incidents, and our overall mental health. We may struggle in our department of wellness even after doing great in the department of physical fitness. If that happens, it is always a good idea to seek professional or expert help so that someone can guide us on how to deal with the issues we are facing in the wellness department. The problem with wellness is that it is very person-centric, completely different than physical fitness. We can find a lot of recommendations about eating well, and gym routines that are standardized to achieve particular goals related to physical fitness and may work for most of us. However, it is not easy to find such standard recommendations for wellness as what may work for me may not work for you, because what works for us depends a lot on our background, social, economic, professional, and emotional settings at that point in time. This is why achieving physical fitness has become a much more standardized practice compared to achieving overall wellness. In today's individual-centric world where we spend a lot of time on social media or consuming a variety of content directed towards us focusing on our mental health is more important than before. Working towards it actively, and if needed, having a wellness coach or mentor is not a bad idea. It not only supplements our physical fitness but improves our quality of life, we find more fulfillment and happiness in our day-to-day activities. Let's give equal importance to our wellness as much as we give to our physical fitness, they both go hand in hand, without wellness we may be physically fit on paper but not in reality, we may appear fit from outside but a total wreck from inside. Let's work towards having a wholesome quality of life where we feel good internally and externally, focusing on wellness can help us to achieve this. Think about it.

Thank you for reading, please share your opinions about this topic.

What happened to civilized social communication?

There is no doubt that social media has brought significant changes in the ways we communicate with each other. Most people are constantly in conversation with someone on some online platform. This explosion in communication technology has opened many channels of communication for many people in the world. This was supposed to create some positive revolution in the connectivity of human beings as most of us now have a very convenient medium to connect not only with our immediate surroundings but also with the rest of the world. Geographical boundaries which used to be a limiting factor don't matter much as far as verbal and written communication is concerned. All this should have brought us closer and opened many new ways to understand each other in a better way. But, what I find is that people are becoming more and more exclusive in the way they want to interact with others. They are moving away from each other by forming exclusive groups. There are many exclusive message groups, chat rooms, forums, and whatnot where only like-minded people come together and criticize people who don't agree with them. It has become harder to communicate with each other in a thoughtful, civil, and constructive way. I am not denying that there are many groups where there is very thoughtful and useful discussion, where people help each other or support victims of various problems, but it is really hard not to notice the polarization of opinions on social media.

Maybe, I am noticing this polarization more because I am part of many different groups as I don't subscribe to any particular ideology or religion. This might be true, but I see that there are many who are complaining about the same problem. What I noticed is, that all these groups are constantly engaged in ridiculing each other, each want's other group to get lost from this planet, and they absolutely don't see any positive thing in the other side's argument. The communication in such groups is very partisan, and rarely any dissent is encouraged or even tolerated. After reading messages from many of these groups, sometimes I wonder whether social media is uniting or dividing the world?

There is no doubt that social media has made it easy to communicate with people who are not in our immediate physical vicinity. Now we can pick and choose people from all over the world and form a group to discuss something that we like or endorse. We don't have to find like-minded people within our friend circle or family to have a group chat. However, this doesn't mean we should become totally ignorant or dismissive about the opinions and views of people around us or people who don't agree with us. This newly found technological tool should not be the reason to shut the doors for alternative views and only engage with people who affirm or validate our opinions. This should not be the reason to conveniently ignore all the facts that don't support our argument and shut the door for anyone who sounds contrary opinion to our views and points out some factual mistakes in our argument. But, it seems many people are busy doing these types of things. Open minds are getting rare, and highly emotional conversations have replaced rational conversations. Very few are interested in finding the areas of mutual agreements. People are quick to make assumptions based on limited data. They are in a rush to judge others, there is a lack of empathy, and most people are not willing to assume any positive intent in other parties that disagree with them.

If it continues like this, I don't know how many political groups within a political group, or religious sects within a religion we will have. The danger is very clear, polarization of our society at an unprecedented level. Now, we have to decide whether we want to continue like this or would like to bring some civility to our online interactions, especially, while interacting with people who disagree with us on various topics. The choice is ours, as we are the ones who are going to enjoy or suffer the consequences of our choices.

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

Intolerance was always there in India

Nowadays there is a lot of debate going on in India about intolerance and tolerance. Some people claim that since this new government came into power (in 2014) incidents of intolerance have increased, they also claim that there is a feeling of fear and insecurity among minorities and some intellectuals. The other side claims that nothing of this sort is happening, rather the very fact that these people are allowed to protest is a sign of a tolerant environment, some irrelevant fringe groups are responsible for whatever ugly incidents are reported, but overall everything is fine. Both sides are busy attacking each other and proving each other wrong, putting on a splendid display of tolerance. Another point that is highlighted again and again during all these discussions is that India was and still is a very tolerant society. I really don't know what is the real basis of this claim, but surprisingly both sides agree on this particular point, the only point of disagreement is whether it is becoming intolerant now or not? The history of Indian civilization is very old and one can dig into its history and try to figure out whether it was a historically tolerant society or not. I am not interested in that aspect of this argument, I can only talk about what I saw and experienced personally during my stay in India. As far as my personal experience is concerned, I never saw a very tolerant atmosphere during the 30 years of my life in India. I always feel surprised when someone claims that India is a very tolerant society, they may have some different definition of "tolerant," but at least I never experienced it. Now before people jump on to attack me personally and label me as anti-India or anti-Hindu or traitor or whatever other name they want to use to display their tolerant nature, let me first explain why I say this.

Any tolerant society is sensitive to the needs and rights of all sections of society and by all sections, I am not talking about all religions and castes that dominate Indian political discussion forums. I am talking about kids, teenagers, men, women, other genders, disabled people, all minorities, etc. I never saw that sensitivity at appreciable levels and still don't see it in India, till recently, transgenders and homosexuals were forced to live in closets, women are still struggling to get equal status and property share, caste is a very important factor in marriage and politics, and one can list many other examples here, but I guess readers mush have got my point. Now let me continue with my personal experiences as my statement is mainly based on my personal experience. First, as a kid, punishments for mistakes in school were very brutal and physically abusive. I am sure anyone who went to school in the 1980s and 1990s can confirm this. Getting slapped by a teacher was not a big deal, getting hit by a stick, duster, or ruler was a very common phenomenon. Even outside the school situation was not much different, it was considered as birthright of parents to smack their kids as much they want and for whatever reason they felt appropriate. Second, any sort of dissent was not encouraged. As a kid, it was normal to get snubbed by elders for asking any uncomfortable question. One could not dare to question many traditions and rituals without being verbally or worse physically reprimanded. Obedience was considered as a virtue and dissent was openly ridiculed and punished. Finally, gender discrimination was blatantly overt and everywhere, within families, in schools, on the streets, in movies, everywhere. These were some of the things that I experienced and witnessed as a kid. I am sure there might be exceptions to this and there might be some people, especially those with very privileged backgrounds who lived in totally different social atmospheres, but whatever I described above was the general environment around me and many others. People must have realized that I am talking about a poor or lower middle-class section of society which constitutes a very large section of the Indian population. Even as a teenager, we were aware that friendship and all were okay but we couldn't marry outside our caste without disturbing our parents or other family members. Tension between various religions and occasional violent communal riots are still a possibility like in the past. All these things used to make me wonder where is that tolerance about which I hear on every intellectual forum? Fights between supporters of different political parties or religious groups were very common. There used to be fights during processions during different religious festivals like Ganeshotsav, and many times between two mandals on trivial issues like who should get to go first in line. It was and still is very trivial to call someone anti-national or traitor or Pakistani (especially to Muslims). Books were and still are frequently banned, movies land in trouble for hurting some group's sentiments, paintings and painters are troubled for creating some objectionable art, authors are attacked for writing something offensive or derogatory about someone, moral policing was very common and still happens to some extent even today. Many of these things are still part of public behavior, we can see these things even in social media, and still, Indians don't hesitate to call ourselves very tolerant!

But there must be some reason why most Indians claim that our country is very tolerant. One reason might be India did not invade any country in recent history or maybe by claiming to be tolerant many of these people mean "less violent" compared to some neighboring countries. It is quite possible that tolerance people may mean at least we don't kill each other as frequently as some other societies do. Maybe there is some truth in this line of argument even though frequent incidents of communal riots don't support this claim, but this might be the only reason for making this claim. But for me, this is not good enough to declare any society as a tolerant society and anyway, the standards of those countries are not worth following for a country like India with such a diverse population if it really aspires to become a superpower. It needs to show more inclusive behavior than merely being less violent or better than some of our neighbors. Intolerance has always been there in India, sometimes it is more visible than at other times that's the only difference. I really feel strange about this debate of India becoming intolerant now, please let me know when was it very tolerant? One can make an argument that India is becoming more intolerant, and there is some truth in that, but to claim that it was tolerant before is hard to accept. 

Thanks for reading and please share your views on this topic.

[Copyright: Vinay Thakur. Please contact the author for re-posting or publishing]