Mental health problems don’t define who you are.
They are something you experience.
You walk in the rain and you feel the rain,
but, more importantly, YOU ARE NOT THE RAIN.”

 — Matt Haig

The world is changing and going through chaos since the covid pandemic, after covid there are a lot of unpredictable things happening in the world which are causing a lot of stress, panic, anxiety, hate, and fear in people. Everything that’s happening in the world is having a bad effect on people’s mental health.

So, in this article let’s try to understand the mind and mental health; how we can protect our mind against the negative influence of our environment, and how to take care of our mental health.

What is the Mind?

If you ask a common person where is your mind in your body?

He would point towards his head and say- here, and most people would say he is right,

 But!

What he is referring to is the brain, not the mind.

Understand this- your brain is not your mind, rather the brain is an instrument of the mind.

Now, you’d ask, so what and where is your mind then?

In order to understand the mind, you have to understand something else first-

The universe and everything in it came from one and the same source, everything in the physical universe that we see as physical matter is actually a pattern of energy at a certain frequency of vibration.

There is an invisible field of energy and information spread throughout the whole universe, and the material realities are excitations in this field.

Think of it this way- if you throw a pebble in a calm body of water, it produces a  ripple, that ripple starts at the point where the pebble touches the water, and then it keeps expanding throughout the whole body of water.

So, the field of energy is like the water, and the ripple in the water is like the physical or material reality. Just like the water and the ripple are the same things, the ripple is nothing more than the excitation in the water; the material or physical reality is nothing more than the excitations in the field.

Now, this field of energy has a self-sustaining intelligence, we can see this intelligence at work in nature all around us. This intelligence causes a seed to become a tree, it causes the leaves of a plant to grow in a perfect structure, it is the same intelligence that is causing the different kinds of plants to grow from the earth, it is the same intelligence that keeps the planets to rotate in perfect order. It is also the same intelligence present within our bodies that is causing the blood to flow into different parts of the body, it is the same intelligence that causes the food to be digested, it is the same intelligence that causes the new cells to form to replace the old ones, it is the same intelligence that makes millions of chemical reactions that needs to happen consistently within our body for us be alive.

This intelligence is the universal intelligence that is evenly present in all places and all things at the same time. This intelligence is also present within your body and brain, which causes your body to function properly and stay healthy, for you to have a physical experience as an individual human being.

So, as you can see, this intelligence is both personal and universal, it is working within and all around you all the time.

The personal aspect of this intelligence that’s within your body is commonly known as your subconscious mind.

The prime job of this intelligence within your body is to provide health, protection, and growth to your body according to the laws of nature.

Now, it is the same intelligence that’s holding the universe together and keeping everything in perfect order, it is very powerful and can do anything, nothing is impossible for it.

This intelligence of your body takes commands from you, processes them, and brings the outcome according to your belief and emotional state.

The problem is that the commands most people give to this intelligence are not conscious commands rather those commands are usually given through the mental programs of a person in his subconscious mind.

In order to give this intelligence any conscious command you have to use your conscious mind. The conscious mind is quite different from the subconscious mind, it is the home of your conscious awareness, and it works according to your level of consciousness.

So, a scientist’s conscious mind would be able to grasp very complex information while the same information would frustrate a common person if he tries to understand it. It happens because the level of consciousness of a scientist is way much higher than the common person when it comes to scientific information. In the same manner, some of the simple things that a common man does would make a scientist go crazy because he doesn’t have that level of consciousness.

You think, analyze, perceive, concentrate,  reason, imagine, and make the decision with your conscious mind, whatever the conscious mind believes to be true gets accepted as true by the subconscious mind, and the innate intelligence of the subconscious mind begins to work on bringing your truth in your experience.

Whether your belief is actually true or false is irrelevant to the subconscious mind.

The combination of the conscious and the subconscious mind together forms your mind.

Now, the conscious mind is your thinking mind, it is the educated mind, it has the ability to accept or reject, and it can learn in many different ways. The subconscious mind is the emotional mind, it has no ability to reject any idea given to it, it cannot differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined, and it learns through the process of repetition.

Your consciousness works through your conscious mind while the universal intelligence within you works through your subconscious mind. So whatever you keep in your conscious mind most of the time goes into the subconscious mind with emotion, and the universal intelligence of the subconscious mind takes it and creates conditions and circumstances in your life for you to experience it.

 It doesn’t care whether it’s good or bad for you, it only works to bring into your life what you keep in your conscious mind and feel emotionally connected with most of the time.

Mental Health

Just like your body has certain needs and those needs must be fulfilled for the body to function properly, your mind also has certain needs which must be fulfilled for your mind to function properly.

The health of the mind or mental health primarily depends upon the harmony between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. When there is a conflict between the conscious and the subconscious mind, it produces negative emotions which cause you to feel fear and anxiety.

Your subconscious mind has programs installed in it, which you inherited from your family and environment in the early years of your life. It also has mental programs that you installed in it by doing something over and over again, your habitual behaviors are the outcome of those programs.

So, as long as your environment stays the same (equal to your belief system) your mind doesn’t feel any fear or discomfort and you feel the same familiar feeling that you always felt. In this case, your conscious and subconscious mind works at the same frequency and you will live in your comfort zone according to your beliefs.

Now, your conscious mind receives information from your environment through your physical senses (see, hear, taste, smell, and touch), and interprets it according to your level of consciousness. So, when your physical senses pick some new information from your environment that is not consistence with your belief system or subconscious programming, your body’s internal chemical or emotional order is altered, when your conscious mind notices a change in your inner emotional environment, it searches for the cause of this change and put your attention on the cause that is in your outer environment.

Now, your brain activities are caused by the thoughts in the mind, as your brain is primarily an instrument of the subconscious mind, it doesn’t know the difference between an event that’s happening in the real world and an event that you are creating in your mind by thoughts alone. So, the same activities would happen in the brain whether the experience is real or imaginary.

When you see some danger in your outer world, the survival system of the brain gets activated, and it uses all of its resources to protect you from the danger.

Let’s say you went into a forest, and you saw a lion looking at you, the moment you perceive it, the fight or flight mechanism of the nervous system is turned on, and it mobilizes an enormous amount of the body’s energy to deal with the present danger, it prepares you to run, or fight. Let’s say you run to your car, gets in, and drive away from the Lion, When you no longer perceive the danger in your outer world your body returns back to a balance or relaxed state

It was an example of short-term stress, and that’s normal.

So, when you perceive some danger in your outer world, you turned on the stress response of the body. Stress is when the body is knocked out of balance or homeostasis, and the stress response is the body’s innate automatic response when it’s knocked out of balance and what it does to return back to balance or homeostasis.

 Now, when you saw the lion you turned on your body’s stress response. If you saw a man with a gun in an empty street the same stress response would be triggered, if you spot your mean ex somewhere, it will trigger the same stress response.

Now, we, human beings, have the ability to make a thought more real in our mind than anything in our physical world, and because of that, we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone.

So, when you start thinking about the problems in your life, you produce the same stress response in your brain and body as if you are chased by a lion or a gunman, and those problem doesn’t have to be in your present environment, you can produce the same stress response by worrying about something bad that might happen to you in your future, and even worse is that you can produce the same stress response by visiting some unpleasant emotional memory of the past.

Now, when you keep your attention on some stress-producing event or experience that happened to you in the past or something you fear may happen to you in the future, you keep activating the stress response of the body over and over again for an extended period of time, and if you keep doing it, it becomes automatic.

When your mind keeps thinking and worrying about something you can’t control, something that has already happened in your life and environment, or something bad that might happen, you keep feeling stress and anxiety.

When you feel those negative emotions you think more thoughts that produce more stress, and you can’t think greater than those feelings, you get stuck in a loop of thinking and feeling.

In this case, you are mentally unhealthy, and if you can’t break this loop, this mental sickness starts to appear in your body in the form of some kind of disease.

When your negative emotions become the means of your thinking and you can’t think greater than how you feel, you are mentally unhealthy.

On the other hand, when you take conscious control of the thoughts you think, and through your thinking create the emotion you chose to feel, you are mentally healthy and creative.

Now, when you are mentally healthy and can self-regulate your internal emotional or chemical order then if some stress-producing event occurs in your environment, which causes panic in the society, you can still control how much this event is going to affect you and your life, and you would be able to make better choices.

How to take care of your mental health

The main reason for mental health issues in most people is their negative emotional state. There are basically two types of emotions that we live by -Survival Emotions and Creative emotions.

Survival emotions are primal emotions, they are usually triggered in humans and animals when a person or animal perceives some danger in their environment.

Now, as Human Beings, we can trigger our survival emotions just by thoughts alone, which means if you think about something that you are afraid of happening in your life, that you don’t want to experience but you are afraid that it will happen you will keep producing those survival emotions in your brain and body.

 Thinking about the problems would cause you to feel survival emotions, like fear, anger, anxiety, suffering, pain, self-pity, low self-esteem, etc. equal to your thoughts, because your body doesn’t know the difference between something that’s really happening in the physical world and something that’s just happening in your mind, to the body both are real.

When you keep doing or thinking about something that causes you to feel survival emotions over and over again, your body becomes habitual to those emotions.

Then, these survival emotions become like software that runs your activities automatically in your day-to-day life.  So, when you really wanna do something creative in your life, you have a goal to accomplish, and you want to work on it, you would find yourself keep going back to the old emotions. You would be working for your goal one day and deciding how you want to spend your working days, but you would find yourself keep going back to the same old behaviors over and over again.

That’s where the mental sickness starts to manifest and it’s because you want one thing but your brain and body want something else.

Now, the process of healing mental sickness and creating mental health begins with an understanding. Understanding is gained through knowledge, and knowledge is gained through study.

 So first step is to study the inner mechanism of your mind and body, once you gain an understanding of how your mind-body works, you would be able to understand the cause of your mental health issue. Once you understand the cause then you would know what needs to be repaired within your being to be free from your mental sickness and enjoy mental health.

First of all, gain an understanding of the universal power that’s working within you and all around you all the time, when you have faith, in the universal power or the Eternal Spirit, which you have developed through study and understanding of the working principles of this great power, you would begin to see the problems in your life as challenges and opportunities for growth.

Once you have this attitude you would always have a healthy mind regardless of what is going on in your environment.

The next thing you need to work on is your inner self-image. Your Self-image is your own conception of yourself and what you are capable of. The way you see yourself, the way you think about yourself, your self-confidence, and your behaviors in your life are all representations of your self-image. The condition, circumstance, and the result of your life are all determined by your self-image. Your self-image has so much control over your behaviors and your performance that it doesn’t matter what you do and how you do it, you cannot outperform your self-image.

So, when you have a low self-image, you would see yourself as inferior to others, you would think of yourself as unworthy and undeserving of joy and peace in life, and you would think that you can’t achieve in life what others can.

A person with a strong and healthy self-image can never be mentally unhealthy because with a strong self-image your belief in yourself will be much greater than the problem and challenges you would have in your life.

Use Meditation to Overcome mental Health Issues

Meditation is the greatest tool to cure yourself of any kind of mental illness, meditation allows you to go deep within and enter the subconscious mind, where you can make lasting changes in your mental health, physical health, and spiritual health.

So, before you begin meditating, the first thing you should do is to give yourself some alone time to think, then think about all the familiar and habitual emotions that you feel all day long, but no longer wanna feel. Write them down on a piece of paper.

Then, think about thoughts you think and believe when you feel those emotions, what you say to yourself, how you talk, and how you behave during those emotional states and write them down as well.

Then,  think about how you really want to live your life, how you wanna think, what you wanna do, who you wanna be, how you wanna behave, and what you wanna accomplish in your life, write them down as well.

Now, you have an awareness of the unwanted emotions that are part of your being and life, you are aware of the thoughts and behaviors that are the product of those emotional states, and you have an awareness of what kind of life you truly want to live.

So, when you start your meditation, choose one emotion to work on, I would suggest you, to work on the emotion of unworthiness first, because if you feel unworthy, you can’t find fulfillment in anything.

Now, choose one of the two times to meditate, either the first thing in the morning or the last thing before you go to bed, because those two times the door between the subconscious and the conscious mind opens up, so it’s the best time to program your subconscious mind for new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

So, sit in a relaxed state, close your eyes, play some instrumental music in the background, and begin by analyzing the unwanted emotion that you want to un-memorize or get rid of. Observe how this emotion feels in your body, observe the thoughts that are produced by this emotion, and the behaviors that are the outcome of those thoughts and the unwanted emotion. Become so conscious of these thoughts feeling and behavior, that they would not go unnoticed by you, become so aware of them that you separate yourself, as a consciousness, from those familiar thoughts feeling, and behaviors.

Then, once you are clear about everything related to that emotion, make a conscious decision that you are no longer going to think feel and behave equal to this emotion.  Surrender this emotion to the universal power within you and ask it to resolve it in a way that is just right for you.

Then, imagine yourself in a few scenarios in your daily life where you would begin to feel that emotion, then when you notice that emotion going up, remind yourself to change it and put your attention somewhere else. Do it, for three or four scenarios, it would prepare your brain to not react emotionally to the same situations in the same old way, and it would prepare your brain to make a new choice.

Finally, imagine yourself living the life that you truly want to live, doing the things you really want to do,  and being everything you really want to be.

Mentally create this imaginary life in your mind exactly as would want it to be. Put all of your attention on those images of a new life and let go of all outside distractions, try to feel as you would feel if you would be really living that life. It would create a neurological network in your brain to perceive you and your life in a new light.

Then, turn to the universal power within you, surrender this creation of your life to this great power, and ask it to bring your creation into your experience in a way that is just right for you.

Give thanks for this new life as you have already received it, and then let go of the thoughts of how it would happen, work towards it, and let the universal power make it happen for you.

So, when you are clear about what you want to accomplish in your life, and you are clear about what you want to change about yourself and your life, and you are working towards it every day, you will be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy.

And, if some day you feel like you can’t control your emotional reaction to some event or problem in your life, and you feel overwhelmed by the negative emotion, then take a break from everything you are doing, take a pen & a paper, and start writing, one by one, all the things you are grateful for in your life, and write down how it has improved the quality of your life. Within 10 to 15 minutes of writing, you would see that your problems aren’t bothering you that much anymore, and your mind is coming to a relaxed state. Gratitude brings peace, harmony, and order to your mental state.

Thank you very much for your time

-Parvez Alam