One of the many reasons I've dialed down my know-it-all cynicism is just how limited our language and ideas are on certain topics. For instance, there's very little more important to my daily life than my mental health, but the language and tools to address mental health barely exist in the common culture, and maybe not even in a clinical setting.
We know what it means to be physically healthy more or less. Each person will have an ideal weight, and should have a certain blood pressure and resting heart rate and blood sugar level, etc. And if those are out of whack for some reason, the solution is relatively straight forward: eat healthier, and do some regular exercise. And one can go into MANY specifics, or try to short-cut them with magic pills that may or may not contain side effects, but the in general we all know the solution: eat better and exercise. AND we generally understand what those activities entail (working up a sweat, and eating as close to un-processed as possible). And while there is still a ways to go on our knowledge of nutrition and the biochemistry of the body, we still know things like: leafy vegetables and regular exercise seem to be very good for the human body and there's a fairly solid body of practical research backing that up.
So what about my precious, fragile mind? What are the metrics for maintaining my mental health? What is a preventative health regimen for the mind? What mental exercises should I do to maintain optimal mental health? For the most part, the questions of "what mental exercises should I do" seem to be held back by "what are the specific metrics of mental health" as far as I can tell. Is mental health simply being able to function in my daily life, in the culture I was born into? Is it thriving in my environment, as opposed to simple functioning? Is lots of memorization good for me? Is it actively learning new things every day (I've read some interesting things on that front)? Is it reading challenging material? Is there such a thing as mental candy and should I avoid too much of it? Is there such a thing as mental health food and I should consume more of it? We have a wealth of material attempting to address these questions with specific answers, but so far, in nailing down specifics of how to talk about and assess mental health and processing it seems to come down to shrugs and how we feel about it, you know? In fact, most of the solutions in mental health seem to be in pill form, as if to address a simple chemical imbalance, but the medication seems clumsy and I'm really much more interested in the mental equivalent of eating right and exercising, and I still haven't found something satisfying on that front with any kind of intelligent and compelling research to support it. Of course, it's possible they exist and I just haven't seen them. I'm pretty sure I haven't been exercising my brain very well or otherwise contributing to my own good mental health.
The only thing I need to know, that some other people seem to agree on, is that the mind and body are linked, so a healthy body is a tremendous asset to good mental health. I struggle with depression, but I would much rather do the equivalent of eating right and exercising to claw myself out of it rather than take meds. I don't like anti-depression meds, they let me function day to day, but kill my sex drive something fierce. And I think a healthy sex-drive is maybe a key component of my long-term mental health, you know?
But are touch screens rotting my brain? Is a trashy novel really junk food? Do I need to rigorously study something for a few hours every week/day to stay in tip-top mental shape? I honestly don't know, and I'm not sure anyone else really does either. I find that frustrating, don't you?
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