Forget Mental Health, Think Navigation
- Mental Health and Mental Hygiene are concepts developed for global and national policy development NOT for clinical therapy. See Roots of the Concept of Mental Health
- Thinking in terms of mental health distracts you from focusing on what actually improves well-being. See Why Pursuing Happiness Makes Us Miserable
- Just as Kayaking demands responsiveness to the needs of the journey, human thriving is about constantly balancing and moving forward in response to navigational cues which are signaling our needs/values.
As a kid, I lived at the edge of the Holden Arboretum, a huge privately owned nature preserve. The home we rented had a pond surrounded by eastern white pines and maples. Some of my fondest early memories involved playing out on the water in a canoe, especially experimenting with the way your voice sounds in the air trapped between the water and flipped canoe. Many years later, I found myself enjoying a kayaking trip on a needed break from my psychotherapy practice going up the Dix River in central Kentucky, not too far from the Red River Gorge.
I was surprised by that first wobble as I was getting launched, that feeling of focused active balancing. Suddenly I was keenly aware of how easy it is to flip in the 50-degree temperature, and not very excited about playing with a turned-over kayak. Our goal was to get up the river in a couple of hours to a spot to eat lunch and then return. The river-carved palisades, shining white sycamore trees, a friendly blue heron that kept flying ahead of us, and the bald eagle on the return trip created a magical space to feel that transcendent connectedness beyond the daily grind.
While on the river I was thinking about how I have been happy to see mental health becoming a passion of so many, and activities like kayaking often make the list of good mental health practices. As a therapist, I have noticed that often when mental health is mentioned in a short article, it tends to have some anecdotes about stress, anxiety, suicide rates, and depression followed by a list of tips and tricks for maintaining good mental health. This got me thinking, is it just as simple as maintaining a mindfulness practice, setting boundaries, taking a hike, and taking your medications? “Mental health”, as a concept, has limited usefulness for moment-to-moment decision-making. Kayaking shows us that thriving is about both balance and getting somewhere using small cues to stay on course.
Mental Health on a Personal Level is Life Navigation, Balance and Movement
Unlike dental hygiene, where if you brush, floss and use mouthwash daily you can expect to maintain healthy teeth and gums, when considering mental health, the ingredients of doing some yoga, having coffee with a friend, doing a sudoku puzzle, and taking a long bath, are only part of what may help you get where you want to go in your life. Human thriving is a dynamic developing process that requires attentiveness to your internal navigational system in the same way that kayaking demands. Something that is right at one moment, day, or year may not be right for the next in navigating your winding river to your destination. Sometimes balance demands a hard paddle on the right, sometimes a glide, sometimes a back paddle to correct the course. Pre-COVID you may have struggled to find enough solitude and autonomy, whereas after COVID you may have had to find more creative ways to get enough connection. So how do you navigate your life more effectively?
When you ask the question, “why do I care”, “why do things matter to me,” you unearth Universal Human Needs, discussed by Marshall Rosenberg, and inspired by Carl Rogers. (Values are just future-oriented Universal Human Needs). Things matter because they relate to sustenance, transcendence, honesty, empathy, community, adventure, safety, work and rest. When these are threatened or fulfilled your system gives you signals about the status in terms of feelings, body sensation and thoughts. Just as organisms constantly seek homeostatic balance and growth, so humans are constantly seeking to meet these needs or values. All thoughts, feelings, body sensations and behaviors can be understood as expressions of these needs.
Balance, happiness, thriving and well-being result when all of your values or Universal Human Needs are being lived out, or at least getting planned for or grieved well when they aren’t. In short, mental health maintenance on the personal level is constant responsiveness to signals related to your needs. Rather than focusing on generic healthy life practices, focus on effective navigation to get your needs met.
One might think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here where the focus is on relative importance. In this paradigm, think of the kayak as balancing in 360 degrees. While you could technically say your need for air is more important than say your need for rest, for human thriving you always need some degree of all of them in balance. The ones that are threatened simply signal the loudest.
Reframing Emotions, Body Sensations, and Repetitive Thoughts
In navigating the river, you use all of your senses, and balance becomes an unconscious automatic process. The experienced kayaker can read the river, the currents, the wind, obstacles, and an intuitive understanding of how the kayak will feel and what response will be needed when you get to it. The higher the danger level of the passage the more one needs to be acutely aware of all of the internal and external signals that will help keep you upright and moving. You have an internal dashboard that gives you the signals you need to navigate your life towards thriving. Think of emotions, body sensations, and repetitive thoughts like the GPS guidance, fuel light, oil light, or check engine light in your car dashboard. They are all information about the needs of the car.
Your Emotions are Signaling Needs
Let’s start with emotions. You may see emotions like anger, sadness, worry as symptoms of poor mental health and feel like you are weak or bad as a result. This could not be further from the truth. This is no more true than saying a car is bad because the fuel light comes on periodically or that you feel like you are tipping over in your kayak. Emotions are just information about the status of needs. They are part of the complex human navigational system.
The feeling of tipping to the right is not the problem, but rather good information about what is needed to stay balanced on the water. Having a sad feeling is information about something in your life balance or your progress on your course. This kind of information is what allows you to know whether to paddle on the right or left, to lean slightly left or right, or in your life, whether to consider a career change, add a hobby or drop a habit that is inhibiting your overall life goals. When you are off course you need signals to help you redirect, when you are tipping over in your kayak you need corrective internal nudges to help you find your balance so you can focus on moving to your destination once again. Negative emotions are positive when seen as helpful information for your overall life navigation, balance, and direction.
Happiness is also just information about how your navigation is going. You might have noticed new happiness when you get clarity and make a decision to move forward on something that seems right for you…even before anything has changed. You are getting emotional information about being on track. Your internal dashboard lights are the body sensations, feelings, and repetitive thoughts that are all meant to help you thrive.
There are rare times when emotional signals do not match the need they are indicating, but my experience is that even when a physiological hormonal imbalance is impacting emotions it is only impacting the volume of the signal and not the validity of the need being signaled.
Your Body Sensations are Signaling Needs
The same goes for body sensations, like that pit in your stomach, the tension in your neck or pit in your stomach, and barring a medical condition, very often are early signals of needs not getting met. Often your body reacts quicker than your conscious mind to threats to your safety, a racing heart, the quickening of the breath, or a clenching fist. If you pay attention to these signals you can more quickly address the need being signaled, perhaps a need for emotional safety, need for autonomy, a need to be honest, or a need for rest.
Your Repetitive Thoughts are Signaling Needs
You may have been trained to challenge unhelpful thought patterns, but even these can be useful navigational information. Instead of asking how your self-loathing thoughts or judgemental thoughts are wrong, you can get curious about the need it represents. A thought like, “I am such an idiot” could be giving a signal that you need to develop more competency in an area or find new strategies to meet your goals, or adjust your expectations of yourself. Instead of just correcting the thought, you can listen to the need being signaled underneath it to gain the navigational information trying to help you thrive.
Decoding your Navigational Information- Get Curious about the Signals
While this may seem complicated, paying attention to your underlying needs can be as simple as slowing down and asking ourselves, “why is this mattering right now?”. As long as you go deep enough, it leads right down to your core need. Some other helpful questions might be, “Why am I getting these intense feelings now, what seems threatened, what is at stake?” Within my repetitive thoughts, “what is the core value of mine feeling threatened, or potentially fulfilled in my repetitive thought?”. Or ask, “what is this intense body sensation trying to alert me to? Why now? What is at stake for me, at this moment, that my body is sending me strong signals?” Slow down, get curious, lay aside self-judgment or judgments of others and just sit with it. You become mindful of your internal thrive nudges. This is how the balance and growth of mental health works, it is gaining competence to sit with your navigational system and respond to its signals. As with kayaking, constant balance and directional corrections can become just part of the fun, not a problem to be eliminated.
When you want to get better at self-care, think navigation. When your kayak seems to keep flipping over consider some mental health treatment to help you listen to your needs and respond to them more effectively. So when you are feeling bad, forget about the concept of mental health for a minute and just focus on navigation by asking yourself, “why is this mattering to me?”
Suggested Reading
Susan David’s Emotional Agility
Johann Hari’s Lost Connections
Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
The information and resources contained on this article are for informational purposes only and are not intended to assess, diagnose, or treat any medical and/or mental health, health disease or condition. The use of this material does not imply or establish any type of therapist-client relationship. Furthermore, the information obtained from this article should not be considered a substitute for a thorough medical and/or mental health evaluation by an appropriately credentialed and licensed professional.
