I attended a mental health summit, and this is what I learnt.

By Erin’O Connor

Like most people (if not all), I am no stranger to blips in my mental health. I call them blips, because while I wouldn’t go as far to say that I suffer every day from anxiety or depression, I do go through short periods of feeling low and lethargic. I have a few things that I do to help myself get through these periods, and on the whole I am fortunate enough that they don’t overrule my life. However, mental health is a vast topic of discussion that I have only scratched the surface of, and have been keen to delve a little deeper. 

So this weekend I stepped a bit out of my comfort zone and attended an online mental health summit. For those of you that aren’t familiar with summits, they are generally meetings of people who care deeply about the same topic. You often hear of summits that involve heads of government and world leaders discussing issues like climate change, and these talks tend to be closed off to the public. However, there are really incredible talks and discussions that are open for anyone to listen in on, such as the Mental Health Matters summit which I attended. 

Zoom calls and conferences have become a routine part of my lifestyle, what with most of my work now done online. Yet, stepping out of my comfort zone came from the fact that it was a bunch of panel talks with primarily Doctors and health care professionals, and just a few of us from the general public. My initial thoughts going into the experience all centred around the fear of not  being able to understand a single word of what they were saying, thinking it was just going to be a group of doctors throwing around fancy medical jargon and statistics. 

I couldn’t have been more wrong - in fact, what came out of the weekend was some of the most incredible insight that I will stick with me for a long time to come. 

Here’s three powerful things I learnt:

1. Relying on motivation is a fool’s game 

This discussion around motivation came about in one of the panel talks on exercise and its impact on our mental health. The idea that relying on motivation is counterproductive, or somehow foolish, sounded a bit bizarre to me at first, and my initial reaction was to say “well how are we ever going to get anything done in life if we’re not motivated to do it?” However, when Dr. Scott Teasdale went on to explain what he meant by this, it totally clicked with me. 

Our internal motivation to do more exercise, to move and in turn boost our moods and prolong our happiness levels is a finite resource - it will eventually run out. Therefore, it is absolutely crucial that we surround ourselves with people who will continually support us and hold us accountable to our goals. 

Now this may be something that deep down we already know, but hearing a panel of doctors unanimously agree that having a community of people, however big or small, supporting you on your journey to healing is essential, it kind of struck a different chord in me. 

“A lot of us do it because it’s the ‘done thing’ or because other people do it, but rarely do we sit down and think why we want to do it.”

2. Find your why

Before we do anything, be it changing what we eat to make our minds and bodies to be healthier, or  there should be a reason why we’re doing it. That’s understandable, right? I mean, we do things because something or someone leads us to do it. Otherwise everything we do would just be for the hell of it. 

But often when it comes to wanting to eat healthier, or taking up a form of exercise, a lot of us do it because it’s the ‘done thing’ or because other people do it, but rarely do we sit down and think why we want to do it. This why is personal, and will be different for each individual. However, knowing exactly why you want to make a change, be it through diet or exercise or any other medium, will be key in making it a long lasting, sustainable change rather than a short lived thing. 

3. We are living in an age where we have the ability to curate what we see, so exercise this choice

One of the big topics of discussion across the weekend was the role that the media plays in mental health. Now I could go on and on about my personal love-hate relationship for the media, particularly social media, but we’d be here for hours. So the last piece of advice that I took from the summit was to recognise that we have a choice in who we listen to, who we follow on social media and the information we consume. So in order to create an environment where our mental health thrives rather than fights to survive, we need to take the following steps to protect ourselves: 

A. Understand our ability to cope with the information we consume. Before we mindlessly scroll through our Instagram feeds or flick through a newspaper, we should ask ourselves first “how am I feeling today, and am I in a strong state of mind to consume what I am about to consume?”

B. Make an assessment of the information you have just read/watched/listened to. How does it make you feel? 

C. From this assessment, start to create boundaries for yourself. In other words, if what you just read makes you feel like you’re anything less than good enough, allow yourself to create space between you and it. This might be simply unfollowing that particularly person, choosing a different publication to read or even simply taking time away from it.

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