Years of living with anxiety and depression have taught me many things. Some of those things were about mental health, while other things were about myself and who I am as a person. But despite all I’ve learned, I still do things that leave me asking myself one question over and over: Why did I do that?
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this way, but I’m the type of person who always wants to know the why of something. Why did I do that? Why did they say that? Why did I react that way? This question can come from all sorts of situations, and can happen on an almost daily basis. And while there are often simple answers, not every one of them will be satisfying. When it comes to our mental health, those questions can be some of the most difficult to answer.
I remember when I was first dealing with anxiety and depression, and I would ask myself “Why?” all the time. All the time! Why was I sad? Why didn’t I have a reason? Why was I struggling getting out of bed? Every new thing I learned brought new questions about mental illness, or about myself. And I desperately wanted answers.
But sometimes with our mental health, answers can be hard to come by. We want clear explanations, something obvious to point to, for why we feel the way we do. But mental illness often doesn’t give us the response we’re looking for – if it gives us a response at all. So we have to find other ways to reach our goals.
One of the ways I get around asking the impossible Why? questions is to ask myself something more practical. These questions feel similar but they start with a different word: what. What am I feeling? What is happening within my body, in the world around me? What factors might be impacting how I’m feeling right now? What can I do in this moment to help support myself? It was a massive shift in my way of thinking that I didn’t know I needed. Rather than put the focus on something I couldn’t change, I tried to move it to something I could. I can’t control everything that happens to me, but I do control how I react. And while I don’t remember that in every situation, it’s helped me plenty of times.
So this is what I’d like to leave you with today. You might not always know why you’re acting the way you are, and that can be frustrating. But understanding that you are doing it, that there’s a reason behind it, is also important. You can’t solve a problem you don’t know exists, right? Many mental health challenges grow or persist because we’re not able to see the problem for what it is. Asking “what’s wrong?” instead of “why am I doing this?” might sound like a small change in word choice, but it’s helped me shift my mindset on my own mental health. And over time, those small changes can amount to big ones – not only for our mental health, but for our whole self.
