It's Time to Stop Calling It "Mental Health" and Start Calling It "Happiness"

What's in a name? When it comes to the way we talk about our personal joy, maybe more than we think.

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-Taylor

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If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on as a remarkable example of human progress, it’s the way we talk about mental health.

I’m sure I don’t need to dive too deeply into the ways we’ve become much more open, informed, and active about our mental and emotional wellbeing as a human race. We understand it better, talk about it more, and deal with it more proactively than at any point in human history.

Except there’s just one problem.

We’ve begun to think of “mental health” as just one aspect of the tapestry that makes up our lives. We say things like, “It’s important to remember mental health.”

But does that approach get it wrong?

Mental health isn’t something to be prioritized over “other” things. It’s not even something we should “put first.”

By calling it mental health, we categorize it as though it’s one item in a list.

But mental health isn’t an important thing.

It’s the only thing.

Okay, stay with me here.

Imagine that you have a magical time machine that lets you talk to the version of yourself that will exist ten years in the future.

Except there’s a catch. You can only ask future-you one question about how things will pan out. You have just one shot to check in on how you’re doing ten years down the line.

What do you ask future-you?

Do you ask, “Are you physically healthy?”

Or, “Are you satisfied in your career?”

Or maybe, “Do you have enough money?”

Or how about, “Are you in a fulfilling relationship?”

All of these questions would give an incomplete picture.

No, the one question we would all want to know the answer to is this:

“Are you happy?”

Everything else — all of our circumstances and choices and genetic traits and life events — are simply influencers on that one, all-important question.

Happiness is everything. Not happy-in-the-moment-because-I’m-eating-chocolate-cake happiness, but joy-and-contentment-with-the-state-of-myself-and-my-life happiness.

But what do we call happiness in 2023?

We call it mental health.

For the average person, mental health is the qualitative perception of ourselves, our relationships, and our lives. Put another way, our mental health is a measure of how happy we are overall. Not our physical comfort in a specific moment, but our general feeling of satisfaction about our life, the world, and our place in it.

So why don’t we talk about it that way? If we thought about our mental health as a measure of whether we’re happy or not — or how happy we are — it would change the way we think and act when it comes to our life choices.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that we pull back from scientific study of mental health or mental health disorders. Conditions like depression and anxiety are all too real, and the medical and scientific communities must continue to study them so we can better understand, diagnose, and treat them.

I’m talking about you, me, the individual — the way we talk about mental health as it relates to ourselves. It’s deeply broken.

By applying a very archaic, naive-sounding word like “happiness” to our mental and emotional wellbeing, my intention isn’t to minimize them. Quite the opposite — I believe we don’t focus on them enough. Or rather, we focus on them in the wrong way.

By calling it mental health, we think of it as separate from the rest of what we have going on. It’s one aspect of our life, rather than the sum of our life.

The result is that we consciously make decisions which will negatively impact our happiness, promising ourselves that we’ll make up for it by doing other, separate things to “look after our mental health.”

We compartmentalize our happiness. It becomes an item on our to-do list, when it should be the title of the list.

Next time you think you might be compartmentalizing your happiness by calling it mental health, ask yourself whether what you’re saying would seem ridiculous if you replaced the words “mental health” with “happiness.”

Here are some examples.

“It’s great to work out every day, but make sure you’re also setting aside some time to be happy, too.”

“I try to take one day a week to focus on my happiness.”

“Honestly things are going great right now, except I do need to improve my happiness.”

Despite the fact that we’re now much more enlightened about mental health, it still seems strange that we talk about it as if it’s one of the “things.”

In your head, list the five things you want most right now. Don’t censor them, don’t try to pick only the five most noble desires you can. Just think of the first five things you desire at this moment.

Whatever they are, they’re not really what you want.

You want to be happy. Content. Satisfied. Whatever was in your list, you feel that those things will help you get there.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting hedonism or the selfish pursuit of self-indulgence. One of the most powerful and scientifically proven paths to joy is serving others. Once again, “service” is an important item on that to-do list titled “Happiness.”

I’m also not suggesting that we avoid all discomfort, sadness, or unpleasant experiences. Any therapist will tell you that physically demanding exercise is a powerful tool for improving mental health, and yet physically demanding exercise is uncomfortable in the moment. The same is true for feelings of sadness or grief — unpleasant in the moment, important for long-term joy and fulfillment.

In this enlightened age where many of us openly talk about our mental health, we’re talking about it the wrong way. And that’s leading many of us to deal with it the wrong way.

We see mental health as an organ in our body, one that sometimes malfunctions and needs medical attention. But our happiness is the body, while all the other things — our jobs, our relationships, our hobbies, our physical activity, our connection with nature, our faith, our community — they’re the organs.

The difference is that when the body isn’t working, you have to look at it as a whole to understand what’s going on. When we compartmentalize mental health, we work on it in isolation. We try to fix it solely through therapy, medication, meditation, mindfulness, etc.

I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: I believe in therapy, medication, and meditation.

But if we think of mental health as joy and satisfaction — as happiness — it encourages us to look at the whole picture, at the actual circumstances of our lives in addition to the machinery within our brains. And it might just encourage us to change our lives, where we might otherwise have remained stagnant.

A person who says their career negatively affects their mental health will try to change their mindset.

A person who acknowledges their career makes them unhappy will try to change their career.

Our happiness isn’t one piece of furniture in the house that is our life. It’s the house.