Mental health & Performance
Mental well-being can be thought of in terms of a spectrum. We can fluctuate or move along this spectrum over time based on multiple factors including stressors, personal situations, and life events.
Everyone has symptoms of some type of mental health issue at some time in life when one or several stressors overwhelm the person’s ability to self-regulate or repair. The symptoms are usually, and arbitrarily, labeled either physical or mental. This artificial dichotomy usually does not align with the affected person’s reality. Rarely is an athlete with a strained hamstring not also worried about the injury or distressed by the pain. Similarly, the most common initial warning signs of depression are the physical symptoms of tension, restlessness, and disturbed sleep, energy, and appetite. This is because we have overlapping systems of mind, body, spirit, and relationships, each integrally connected to the others. When the homeostasis of one or more systems is disrupted, people instinctively try to correct the problem regardless of its origin. In the mental health domain, signs of distress are emotional, mental, behavioral, and physical.
