Mental Health Literacy: Weathering Life's Storms

On tths episode, Teri challenges listeners to define “mental health” and explains that mental health is not the same as mental illness. Using the World Health Organization definition, mental health is described as active wellbeing—coping with normal stress, working productively, and contributing to community—more like ongoing maintenance than crisis response.  Mental health is then broken into four components: emotional health , psychological health, social health , and behavioral health.

00:00 Welcome and Big Question
01:12 Mental Health vs Illness
02:12 Inner Weather Metaphor
04:13 It Ebbs and Flows
05:52 WHO Definition and Maintenance
06:51 Iceberg and Hidden Struggles
09:49 Four Legs of Mental Health
16:39 Why Definitions Matter
17:25 Mental Health Map 
18:55 Closing 

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• Teri@stillwaterslife.com
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Thanks for joining me today on the Stillwaters Podcast. Today is May 21st, 2026. So, you know, we throw this phrase mental health around constantly. It's in the headlines, we see it on our social media feeds, on Instagram, on Facebook, you name it, TikTok. It's in HR emails from companies, okay? But here's what I want to ask you to think about today. If someone stopped you on the street and said, define it, could you? Could you actually define what I mean when I say mental health? I don't mean just like somebody pointing at their brain and gesturing, you know, that that's my mental health. So today we're gonna go back to the basics. And I promise it it's gonna be more interesting than it sounds. In fact, by the end of this episode, I think the way you see yourself and the people around you might change just slightly. And sometimes a little bit of change is really a lot of change. Okay, let's start with the most important thing I want you to take from today's episode. Mental health is not the same as mental illness. I know it sounds simple, but stick with me because most people, without realizing it, use those two phrases like they mean the same thing. Like mental health, it's just a polite way of saying mental illness. And honestly, that does some damage. Okay, so let me tell you the the the truth about this. Everyone walking on the planet has mental health. Their mental health is in some condition, just like their physical health. Every single person listening to this right now, you don't have to be struggling or in crisis or in therapy to have mental health. It's not a diagnosis, it's a dimension of your life, just like everyone has physical health. Think of it this way. And this is the first metaphor I want to give you today. So hold on to it. Think of your mental health like weather inside of you. Some days it's sunny and clear, you feel focused, you're connected, you're calm, like you're running on all cylinders. But then on other days, it's totally different because it's overcast, it's gray outside, there's clouds, might not be terribly awful, you know, terrible things happening. It's just got this weight and this heaviness. But then other times it's a full storm that rolls in. Thunder, lightning, you name it. Now, here's the part of this metaphor of weather that I want you to keep in mind. Weather isn't good or bad, it just is. We don't say the sky is broken because it's cloudy. The goal of mental health awareness isn't permanent sunshine, it's learning to read your own forecast, dress for the conditions that are expected, and know when to stay inside the house or to go outside of the house. That's the first myth I want to bust because the mental health is only relevant when something is wrong. If that's not the case. Mental health is relevant every single day on the sunny days and on the cloudy days and on the stormy days. So if mental health is like weather, here's the thing that you need to know: it changes. It's not in a fixed state. It is not something that you either have or you don't have, it shifts. And a big part of mental health literacy is understanding that your inner weather responds to things like to what you do, what you don't do, what happens to you, what you feed it, okay. I want you to think about physical fitness. Physical fitness is not something you quote unquote have or don't have, it's something you work at. You have strong weeks where you're at the gym and you're working hard, and then there's weeks when the gym hasn't seen your face for a long time. And you're not gonna talk about it. You get injured, maybe. You rest, you come back. It the whole point is it ebbs and flows, right? I had surgery on my Achilles tendon over a year ago. Before that surgery, I used to walk all the time. You know, my husband and I would get up and walk in the mornings, but then all of a sudden I had this surgery and I had to go through this extensive recovery period, and then even after I was supposedly supposed to be done with that, I still had I wasn't back to where I had been before. So once again, it ebbs and it flows. Well, mental health works the same way. It's not a diagnosis you receive once and then you carry it forever like it's a it's like a tag that you put on your luggage, right? Or a label. It's something that fluctuates. It responds uh to sleep, to stress, to relationships that you have, to grief, to joy, to whether you've had your lunch or not. Have you ever heard of someone being hangry? You don't stay hangry all the time. So I want to quote the World Health Organization because I think that they have a really good definition for mental health. They describe mental health as a state of well-being in which a person can cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively, and contribute to their community. I really like that definition because it centers on well-being as something that is active, not the absence of bad days, bad things. It's not that you're not struggling, you're actively coping, actively contributing. It's a doing word. It's not a not doing word. And that means tending to your mental health, like going to the gym, like eating your vegetables, like getting enough sleep, isn't something that's reserved for people when they're in crisis. It's maintenance, it's just supposed to be part of life. Now I want you to think about an iceberg, get that visual in your head. Above the water line of an iceberg, what do you see? You see behavior, you see how someone acts. You see whether they show up to work, whether they seem fine when you're having a conversation with them, whether they're smiling, or whether they um say I'm good, you know, or I'm fine when they're asked how they are. But below that surface, the part that makes up that vast majority of the iceberg, that's where the real mental health story lives. There's thoughts, there's core beliefs we have, there's past experiences that we've endured, there's emotional patterns that are built over years. There's a nervous system that learns certain things before you were even old enough to choose otherwise. Okay. So when we only judge a person's mental health by what's above that waterline, we miss almost everything. And we make assumptions that are honestly, they're just harmful. So I want you to think about how many times you've heard someone say, after some kind of tragedy, but they seemed so happy. Or I had no idea they were struggling. That's the iceberg. What's visible is a fraction of their story. And this goes the other direction, too. Someone might look chaotic on the surface, messy, disorganized, emotional mess, right? And be doing enormous, difficult, courageous internal work. But the surface doesn't tell you that. So the second myth I want to bust. Um, have you ever heard someone say you would know if someone had a mental health problem? Well, you wouldn't. Not necessarily, because what you see is behavior. And behavior is just that tip of that iceberg. That iceberg, once again, it runs deep underneath that water line. So, what this means practically is that we have to stop using looks as a measure of a person being okay or not being okay. And we need to stop doing that for other people and honestly for ourselves too. Because a lot of us are very, very good at performing and putting on a show to mask other things. Okay, what actually makes up mental health? So we know that mental health is kind of on a spectrum, that it's it's dynamic and them and that most of it's invisible. We've talked about that so far. Let's get a little bit more specific about what it's actually made of, because mental health is a single phrase, uh, it can feel very abstract, and you know, those types of abstractions are hard to act upon. I want to break mental health down into four different components. Think of these as four legs of a table. A table can technically stand on three legs, even two in a pinch, you know, but it's it's gonna be unsteady, right? It's gonna wobble. And if one leg snaps entirely, the whole thing is gonna tip over. So these four components work the same way. The first component or the first leg of our table is your emotional health. And I want to be really precise about what this means because I think people misunderstand it. Emotional health is not about being happy, it's not about staying positive, it's about your capacity to feel, name, and process emotions without being completely overwhelmed by them. It's about having a relationship with your own feelings rather than being ruled by them. Or on the other side of it, being so shut down that you can't access them at all. Good emotional health looks like, okay, I'm feeling kind of sad right now, and I can sit with that, and I trust that it's gonna change eventually. It's not I feel sad, and therefore something must really be wrong with me or with my life. Okay, that's emotional health. The second leg on our table is psychological health, your inner world, your thoughts, your beliefs, your sense of self, how you talk to yourself when no one else is listening. A lot of this is established in childhood long before you had anything to say about the matter. The stories that we were told about who we are, whether we're worthy, whether we have value, whether we're capable, they become the background noise in our minds. Psychological health is partly about becoming aware of that noise and asking, is that true? Um, does this still serve me in a positive way? Is that really mine to hold on to? The third leg of our table is social health, and that is the quality of our connections or our relationships. And this one is, I think, probably the most underestimated. Humans are wired for connection. God made us that way, not as a preference, okay, as a biological need. Loneliness isn't just being sad, it's genuinely uh measurably harmful to mental and physical health. There's research out there showing that chronic illness or chronic loneliness has health impacts that's comparable to smoking cigarettes. So our social health isn't about having lots of friends or being extroverted. Um, it took me a long time to learn this because I am extroverted. But it's about having enough genuine connection or relationships where you feel seen, where you are known by that other person, and like you matter to that person. So that's social health, connections, relationships incredibly important. I mean, if you think about it, why did God create Eve? Because Adam was lonely. He needed connection, he needed relationship with another person that was like him. All right, the fourth leg of our table is behavioral health. And this is the habits and the coping mechanisms that we are reaching for all the time, especially when we're under stress. Because stress is a real test, and what we do when we're tested reveals a lot. So healthy coping, which is things like moving, you know, but also resting, reaching out, being creative, getting outside, whereas less healthy coping is when we avoid people, when we numb ourselves. Some people numb themselves with substances, right? Or with other behaviors that are not healthy. Isolation, or what about scrolling for hours and hours on end? And then calling that rest. That's not rest. So don't get me wrong, I'm not judging anybody that does that. But the question is this which ones am I reaching for the most? Am I reaching for that phone so that I can do scroll? Or am I reaching for getting outside, maybe doing some walking, or maybe just putting my body and mind at rest? And whatever I'm reaching for, or whatever you're reaching for, is that working for you long term? Or is it just working momentarily? We could talk more about all of those, but that's the four legs of our table: emotional, psychological, social, and behavioral health. So remember, when one of those legs on that table starts to wobble, the others are gonna feel it. However, when one strengthens, the others tend to feel that as well. So why does any of this matter? So, you know, I'm constantly asking myself, so what? What does this matter? Why spend 20 minutes here defining a term? Well, because I think language shapes how we see things. And when we only have this vague idea of what mental health means, when it's equated with being unwell or being weak, we stop asking the right questions. We stop checking in on ourselves, and we wait for a crisis before we pay attention. Okay, you know I love metaphors, I use them all the time. That's the teacher in me. But I've got one more for you. Understanding mental health gives you a map. Before, you might have been navigating your inner life in the dark, stumbling into walls, not sure why certain things feel so hard and why certain patterns keep repeating in your life. Having a map doesn't remove the difficult terrain, but it means that you can see where you are. And that changes it all. Knowing what mental health is, really knowing it, shifts the question. It moves you from am I okay to where am I on this mental health spectrum right now? Which of my four table legs needs some attention? What does my inner weather look like today? Those are better questions, they're more honest, and they lead to better answers. This is not about having it all figured out. We are all human. None of us are perfect. But understanding mental health, it's about paying attention and treating your mental health like it's important and it matters because it does. And not just focusing on it when things start falling apart. So, mental health. It's not just a buzzword, it's not just for people that are in a crisis, it's the whole inner weather system that you carry with you every single day. Your emotions, your psychology, your relationships, your habits. The iceberg beneath everything you show to the world. And now that you can name it, you can start to understand it. And that's what this episode of this podcast is here for. On every episode, regardless of the topic, we try to ask better questions. We try to make space for the stuff that doesn't usually always get good airtime. So in the future, we're gonna dive into some more of these topics. It's fascinating stuff, and I cannot wait to get into it with you. Okay. Until then, keep checking your forecast. Be kind to what you find there, and tune in next time. Until then, may you find healing and wellness at the still waters.