We Talk About Mental Health More Than Ever — So Why Are We Still Struggling?

Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much our culture talks about mental health now.

The everyday person now has language for anxiety, burnout, trauma, ADHD, attachment styles, boundaries, and nervous system regulation. In many ways, that growing awareness is deeply valuable.

But despite becoming increasingly emotionally literate, many people still feel exhausted, overwhelmed, disconnected, lonely, and quietly unwell.

So why is that?

In this episode, I explore the difference between emotional awareness and emotional wellness — and why flourishing may require something bigger than simply becoming experts on ourselves.

Together, we reflect on:

• why self-awareness alone doesn’t necessarily create healing
• the hidden exhaustion of constant self-monitoring
• how modern culture often reduces mental health to symptom management
• the difference between functioning and flourishing
• the relational, emotional, and meaningful conditions human beings actually need in order to thrive

This is a thoughtful conversation about mental health, modern life, and the deeper human longing not merely to cope better… but to feel more fully alive.

If you’ve ever felt emotionally informed but still emotionally depleted, this episode is for you.

If you're longing for a summer that feels more spacious, supported, and more like yourself again, I'm opening a small number of private mentorship spots this season through The Summer Sanctuary. You can learn more here.

RESOURCES & LINKS

• Take the quiz: Are You a Gifted Woman?
• Sign up to receive my Sanctuary Letters
• Book a complimentary Flourishing Call if you're curious about working together
• Follow me on Instagram: @dr.andrealein
• Learn more: andrealein.com

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Transcript

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May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And I've been thinking a lot lately about how much our culture likes to talk about mental health now. We have language for almost everything, right? Anxiety, burnout, trauma, attachment styles, nervous system regulation, ADHD, boundaries, emotional triggers. I will refrain from naming all the acronyms that you all, I'm sure, have heard, and all of us professionals like to throw around. And in many ways, I think this awareness is genuinely very valuable. Conversations that used to stay hidden behind closed doors are for those of us who went to school and studied the DSM are now happening openly. And I am very, very grateful for that. I mean, do we not do that here on this podcast? But I also find myself wondering something. If all of this psychological awareness was actually making us emotionally well, wouldn't more people feel better by now? Because despite becoming increasingly emotionally literate, many people still feel, I believe, exhausted, overwhelmed, lonely, disconnected, anxious, and quietly or not so quietly unwell. And I wonder if part of the reason is that emotional awareness and emotional wellness are not necessarily the same thing. Human flourishing, in my opinion, requires something much bigger than simply becoming experts, so to speak, on ourselves. So today I want to explore the difference between talking about mental health, as important as that is, and building lives that genuinely help us flourish. Let's go. Welcome to the Power to Flourish podcast, where science meets the art of a beautiful life. I'm Dr. Andrea Lyon, positive psychologist, giftedness expert and coach, and modern-day spiritual godmother to brilliant, deep-feeling women. This isn't just another self-help podcast. It's a sanctuary, a sacred space to come back to yourself. Each week we'll explore the emotional experience of gifted, sensitive women and what it means to live a life that feels as beautiful as it may look. Because flourishing isn't a luxury. It's your birthday, and your life is waiting. This is the Power to Flourish Podcast. So how is it possible? How is it possible that we are more psychologically aware than ever before? This is my belief anyway. And yet so many people, those of you listening, people you know, still feel emotionally exhausted. And I'm not even saying that we're clinically struggling, although of course many people are, but just like deeply depleted, feeling that deep sense of disconnection or feeling overwhelmed, or even just as simple as feeling lonely, even though it's not simple, but I I think it's just like being emotionally burdened by our modern life. And when I speak, I have to be clear that here I am, I am recording in the United States. I'm surrounded by life here in the United States. It's really the only life I've ever known. And for many of us here, this is the life we've known. And so I recognize that this is not necessarily the case in other places of the world, but I do think our globe is becoming more and more similar in this way. And maybe it's just like Western culture, but I just want to clarify that is what I'm speaking about today. And I don't think people are feeling this way because they're not trying. In fact, especially for thoughtful, introspective women like yourself, many women who listen to this podcast, I think you are incredibly self-aware. You reflect deeply, you think deeply, you feel deeply. A lot of the times you analyze your patterns, you care about growth. That's why you listen to podcasts like this, right? You genuinely want to heal and become healthier. You genuinely want to have a good, healthy, happy life. But sometimes, and I think oftentimes nowadays, that self-awareness quietly turns into something that isn't always helpful. It's the constant self-monitoring. It's almost like this emotional hypervigilance and this like internal analysis. Even if we're working with someone like a therapist or a coach, it's this kind of like ongoing analysis, whether it's just inside our own heads or something we're doing with a friend or a professional. And I think the way I would put it, and I've certainly I've fallen into this trap myself. So I'm not saying this is, you know, about other people and not myself, but it's this pressure we feel in our culture to optimize ourselves, not just physically, uh, but emotionally. And I think because of that, many women are carrying around this like enormous psychological insight on the one hand, without actually feeling emotionally nourished. So sometimes I wonder if we have unintentionally, and all of our sharing of all the knowledge and, you know, sharing it all out on Instagram and TikTok and all the places these days, it's like we have reduced mental health. Even the concept of mental health awareness month, a lot of the times when people are talking about mental health awareness month, they're not actually talking about mental health. They're talking about illness. They're they're actually talking about managing symptoms and how to fix these problems. And I'm not saying that there's not I'm not saying that's a bad use of our thinking and our energy, but in our overzealousness, maybe to manage all the symptoms and analyze ourselves and function more efficiently and more efficiently, more, more efficiently, we get stuck in this place and we've reduced mental health to that instead of asking the bigger question, the question that I prefer focusing on, which is also one of the reasons why I transition from the clinical work that I used to do to the work I do today, which is actually the question of what helps a human being flourish. That to me is a more important question to consider in this month of May, in Mental Health Awareness Month, and just constantly focusing on the negative, on the symptoms and the pathology and the diagnoses and all of the disorders that we could categorize ourselves or our loved ones in. Even though, again, I don't mean to throw it all out, you know, throw what is the throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I do think we have to shift our focus if we want to have a balanced and I would argue more effective approach to having robust mental health flourishing vitality in our life. So I want to share a few thoughts today with you for your own reflection. The first one is emotional literacy, while very important, is not the same as emotional wellness. And one thing I've noticed is that at least on the surface today, we've become very good at naming things. Now, I could argue that there's a lot of stuff out there, and the way people throw around terms these days is like a little irresponsible at times. But even if we, even if we take that argument aside and say, okay, even if people kind of get it not quite right, I do think that there is something useful about more and more and more and more people, especially young people, understanding things around, you know, and being able to identify things like attachment patterns and coping mechanisms and trauma responses and, you know, quote unquote triggers and nervous system states and, you know, the various kinds of disorders that are out there that people are interested in. We're very good at naming things. This is part of that, again, Western mindset. I would also just say that our whole field in mental health, our psychology, psychiatry, like it's it's come from a background of like, this is the way we think. This we we want to try to categorize and reduce things down to a way of understanding and naming them, which again, there's nothing wrong with that. But naming an experience and transforming an experience are really not the same. They're not the same. You know this for yourself. You can understand yourself intellectually, and for years, oh my goodness, I feel like I sat in a place for a very long time, probably mostly in my teens and 20s, because I was in learning mode. And I was understanding myself and I was understanding myself, and intellectually I could tell you all sorts of things. But that didn't mean that my life was changed and I still felt emotionally exhausted. And I think a lot of people fall into this camp where, you know, you can you can sort of know why you struggle, which is great on the one hand, you know, but you still feel disconnected from joy and from meaning and from beauty and from rest or just feeling alive. And again, awareness matters. I think even therapy and coaching, all of this matters. Language matters. But I think sometimes our modern culture subtly, or not so subtly, treats self-awareness as the end point instead of the beginning. It is the beginning. It's the beginning. It's a very important but insufficient step in the whole process because we as humans need more than insight. I'm sure many of you can think of a story, either someone in your life, someone in the past, or a story of someone who maybe was in therapy for years. Maybe it's yourself. And you've got a lot of insight. There's a lot of insight there. We need more than insight. We also need belonging. We need actual rest, not just knowing about it. We need actual meaningful relationships, not just learning about it. We need I'm biased. We need beauty. We need to embody this. We need to find ways to actually be creative in our lives, like creativity and purpose and all the things that you've heard about the spiritual grounding environments that are actually supportive and help us to exhale in our everyday life. Like all of these things are important and go beyond the insight. So insight, again, very important. But it leads me into something else I've been noticing culturally. We've become, on the one hand, very self-aware, but also very self-conscious. And I think many people, if we're not careful, if you're not careful, even listening to a podcast like this, we live in a near-constant state of self-observation. It's like just focus on ourselves. We're monitoring our emotions, we're evaluating our reactions, we're assessing, you know, our healing journey. We are consuming endless psychological content. We're reading all the books, or maybe you're not reading any books, but you're listening to all the podcasts, or you are hooked on whoever your favorite, you know, TikTok or Instagram creator is in this space. Whether we realize it or not, we're asking ourselves on some level whether we're functioning, quote unquote, correctly. And I think self-awareness can absolutely be healthy and we can sit in it in a healthy way, but constant, constant self-surveillance is not only exhausting, I think it is completely misguided. And I think it's one of the potential pitfalls. Um, and honestly, even again, when I worked in therapy, it's like I did not want to be part of the problem. And sometimes part of the problem means you are focusing with someone in therapy on this like constant self-surveillance rather than zooming out and looking at things like how do we participate in life? How do we be present? How do we practice being present? How do we focus on creating more than just consuming? How do we actually connect with other people, which means focusing on other people, which means serving other people, right? Not just constantly thinking about ourselves. We call it like navel gazing. This is where it just dips into the negative. It's really about engaging with the world outside of your own internal state. And look, I am an introvert naturally. I do love being with people. I love people, I love connecting deeply with people. But I also am I have this tendency where it's a lot easier and comfortable for me to just kind of like stay in my head. So this is something I'm very, very familiar with. I think, especially for more introverted people, this can be a challenge. But even if you're extroverted and you're just going through a hard time, you want to be careful because, you know, as humans, we're just not designed to spend all day psychologically analyzing ourselves. It's it's not healthy. It's not healthy. And I think you probably intuitively know that to be true, but we do it, right? Or we know our culture supports that. Just look all around you. It just supports this way of being. And I think that maybe this points to a deeper issue in how we define mental health itself, which is my third point. I believe that mental health, keyword health, is bigger than just quote, not falling apart. To me, if we're really talking about mental health, and if May is mental health awareness, then I want to support people and point them to what is going to build your mental health. Not necessarily focusing on what I think we oftentimes mean in our modern culture. I think one of the hidden assumptions is that mental health means like mental illness, actually, you know, and symptom reduction and emotional management and like trying really hard to stay functional, which is on the spectrum of mental health for sure, because mental health, there's a spectrum, right? Like like physical health. There's robust health on the one end, and then there's like completely falling apart and you know, clinically not functioning in life on the on the other hand, like very severe. But as you can probably guess, since this podcast is the power to flourish, I am really focused on helping people flourish. And flourishing is bigger than functioning. Flourishing goes way beyond just functioning. It is true that if someone is not functioning, we need supports in place and we need ways to help people get to a place of functioning. And a person can technically be very productive and high achieving and emotionally aware and outwardly stable and still feel deeply disconnected from themselves. And I think this is very true for women. I mean, honestly, in the last week alone, there have been multiple stories that have come into my personal life through various people sharing specifically about a woman they know who on the outside the life looks like near perfect, like better, better than good. Like really it looks amazing from the outside. But the the real story behind the facade is that they're falling apart. Or even if they're not fully falling apart, they are deeply, deeply, deeply disconnected from what I would say is reality, the reality within themselves and the reality in whatever the situation is. So the main point I want to drive home here is that mental health is not merely the absence of crisis. In fact, I think it needs to be a much broader discussion than that. It is also, it needs to be about vitality and meaning and delight and secure attachment, which we've talked about here, and beauty and hope and purpose, and feeling just fully alive inside your own life. How many people, if I just know, if I walked into a room and said, raise your hand, if you would like to feel fully alive inside your own life, how many people would raise their hand? I I think few people, if they're being honest, feel fully alive inside their own life. And you might have a moment of it. And maybe it's, you know, may it's not about even the feeling in the moment. It is this deeper feeling in your life. It's a deeper feeling. It's not the feelings that change from circumstances, right? Well, people can have really bad circumstances, but still feel very fully alive inside their life. I think many women sense this intuitively and they don't merely want to cope better, right? They want to feel more human. They want to feel more alive. They don't necessarily just want to be able to function. And if you're listening to this podcast, I know that's not you anyway. So maybe here's just a question to reflect on this week. Again, it's it's May, it's mental health awareness month. Think about our mental health. Really, let's think about our mental our mental health. And I want you to ask, have I been primarily trying to manage myself? Like manage the symptoms, manage the bad stuff. Like the way I think of it is like go from you know negative 10 or negative 25 or whatever, wherever you place yourself on the on the meter to zero, right? Like if I could just get to zero, that would be better than being in the negative. Versus, am I trying to nourish myself? And you can feel like you're in the negative and you can focus instead of looking at zero as the goal, look at plus 25 as the goal or whatever, whatever the number is, right? Maybe it's on a scale from negative 100 to 100. How do we get to flourishing? And ask yourself what actually helps me feel more alive? Sit with that question if you really don't know the answer. Because being alive, feeling more alive, is not the same as being more optimized or being more productive or even just like being more successful, whatever, whatever that usually means is like external. And it's not even more emotionally under control. That is not the same. I am talking about alive. I am talking about just think about a flourishing flower. A flourishing flower is alive. It's alive. I'm laughing because I have these beautiful lilies that my husband got me on Mother's Day, which was not that long ago, and they're already just looking so sad and wilted. Um, they're not looking very alive right now, but I know the plant is still alive and I'm trying to keep it alive, but they're not flourishing at the moment. And maybe that, maybe that's how you feel today, and that is okay. That is okay. But you know, you know what it looks like, and maybe you've never felt alive in your life, but you you want that. You know you want that. That's that's the goal. To me, mental health in its core is is not about symptom reduction. It's it's really about being fully human and living this life and and just experiencing and feeling it all and being able to do that in a sound, beautiful way. So ask yourself this week what actually helps me feel more alive? And you might even reflect on things like what, like specifically, what environments nourish me, what relationships nourish me, or just you know, help me to exhale what restores beauty and depth and creativity and meaning in my life. Those are the keys. That's the compass, that's to the direction. If you want more robust mental health, I want to encourage you not simply to look at how to reduce your symptoms. And I'm not saying to you to ignore that, because there's definitely great skills. And if you're working with a therapist or someone who's helping you through that, that's really important. But don't disregard this part. Don't disregard the the parts that we know. We know for a fact. This is not my opinion. This is research. This is not even if you don't want to take a scientific approach. This is we've known for eons and eons the way humans are built, these are the things that give. Life, real life to humans. So I am genuinely very grateful that conversations around mental health are more open than they once were. They're more open than they were when I was younger. They're definitely more open than they were, you know, when my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother all who struggled with mental health issues. We have a beautiful opportunity today to have these conversations that are very important and very needed. But I just think that we need a bigger vision. We need a bigger vision of emotional wellness than simply becoming better at managing our distress. It's it's way more because we are not here to be machines to optimize. We can we get let AI do that, right? But we as humans are not machines to be optimized. We are relational, we are emotional, we are embodied, meaning-seeking people, and flourishing requires more than awareness alone. It it really requires lives that actually support our humanity. And I think many women are not simply longing to feel less anxious or less depressed, they're longing to feel more fully alive. So I hope this served you. And if it gave you food for thought and you think a friend might enjoy it, would you do me a favor and would you forward it to a friend? Because as I have shared at other times, this podcast, I believe, this message that I have is going to get out in a more organic, relational way. That is who I am. I am relational at my core. I I have a hard time like in transactional kinds of things. And sometimes things like marketing a podcast and showing up on Instagram and all to for me can sometimes feel less relational. Um, it's a little bit of a challenge if I'm being really completely honest. So I'm gonna rely on you, the listener, to help spread this message because I think it's very important. And if it's important to me, and if it's important to you, there's someone else out there that you're probably connected to that would appreciate hearing this message. So I would love it if you would do that. And until next week, my friend, as always, keep flourishing. Thank you for listening to the Power to Flourish podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling more seen, more supported, and more deeply connected to yourself. And if this episode resonated, would you take a moment to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with a friend? It's one of the best ways to help this work reach the women who need it most. You'll find show notes, links, and resources from today's episode at powertoflourish.com. And now just a quick reminder: this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It's not therapy, medical advice, or a substitute for professional support. Listening doesn't make me your therapist or doctor, though if you're looking for a coach, you know where to find me. All right, beautiful one. That's it for now. Until next time. Trust yourself, honor your guests, and keep flourishing.