getting past mental illness - part II

In the last post, we learnt that believing you can heal is the key to permanently overcoming mental illness. But another crucial element in getting well again is understanding what might have been making you sick, in the first place. 

Mental illness is caused by a huge number of things, ranging across body, mind and soul.

​In this post, let's take a look at some of the more common issues that can cause mental and emotional illnesses.

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Body-wise
Mental health is often directly affected by poor diet and nutrition, lack of adequate sleep, lack of regular exercise, chemical pollutants and also electro-magnetic ‘smog’ that can severely disrupt the body’s own bioelectrical signaling system, that directs hormones, moods, cell growth and  bunch of other things, besides.

This article in the JEMI knowledgebase explains more about the bioelectrical dimension to mental and physical health:

LINK

If you eat properly, sleep enough, exercise regularly (at least 30 minutes, at 3 times a week) and keep chemicals, stress and pollution to a minimum, and you’ll see big improvements in your mental health, even if you do nothing else.

Emotionally
Mental illnesses have a great deal to do with spending too much around emotionally unhealthy, critical, angry and abusive people. 99% of the time they are the direct result of learning how to behave, react and think in certain emotionally-unhealthy ways as a child, usually as a form of self-defense.

There’s a lot more to be said on this subject. The following posts will give you a flavor of what’s really going on:

Scientific causes of personality disorders

7 types of negative people

Again, just as these behaviours were learned, they can be unlearned, and the brain CAN be retrained.

A key part of this is learning more self-compassion for the self. The website below has practical ‘self-compassion’ exercises, plus a whole bunch of scientific studies proving the efficacy of self-compassion in overcoming all sorts of mental issues and problems:

www.selfcompassion.org

Another good book to read is Running on Empty by Jonice Webb PhD, which sets out in detail how childhood emotional neglect can occur, the types of emotional and mental problems it causes for people as adults, and gives a lot of practical ideas on how to start fixing the problem.

Soul-wise

This part of the equation is crucial for 2 reasons:

1. If you don’t recognize the spiritual dimension to a person, then you’ll find it very difficult to answer the question: ‘What is the point of being alive? What is the purpose of being alive?’ You’ll also find it very difficult to bounce back from the difficulties and challenges we all face in life, if you believe that it’s meaningless or random suffering. And lastly, you’ll worry yourself death about the millions of things that are out of your control, and that could conceivably go wrong or harm you. A lack of what’s termed ‘resilience’ is a key trait in many of the more severe mental illnesses, like personality disorders.
2. When God’s in the picture, there’s always hope.

Again, this is profoundly connected to the idea that you have to believe things can change. When things look bleak, when your efforts haven’t got anyway, when you hit a tough patch and things are sliding even more out of control, being able to turn to God at those times and ask for help can make all the difference between coping, keeping it together, and eventually turning it around – or completely losing it.

If prayer, and a connection to God, can work for even physical illnesses (even in cases when the doctors had given up all hope of improvement or recovery), then it can certainly work for mental and emotional illnesses.

To sum up:
Full recovery from mental issues like depression, anxiety, panic disorders,  bipolar, ADHD, pscyhosis – and many more! – is possible, and many people have already made that journey to health themselves, and you can find their stories and experiences all over the web.

In order to heal, you need to:

• Believe it’s actually possible and
• Work out what’s really causing the problem, and take steps to ameliorate the issue at all 3 levels of body, mind and soul.

If you want some help figuring your personal health puzzle out for yourself, pick up a copy of my latest book: Talk to God and Fix Your Health: The reasons why we get sick and how to stay healthy, which you can pre-order by clicking HERE.