How to Solve the World’s Mental Health Crisis – Part 3/3 the Solution
Disclaimer: The entire content of this article is based on the opinions of the author. It is intended for informational and educational purposes only. The information in this article is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified healthcare professional and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your healthcare professional if you suffer from chronic stress, anxiety, or depression.
In 2023 people are the unhappiest they have ever been. 540 million people worldwide suffer from anxiety or depression: That’s about 10% of the world’s adult population. Over 30 % of people around the world reported feeling stressed, worried, and/or angry. 700 000 die of suicide each year.
Does this sound like a world where people are happy and enjoying life?
In this three-part series, we’ll take a look at the issue by answering the following questions:
- Why does the way we live make us anxious and depressed?
- Does the world really have a mental health crisis?
- If it did, how would we solve it?
Part 3: How do we solve this crisis?
After I healed anxiety and depression, it became clear to me that things do not have to be the way they are around the world.
Knowing the root causes of stress, anxiety, and depression is the first step to healing them.
Once more The World Happiness Report proves an invaluable asset. Their extensive studies of happiness come down to the sentence:
“Mental health or psychological well-being rests on the capacity of individuals to manage their thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as their interactions with others”
Manage your thoughts, feelings, and behavior — manage your mental well-being (happiness).
- We must learn to think for ourselves instead of accepting the truths of others
- We must start honoring our feelings instead of repressing them
- We must allow ourselves to behave in a way that comes naturally to us
- And last but not least, we must learn to accept, honor, and respect other people, most of all their opinions and beliefs. Ditch the incessant need to be “right” and stop figuring out what’s “best”: It’s all subjective.
Change your beliefs, change your life
It may seem like a tall order to get rid of old habits and break the cycle of teaching our children the way we were taught.
After all, we live based on our beliefs (what we have learned) and keep repeating the same patterns over and over again until challenged to make a change.
I certainly did not learn as a child the means to express my emotions and fulfill my needs in a healthy way, let alone any way of being happy.
But there is a way forward.
Despite everything I had learned, that unknowingly brought me so much stress and anxiety, I learned, as an adult, to break the patterns of old habits, and control my emotions.
I learned what it takes to be happy and beat stress, anxiety, and depression in the process.
You can learn it too. Anyone can.
If you want to know what I have learned, you can download my free eBook below. It explains everything I know.
Change Starts with You
After I had healed, I remembered that life is supposed to be fun, not a struggle, and I could and should still pursue my dreams instead of just money and success.
Having found the means to bring joy and happiness back into my life, I felt it was my obligation to share what I know with as many people as possible.
That’s why I started a blog to fight mental health problems. I’ve seen up close what depression does to people and experienced anxiety and depression myself. They are debilitating conditions and something I do not wish anyone to struggle with.
Commit to Change
If we want to stop the anxiety and depression that our current way of life is bringing about, we must commit to change:
- We must first fix our issues. Get rid of negative, non-beneficial beliefs. Start living according to our true values and needs, and transform ourselves to accept that life can be fun and easy instead of stressful and depressing.
- Teach this new way of living to others, especially children: Self-worth, empathy, and social-emotional skills. Everyone is enough just the way they are. Bring out what is naturally found in children, instead of pushing our values and ideas upon them.
- Embrace a new truth about ourselves: Oneness. We are all in this together and everyone deserves an equal opportunity to fulfill their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.
By changing ourselves we can also change our circumstances.
We can all learn to be happy whenever and wherever we want, regardless of the circumstances around us. We do not have to stress and worry all the time and we can, and should, be excited about life and the future.
Learn how to be happy and spread happiness wherever you go
The quickest, easiest way out of this mess is: Learn how to be happy.
That is the best and perhaps the only way.
But why would this work?
Well, you may have noticed that happiness is contagious:
Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler discovered that happiness spreads through social networks (seemingly just as much in social media as in real life), like a virus. You can be infected with the happiness of someone you’ve never even met, and vice versa.
Happiness can spread through your social networks up to three degrees of separation.
Therefore, your happiness can be related to the happiness of your friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond your “social horizon”.
It seems to be the case that when you smile, the world smiles back at you.
Learn to be happy, and you will spread happiness wherever you go.
With enough happy people the whole world will be affected
Seeing how happy you are, other people will want the same happiness for themselves, even though initially they may project their fear and anger at you. They will probably say things like:
“What are you so happy about?”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Stop it, you look like an idiot!”.
But that’s only because they are intrigued by your radiant, happy, presence. They may be afraid at first that they can never be as happy as you. That’s why they react out of fear or even anger.
Eventually, their curiosity will win, and they will come to you and ask:
“Ok, you know what, tell me the secret of your happiness”.
Then, it’s their turn to learn how to be happy.
Will it be enough?
I know that this may sound futile. Wouldn’t the “right” way of solving the problem be to rethink the way we live, educate people on a national level, and reform our societies?
Yes, but it’s a long and arduous road.
The better thing to do is to start the change from within, one person at a time.
Read the paragraphs under the last heading again and think about it. It is a proven fact that happiness spreads to people around you. With enough people living happy lives, the effects will reverberate to reach hundreds of thousands of people.
We need people who know the secret of happiness. Everyone else is telling a different story about life and how it’s a struggle and spreading hopelessness, negativity, stress, and anxiety to people in their social networks. Let’s counteract that negativity. Start spreading happiness.
Update March 20th, 2023, the International Day of Happiness
This is the day The World Happiness Report is published each year.
This year marks the 11th year of the report, and as always, it’s filled with insightful revelations about happiness around the world and how happiness should be placed more front and center in decision-making.
The key takeaway, that so well suits the theme of this article is:
“more and more people have come to believe that our success as countries should be judged by the happiness of our people. There is also a growing consensus about how happiness should be measured. This consensus means that national happiness can now become an operational objective for governments.”
So there are parties working “behind the scenes” to raise awareness about happiness and make happiness a driving factor of the success of nations around the world. The change we seek is happening, albeit slowly.
The World Happiness Report also concluded all the way back in 2013, that
“Mental illness is the single most important cause of unhappiness but is largely ignored by policy makers.”
“Cost-effective treatments exist, but even in advanced countries, only a third of those who need it are in treatment. These treatments produce recovery rates of 50% or more, which mean that the treatments can have low or zero net cost after the savings they generate. Moreover human rights require that treatment should be as available for mental illness as it is for physical illness.”
It’s a shame that such an insightful, thoughtfully conceived report gets so little attention from mainstream media.
The reports have been available for 11 years and validate what I’m trying to convey here:
Happiness is the ultimate goal in life and the truest measure of well-being.
It’s time we start placing happiness first, and educating people about what happiness is and what it takes to be happy.
But until the changes happen on a national scale (which will take time), the best thing we can do is combat mental health problems individually.
How to be happy
Then the final question is: How to be happy?
To solve the world’s mental health crisis, we have numerous tools at our disposal. In the 2nd part of this series, I mentioned that mental health disorders are treatable and curable.
This entire website, happyondemand.com, is dedicated to providing complementary and integrative health practices for healing chronic stress, anxiety, and depression.
Browse the resources and blog and I’m sure you’ll find many useful ideas and practices.
I’ve summarized the keys to living a happy life in my book The 3 Steps to Happiness, which you can download for free by clicking this link.
Don’t forget the conventional well-established methods for treating anxiety and depression, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Start your journey to happiness by healing any causes of unhappiness.
Tl;Dr
Happiness is a state of being that you can achieve regardless of external events and circumstances.
You can find your innate happiness when you:
- adopt a new way of thinking about happiness
- Start acknowledging and taking care of your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs
- Align your life with your passion and purpose
Helpful Resources
Closing Words
You cannot change others, but you can be the change you want to see in the world. Emotions are contagious and the happier you are, the happier you will make others.
- If you found this inspiring or at least somewhat helpful, consider sharing this with others.
- There are tons of ideas, practices, and resources on happyondemand.com. Check them out, and see if any are useful to you or someone you know. Everything on my website is free. No paywalls, subscriptions, fees, etc.
- I turned my realizations about happiness into a free ebook, The 3 Steps to Happiness. Check it out as well and feel free to share it.
- Message me here or on my website, and let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. I’ll gladly share all I know and suggest books, courses, websites, and whatever you might need to be the happiest you can be.
Conclusion
It’s time we change our model of happiness: Place happiness first instead of making it a “reward” for acquiring material wealth, or success.
We must start taking care of our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs, and start living according to meaningful values and our natural behavior.
Happiness is contagious: Learn how to be happy and you will spread happiness wherever you go.
Disclaimer
The entire contents of this blog are based upon the opinions of the author. It is intended for informational and educational purposes only. The information in this blog is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your health care professional before trying any of the products or methods based on this content. I cannot guarantee that you will be free of stress, anxiety or depression, or that you will be happy. I simply want to share with you what I have discovered during my twenty years of seeking happiness and what has worked for me may not work for you.
