Tender Loving Care: Rinse and Repeat

I often teach people mental health exercises to help them accomplish certain goals, like anxiety relief and better focus. I personally use some of the exercises that I teach. But I have learned that many people will cease to practice these exercises when they feel better. That’s when I think about the bathtub.

Many of us treat mental health problems like we, regrettably, treat weight problems. We do what’s necessary to get rid of the obvious problems and then we return to our previous life patterns.

Eventually, though, old problems rise again or life throws a new curve. Sometimes this will bring us back to our mental health “workouts.” But quite often we’ll get stuck first in a quagmire of self-doubt and recrimination, saying things to ourselves like, “What’s wrong with me? I thought I was all better. I fixed this aspect of myself. I cleared that demon!”

Truth is, the exercises are not only for "unhealthy" people. Just like physical exercises, mental and emotional health exercises are for everybody. Mental and emotional health don’t just arise out of nowhere. They have to be cultivated, nurtured, and maintained. I don’t care how together other people look to you, they need the exercises just as much as you do.

Equating emotional health to physical health, however, doesn’t always help make the necessity of regular nurturance clear to most people because it’s easy for many of us to view a life without continual physical exercise as normal.

But it’s a lot harder for us to imagine a life without regular bathing. So I suggest thinking of mental and physical health practices as we think about taking care of our bodily hygiene. Think of how your body feels every time you finish a shower. Think of the smell of soap in the air. Think of the way your skin feels when the sweat, dead skin, and day-old oil is rinsed away. Fresh. Then think of the way it must feel after days of not bathing—the stickiness, the stinkiness, the rashes (not that any of us would know this from experience).

Most people would not go without cleansing the exterior of their persons for more than a day or so, but we tend to think that our minds are self-maintaining machines. Our minds are a lot more like our bodies than we tend to think. They do not necessarily have the ability to take care of themselves.

Much like parents exist to take care of babies, and automobile technicians exist to take care of cars, there is a deeper, more mysterious part of us that exists to take care of our minds and hearts—daily.