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  "description": "Checking in that we're on the right page, when it comes to Mental Health awareness 🌤️",
  "path": "/what-is-mental-health/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-11T06:00:53.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.gilespcroft.com",
  "tags": [
    "Mental Health Awareness Week",
    "signing up (for free)",
    "MentalHealth",
    "Mental Health - The Daily RemindersMental health as birthright: who we really are, underneath the noise of Thought. Diagnosis ≠ life sentence ✋🏼The Daily Reminders",
    "completely the wrong direction",
    "iHeart home-study ‘Ignite’ Programme",
    "inside-that’s-nothing-to-do-with-any-part-of-our-bodies",
    "Innate Health",
    "https://gilespcroft.com/what-is-mental-health/",
    "Looking upstream 🔖The different ways you can address mental health conditions. (Premium Written & Audio Content.)The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft"
  ],
  "textContent": "This week, in the UK, it's Mental Health Awareness Week: _“a week-long campaign that highlights the importance of good mental health, challenges stigma and promotes practical actions people can take to support their own wellbeing.”_\n\n(Talking of practical actions, if you're new here, or have been forwarded this email, you could do a lot worse than signing up (for free) to receive the **Daily Reminders** in your inbox. If you'd just like a refresh, then check out all the posts on the site tagged with #MentalHealth… and share any that resonate with you.)\n\nMental Health - The Daily RemindersMental health as birthright: who we really are, underneath the noise of Thought. Diagnosis ≠ life sentence ✋🏼The Daily Reminders\n\nClick on this card to find related posts\n\nI can get a bit of a bee in my bonnet about such campaigns, because generally speaking, as a society, we're looking in completely the wrong direction when it comes to the way we see, and treat, mental health conditions (which is the whole reason the Daily Reminders exist in the first place).\n\nSo to address the balance a little, here's a conversation I had with my then 9-year old daughter, on our walk to school, a few years ago:\n\n### What is mental health?\n\nIt’s #MentalHealthAwarenessDay, or #WorldMentalHealthDay, or whatever it is they’re calling it this time round (I prefer the former), and my daughter was encouraged to wear yellow to school today, as a result.\n\nWe got to talking about it on the walk in. Curious, I asked her,\n\n> **_“What d’you reckon the most important thing to remember about mental health is, lovely?”_**\n\nNow, she’s been through the iHeart home-study ‘Ignite’ Programme (check it out for your own kids - it’s great!) and when Dad asks her a question like that, she treats it as a test, with a right and a wrong answer.\n\nShe’s well versed, so I got,\n\n> _“Well, when anything happens, you can ask yourself the question, ‘Does it look like something outside of me is taking away my wellbeing?’ and that will tell you whether or not you’re on the ‘attached wellbeing’ path. And that’s not how it actually works.”_\n\nPretty good, in a multiple-choice kind of way, and I’d like to think she puts this in to practice in her more reflective moments, but you’ll note that just like a politician (or every client I’ve ever worked with) she’s not answered the question I’ve asked her. She’s instead given me an answer to a question she _wants_ to answer. Classic.\n\nI pushed, rephrasing and focusing a little:\n\n> **_“So, where d’you reckon mental health is, then?”_**\n\nShe paused.\n\n> _“In your heart? No, ummm, your head. Oh. No. Umm, oh, I don’t know, Dad.”_\n\n(At this point probably wishing we could instead talk about how she can almost touch her nose to her knees when stretching, or what happened when a wasp landed on her apple at school, or anything other than this boring Dad stuff.)\n\nSensing myself about to launch helplessly, and pointlessly into a baffling description of inside-that’s-nothing-to-do-with-any-part-of-our-bodies to a small child, life intervened and rescued me, as at that point we walked out from underneath a tree, into a fierce, low autumn sun that was busy burning off the early morning mist.\n\n> **_“Well, what if mental health was nothing to do with our bodies at all? What if it was a bit like the sun?”_**\n\n>  _“Always there, you mean, Dad?”_\n\n(She’s heard this metaphor before, and like you and me, needs reminding of it once in a while.)\n\n> **_“Exactly that. And do you think the sun needs ‘looking after’?”_**\n\n>  _“No, of course not. It looks after itself!”_\n\n> ** _“Can we always _see_ the sun, during the daytime?”_**\n\n>  _“No, we couldn’t see it first thing this morning, could we? It was covered up by the mist. It’s really bright now, though, isn’t it Dad?”_\n\n> ** _“It is, my love. You know, maybe that’s the closest we’re going to get to describing what mental health actually is: always there, doesn’t need looking after, sometimes gets covered up.”_**\n\n>  _“By our thinking, Dad?”_\n\n> ** _“Exactly that, kiddo.”_**\n\n(Like I say, she knows the score.)\n\n* * *\n\nWe walked for a while, talking about wasps and friends and traffic lights and Autumn being her favourite season and how awesome it is that we just saw three leaves fall off a tree all at once, when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I spotted a volley of sun rays, slicing through the mist in the valley beneath our feet.\n\nI stopped, back-tracked a little and pointed it out to her, through the gap in the trees we’d just passed.\n\nThe view we saw together.\n\n> _**“WOWWWWW!!”** _we said, in unison.\n\nWe stood there in silence (notable on a walk with a 9yo), just marvelling at the light, the grades of shade, the spiders webs glistening in the sun, the spectrum of colour in the leaves, the subtlest shade of blue above… and we rested _in_ mental health.\n\nBecause that’s the other thing about it:\n\n☀️\n\n****Mental health is always Now.****\n\nIt can’t be anywhere or anything else, because everything else is the clouds of our thinking, obscuring the omnipresence of Innate Health.\n\n## ⛅️\n\n _“Take a picture!”_ was her eventual first utterance (and mine, mentally, if I’m being truthful with you) and I did, and of course it’s lovely and it’s a reminder of that moment, but the feeling of peace—of mental health—we both experienced in that moment had nothing to do with the sun, or the mist and everything to do with just being.\n\nBeing. Present.\n\nNo labels. No judgement. No Dad, no daughter, no past, no future, just life.\n\nAnd here’s the deal: to attribute this feeling to something ‘outside’ of the moment is the ‘attached wellbeing’ route all over again, and it’s a slippery slope.\n\nBecause before we know it, we’re back at square one, where it looks to us like we _can’t_ experience mental health _unless_ the conditions are just right for us:\n\n  * the sun has to shine\n  * people have to be nice to us\n  * work or school have to be going ok etc.\n\n\n\nBut that’s not how it actually works.\n\nThere is no barrier to entry for the experience of mental health. It’s waiting for us every time we fall out of our thinking _about_ life and instead go about our business, at one _with_ life, be that looking at trees and sunlight, dropping wasp-invaded apples, waiting at traffic lights, watching leaves fall or even arguing with our friends.\n\nAnd as I write this, I realise that maybe she _did_ answer my question, after all.\n\n💟\n\nGiles\n\np.s. The theme for this year's Mental Health Awareness Week is **‘Take Action’** , so please do just that, by either **forwarding this email** on to someone, or share the **online version**(https://gilespcroft.com/what-is-mental-health/) with your network. You'll be doing your bit 💝\n\nSIGN UP FOR THE DAILY REMINDERS newsletter\n\nWant to start __every__ day with helpful, insightful content like this? The Daily Reminder is a quick, lighthearted email that arrives in your inbox every morning, to help keep you grounded in reality, so that you get to __‘Think less, and live more.’__\n\n __“They feel like a moment of stillness in a world of madness.” ~__ Neil, UK\n\n __“One of those small things with big impact. Honestly, just sign up!”__ ~ Paula, UK\n\nGET YOURS NOW\n\n### Related\n\nLooking upstream 🔖The different ways you can address mental health conditions. (Premium Written & Audio Content.)The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft\n\nPremium Content made ****Open Access**** for Mental Health Awareness Week",
  "title": "What is mental health?",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-11T08:24:38.575Z"
}