Healthful relationships are important for your Mental Fitness

When it comes to feeling and doing YOUR best, seeking and maintaining healthful relationships is a BIGGIE!

It's a "know brainer" to know that your social relationships are a major influence on your mental health and fitness. Your relationships can either give you a healthful boost of serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine (that reduce your stress response to reinforce healthful thoughts, feelings, and behaviors), or trigger a toxic unconscious stress response that increases cortisol in your system (that inhibits the healthful powers of your prefrontal cortex).

Being consciously aware of your emotions is key to helping navigate stressful situations and relationships, to reduce social and environmental toxicity (i.e., unhealthy levels of cortisol) to rebalance your nervous system.

When we're in a stressed cortisol-driven state, it can feel SO GOOD to fight and attack, and WIN (rewarding ourselves with a burst of dopamine)!

The problem with this unconscious neurochemical victory dance is that when we're driven by our stress response (including unconscious biases and stress triggers), our prefrontal cortex becomes inhibited that inhibits comprehension, critical thinking, compassion, emotional regulation, impulse control, and problem solving.

We may feel valid when we attack someone who we perceive as a threat, who we feel deserves it, but being the target of such an attack doesn't feel so good, and may even be considered bullying, assault, or abuse (even when we're not consciously aware).

As I write in ‘My Brain Can’t Poop: A mental fitness guide for humans,’ abuse is what abuse does, even when we feel fully validated in our feelings.

While our feelings may be valid, hurtful actions may not be.

It's important to know that this is not because we're "bad" people, but because of how the human brain works.

The healthful practice is not to suppress or feel ashamed of your feelings (that just adds to the toxic stress and stigma), but to learn how to process and express your feelings in a healthful way, to understand them to achieve a healthful outcome, to rebalance your body chemistry and energize your prefrontal cortex---to feel and do YOUR best.