The vital need to avoid “mental drift” …

In any aspect of life, drift can be a dangerous thing.

For example, the Bible warns us about drifting in our spiritual life (something I’ve written about previously here, here, and here):

“So we must listen very carefully to the truth we have heard, or we may drift away from it,” Hebrews 2:1.

The Apostle Peter has nothing good to say about “spiritual drift”:

“And when people escape from the wickedness of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and then get tangled up and enslaved by sin again, they are worse off than before. It would be better if they had never known the way to righteousness than to know it and then reject the command they were given to live a holy life,” 2 Peter 2:20-21.

And Jesus has words of warning for a church that had drifted from its “first love”:

“But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first! Look how far you have fallen! Turn back to me and do the works you did at first. If you don’t repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place among the churches,” Revelation 2:4-5.

Writing about this “spiritual drift,” William Barclay says, “For most of us the threat of life is not so much that we should plunge into disaster, but that we should drift into sin. There are few people who deliberately and in a moment turn their backs on God; there are many who day by day drift farther and farther away from him. There are not many who in one moment of time commit some disastrous sin; there are many who almost imperceptibly involve themselves in some situation and suddenly awake to find that they have ruined life for themselves and broken someone else’s heart. We must continually be on the alert against the peril of the drifting life.”

In many cases, relationships that fail don’t do so because of a sudden, catastrophic conflict; rather, it’s because we fail to nurture them — we drift from the proper and healthy way of maintaining a relationship.

Then there’s that morning when, while trying to fasten and zip your pants, there’s no more denying that you’ve become overweight, or even obese. Even though you had to “super size” your wardrobe once or twice already, it’s like the pounds suddenly, silently crept upon you until you just can’t deny it: you’re fat, unfit, and trending toward unhealthy. You drifted there.

Drift is also a serious issue in caring for our mental health. Ryan Casey Waller, writing in “Depression, Anxiety, and Other Things We Don’t Want to Talk About,” notes how we can drift in the proper care of our mental health:

Mental illness creeps up on us. Which is mostly how mental illness works. You don’t know you have it until it’s all up in your grill trying to destroy your life. This happens, most often, because getting honest with ourselves about what’s going on in our hearts and minds is a difficult thing to do. So mental illness frequently goes undiagnosed until, well, it just can’t anymore because really weird things start happening.

… Addressing our mental health is more complicated than addressing other aspects of our health, especially for Christians. I personally put off seeing a therapist for ten years before I finally broke down and admitted I needed psychiatric help. I was convinced I could rid myself of anxiety if I prayed hard enough, read my Bible long enough, and served other people sincerely enough.

But there’s a secret I’ve discovered that gives us the power we need to enter this conversation with the honesty required for it to be helpful. Do you want to know what it is? You. Me. All of us. Are in this together. And together we can see this thing through. I am not speaking as Moses from the mountaintop but rather as an Israelite from the valley below. I may be a mental health professional with expertise to offer, but I am first and foremost a co-sufferer who knows how painful and difficult battles with mental illness can be.

Mental health — something we all have every day, like physical health — is a continuum; an example of that is shown below:

If we’re not good stewards of our mental health, we can suddenly realize we’ve allowed ourselves to drift down that continuum. Part of that is a natural experience of life, something Dr. Caroline Leaf writes about in “Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess”:

Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity and the experiences of life. And we all face adversity in many different ways: challenging events and circumstances are as much a part of modern existence as they were a part of human history.

Calling these mental and emotional responses diseases misses the point entirely. Anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, angst, anger, grief, and so on are emotional and physical warning signals telling us we need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in our life. This pain, which is very real, is a sign that there’s something wrong: you are in a state of disequilibrium.

It’s not a sign of a defective brain. Your experience doesn’t need to be validated by a medical label. Mental health struggles are not your identity. They’re normal and need to be addressed, not suppressed, or things will get worse.

May is national Mental Health Awareness Month, which we can use as a prompt to take stock of our mental health and see if we’ve allowed ourselves to drift in our care of it. If, with honest self-assessment, you realize you’ve drifted from healthy, rational thinking and wise stewardship of your mental health, I encourage you not to shrug off that reality or ignore it, but to turn back toward excelling in your mental health and, if necessary get whatever help you need to accomplish that.

Scotty