What is mental wellness, really?
Wellness has a wide variety of definitions and interventions in our world. It can mean everything from evidence-based, preventative health behaviors and habits to hot/cold plunges to gut health, activated charcoal, biohacking, and beyond.
In many ways, it’s also really become a catch-all for anything related to mental health that most health insurance plans won’t pay for.
In the world of psychology, mental health and mental wellness are technically different. A handy-dandy research summary from Google’s NotebookLM notes that mental health tends to be associated with the
presence or absence of diagnosable mental disorders e.g., depression, anxiety, personality disorders, etc.), based upon the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5)
And mental wellness or mental well-being is more about
the many factors that shape our overall mental health and well-being, but are not clinical conditions – e.g., stress, worry, loneliness, or sadness at the negative end, and happiness, life satisfaction, strong relationships, or personal growth at the positive end"
In my therapy practice and ongoing learning, I find that much of today’s thinking and work around mental wellness is rooted in psychological frameworks like positive psychology and humanism, which often emphasize flourishing and individual growth. These approaches have their strengths—and they can sometimes lack a deeper engagement with the reality of human suffering.
As a result, suffering is often seen primarily through the lens of mental health or illness—and addressed mainly in clinical settings (therapy sessions, structured therapy programs, hospitalization, etc.). But many aspects of human suffering are not pathological; they are part of what it means to be human.
That’s why I’ve come to think of mental wellness not just as the opposite of illness or a collection of good habits, but as a set of capacities that
Help us steward our internal experiences within our larger contexts
Are sustainably responsive to human suffering
We can grow—with help, over time
It’s not about being happy all the time, avoiding hard things, or doing all the right practices. It’s about building skills to respond wisely to life as it is.
At Rootwise Mental Wellness, I think it’s helpful to think about mental wellness through these five dimensions:
Attentiveness – learning to pay attention to and fully feel your thoughts, emotions, and patterns, acting on them in ways that are congruent to the present moment situation and your values
Kindness – developing the capacity to respond to yourself with care and validation, including offering helpful feedback instead of harsh self-criticism
Flexibility – practicing skills to shift perspectives, regulate emotions, and respond with intention
Connection – building supportive relationships (with yourself, the people around you, and something bigger than you, like your faith, nature, your sense of purpose, your larger community) that can be sustained through life’s ups and downs
Integration – bringing together the different parts of yourself in ways that support lasting change, self-trust, and sustainable growth
It is also important to me to ensure that those dimensions aren’t just magical and nice sounding, but are also able to help us when we experience pain and suffering.
To that end, I think it’s helpful to identify what we can do to translate those dimensions into new neural pathways in our brain. Because when we have those neural pathways, they are accessible to us when we need them most: when we’re stressed, anxious, depressed, or traumatized.
And the what, at least in my own practice, is in the form of skills - actions (internal and external) that we can take and that we can repeatedly practice and refine over time:
Attentiveness – learning to pay attention to and fully feel your thoughts, emotions, and patterns, acting on them in ways that are congruent to the present moment situation and your values
Skills:
Mindful observation – learning what thoughts, feelings, and urges are, learning how you experience them, and noticing them without trying to change them
Knowing why you are feeling certain ways (i.e. what feelings indicate what your needs are)
Caring for your nervous system
ABCD tracking (activating event → beliefs/thoughts → consequences (emotion/sensation) → desires (urges) ) – identifying your internal patterns in real time
Experiential willingness: Fully allowing your thoughts, feelings, and urges without being dedicated by them or trying to suppress them
Choice Point – choosing actions that align with what matters to you, even when it’s hard
Kindness – developing the capacity to respond to yourself with care and validation, including offering helpful feedback instead of harsh self-criticism
Skills:
Self-validation – naming your emotional experience and identifying why it makes sense
Self-compassionate reappraisal – talking to yourself like you would a friend, especially when you mess up
Urge-surfing harsh criticism from your inner critic rather than immediately acting on it.
Acts of care
Understanding why your default patterns exist (what they tried to help you with in the past)
Flexibility – practicing skills to shift perspectives, regulate emotions, and respond with intention
Skills:
Exploring thoughts - getting curious about what your thoughts are trying to help you with and learning to have a relationship with those thoughts rather than treating them as facts
Cognitive defusion – noticing thoughts without getting stuck in them
Knowing how to balance short- and long-term needs
Knowing what to do if you’re having a reaction that doesn’t seem to match the facts of the present
What I can/can’t/sometimes can control/influence
Opposite action (DBT) – choosing behaviors that help you move through intense emotion
Reframing stuck beliefs – examining old stories and practicing more adaptive ones
Exposure practice - doing experiments where you try something you usually avoid to see if you’re able to experience it differently in the present
Connection – building supportive relationships (with yourself, the people around you, and something bigger than you, like your faith, nature, your sense of purpose, your larger community) that can be sustained through life’s ups and downs
Skills:
Knowing what you want and need
Assertive communication – expressing needs and boundaries with validation and respect
Building trust through behavior
Repairing ruptures – practicing how to reconnect after conflict or disconnection
Being different together while on the same team - knowing what your style is, knowing what other people’s styles are, and trying to figure out how those styles can work together rather than spend energy trying to change each other
Navigating change back reactions within yourself and when others express them
Identifying your values, mission statement, “north star”, ultimate meaning or guiding purpose
Integration – bringing together the different parts of yourself in ways that support lasting change, self-trust, and sustainable growth
Skills:
Parts work (e.g., noticing conflicting internal voices) – identifying and dialoguing with inner parts
Habit stacking – pairing new behaviors with existing routines to build consistency
Regular reflection – journaling about what you’re experiencing so that you can understand it and start to see how your old story (autopilot neural pathway/patterns) is present and what might help you shift to live into your new story (new neural pathways you’re developing) in a way that makes space for growth and self-trust
I like this this framework because draws from wellness-oriented psychological theories, evidence-based therapies like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and meaning-making practices found in spiritual and communal traditions.
And, not only that, but it’s what I have seen to be most helpful to people who are trying to get unstuck and live their lives in ways that feel sustainable to them.
So, what is mental wellness?
It’s obviously a bigger question than what can be explored here, and is really more of a lifelong practice of learning rather than something that can be encapsulated in one blog post. And, I keep returning to this framework as a way to meet myself and others with honesty, care, and intention - things that do help me and others feel mentally well.
To wrap this up, what I do know is that the world doesn’t need more perfect people (ideologically, physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually, behaviorally).
It needs more people rooted in attentiveness, kindness, flexibility, connection, and integration—people who are engaged in lifelong practices of awareness, working on themselves, trying, succeeding and failing, and talking about it/working on it with others. And if that’s what you’d like or what you think mental wellness can be - let’s work together!
