Why Build Mental Wellness?

Today, taking steps to build mental wellness is easier than it has ever been before! Just as we build our muscles for physical wellness, we must do so with our mental wellness. Although it is often ignored, because there are no popular fitness centers and gyms for mental wellness, the current mental health pandemic has drawn great attention ways of building these muscles. A 2024 Yale study estimated that mental illness costs the U.S. economy $282 billion annually, which is about 30% larger than previous approximations and equivalent to the average economic recession. Although spending increases annually, how has mental illness consistently escalated to reach pandemic stature? The answer lies in the controversial exploration of how we frame mental illness treatment and prevention, versus how we build mental wellness.

Why Healthy Living Nation?

After years of research, workshops, conferences and personal life experience in the mental illness space, Healthy Living Nation founder, Mark Lawrence, encourages a different approach. Building mental wellness is very different than treatment and prevention of mental illness. “If our entire society were to concentrate on building mental wellness muscles, the mental illness pipeline would sharply decline and nearly choke itself out,” states Lawrence. While there has always been and will always be a percentage of our society that faces mental illness challenges, research indicates that we can slow down, halt and ultimately reverse this trend. To accomplish this feat, members of society must be prepared to become slightly uncomfortable. We must questions some things that we’ve long not known, but accepted as truth. We must learn to embrace the power of gradually accepting that there are things we simply do not know. The power in this approach is that it opens the floodgates for truth.

Resiliency is not just bouncing back from adverse experiences, it requires a reckoning with how you got to that place from which you bounce back and taking customized steps toward recovery. The three stages of resilience include Experience, Recognition, and Recovery (ERR).

It is said that to err is human. “ERR” means to violate an accepted standard of conduct. But what is “standard conduct” and who sets those standards? In truth, every living being carries trauma in their cellular memory. It has been transferred generationally and compounded with experiences since birth. These memories can be denied, but not ignored, as they manifest uniquely in our lives, often varying significantly — even within families, cultures, societies and races.

Only through ERR (Experience, Recognition & Recovery), can we define, acknowledge and accept our trauma — however lasting and disruptive it might be. Once accepted and embraced, we can all be taught to remove the barriers to our productivity and greatness — at work, in school, in our communities and within our families.