Day 46, on which I discover that there's no such thing as mental health.

I like to live my life as a series of 7- to 30-day challenges.

As near as I can tell, it’s the only way to ‘try out’ the hundreds of promising self-improvement, business-improvement, and health-improvement ideas I hear every year from sources ranging from Tony Robbins to Tedx to Oprah Magazine.

So pretty much every week, I’m involved in some personal experiment or another. Last month, it was no alcohol or simple carbs for 30 days. The month before that, it was no negativity (a 30 day challenge that crashed and burned in 8 days). Right now, it’s listening to my focus music when I work and, of course, #100DaysofHealth.

Since I’m coming up on day 50, the halfway point of my big health thing, and since the first 50 days have been largely focused on diet and exercise, I thought it would be good to do a 30-day challenge that had to do with MENTAL healthiness. You know, something that might do for my brain what Pilates does for my core. No, not make it scream in pain at the time and sore for a week after; more like strengthen it, make it more flexible, and keep it from rotting from disuse.

As I began to think about what a mental health challenge might look like, I realized that I wasn’t really clear on what I meant by “mental health”.

I mean, there’s what I’d consider to be the “hardware” part of mental: is my brain functioning correctly? Am I able to, both literally and metaphorically, put 2 and 2 together quickly and accurately? Can I focus when I want to focus? Are things pretty much staying stable up there?

But when most people talk about mental health, it’s more about the software: the emotional component, the programming, whether one’s behaviors and reaction are adaptive or destructive; you know, stuff that’s hard to quantify, hard to measure, and hard to create “to dos” around.

So I started looking for a definition of mental health for which I could to figure out a set of leading indicators. You know, something like, “Mental health is a state in which one is able to do x, and is created by y”.

And you know what I found out?

The ONLY agreed-upon definition for mental health seems to be “an absence of mental illness”. Yes, really.

To me, that’s like saying “That Olympic gymnast is flexible because of her lack of rigidity” or “That professional athlete is strong because he lacks weakness”. No, she’s flexible because she’s trained hard every day since she was 6, and her body has responded to that training by rebuilding itself in such a way that her joints, tendons, and ligments stretch farther an in different directions than the average person’s. He’ s strong because he challenges his muscles with higher and higher weights and stresses each day (and also by injecting himself with bull pee, probably) and they’re responded by getting larger and more numerous, and we can MEASURE that strength both by watching how much weight he can bench press and by comparing that to other men of his age and size.

There’s no similar definition for any form of mental health. And yes, I know that’s partly because, in a person who isn’t exhibiting actual symptoms of mental illness, any reporting of relative mental health is, by its very definition, subjective. How do you know how I’m feeling? You ask me, and I tell you. The problem is, of course, that human beings have developed this capacity to lie, and “about how I’m feeling” is one of the key ways in which we use it.

Yes, there’s the issue of subjectivity, but the longer I contemplate it (and I’ve been doing that for more than a week now, so it’s pretty well chewed over), the more I wonder whether there’s something more to our inability, or unwillingness, to come up with a logical, testable definition of mental health—one that at least the subject themselves could use as a measure.

I wonder whether the issue is one of human biology (the hardware doesn’t have the capacity to really evalutate the software, perhaps?) or of modern culture (we have a strong aversion to seeming to judge or even have an opinion on other people’s inner lives; we’re more interested in ‘honoring their experience’ than in evaluating it for healthiness, or for adaptiveness, or whatever.

So step one in figuring out my daily leading indicators for 30 days of mental health seems like it might be figuring out what mental health means TO ME. It can’t just be happiness, right? Because I suspect that one can be very mentally healthy, but not happy. Does it have something to do with being able to handle stuff? With being present? With reacting in a healthy or positive way to situations and to other people? With having healthy relationships (in which case I might be screwed?)

I don’t know. If you have ideas, I’d love to hear them.