It's time to radically rethink mental health
Until now, we've looked at mental health under the lens of mental illness. Treatment is sought and administered once we realize there is a problem. According to NAMI, the process of realizing you have an illness to finding treatment for the first time takes an average of ten years from when your symptoms start.
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It's the equivalent of brushing your teeth only after you find a cavity. The equivalent of not knowing what a toothbrush is until you see a dentist.
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But we know that being proactive in cultivating good health and working to prevent issues before they start is a more effective strategy.
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We've made strides in the field of nutrition. We've developed methods of and systems to promote physical fitness to keep us feeling physically healthy.
Why don't we engage our minds the same way that we engage our bodies?
That is where mental fitness comes in.
Realizing mental fitness
Physical fitness is more than disease prevention.
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People participate in physical fitness to more fully engage with their lives. It helps manage stress, provides a sense of mastery and control, and can increase confidence and self-esteem.
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Mental fitness is more than mental illness prevention.
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Those who engage in mental fitness can find more satisfaction in relationships, overcome stressful situations, better communicate their emotions to others, and become more self-aware.
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Let's see how conversations change when you use a lens of mental fitness instead of mental illness.
Mental Illness
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How do I get rid of my anxiety?
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I don't need to talk to someone about my mental health, that is shameful
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I'm the only one who feels this way
Mental Fitness
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What is my anxiety telling me about myself and my environment? How can I use that information?
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I might be nervous, but I'm excited to share my experiences with others and learn from them. I know that I can more fully engage with my life that way!
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I bet someone else has experienced this thing too, what can I learn from them? How can I find them?
Enter the Mental Fitness Studio
Mental fitness is your ability to emotionally and behaviorally overcome life's stress and engage in your day to day activities.
Rise Mental Fitness Studio is the go-to community and platform to find programs to improve and maintain your mental fitness.
We connect our members to each other to have productive unstigmatized conversations about mental health. This takes place on a messaging board called Slack! Click the button below to join the conversation!
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We also offer weekly videochats called RiseGroup. If you're already interested in those, read below!
RiseGroup
Your simple weekly mental health workout.
Share your life and improve the way you think about your world.
Videochat
Join RiseGroup from the comfort and convenience of your phone!
RiseGroup Facilitator
Your Facilitator is there to make sure RiseGroup is as productive as possible!
Think of them as a group workout instructor.
The Power of Peers
Know you are not alone in what you are working on, and learn from each other.
Having an objective group provide you feedback is invaluable.
Alex, 24
I felt totally ridiculous for feeling the way that I do but after hearing that all of you have been through the same thing, I feel so much better!
Bryan, 23
I feel like I can approach RiseGroup on my own terms, I can choose when I want to bring something up or when I just want to support someone else. Either way it feels really great.
Jane, 22
RiseGroup gives me a great space to think through issues and goals that if I was thinking alone I would just constantly loop through.
Real quotes, fake names
About Reed
I started Rise Mental Fitness Studio after 6 years of leading awareness events and being unsatisfied with the resources I found out there.
Many of them couldn’t scale to meet today’s problems and were very reactive. My friends were left with absurd wait times when they really just wanted to talk to someone.
After going through a successful round of therapy and being effectively discharged, I realized how hard it is to actively improve and maintain your mental health outside the realm of therapy. I wasn’t able to find many offerings out there outside of meditation and journaling.
I wanted to be able to talk to people about what I was experiencing and have accountability to keep myself healthy.
I also started to have a fundamental shift in the way that I understood our mental health system.
Imagine if you didn’t go to the dentist until you had a cavity.
That’s effectively what it was like for me when I first went to therapy.
I had gone years without addressing some underlying issues that were in the way of my life.
What if I had been training proactively and learned to pick out those things along the way?
How would it shift our culture around mental health if people took the same pride as they do in it buy going to a gym?
I’m super excited to meet you and help facilitate meaningful conversations!
