I often tell people that life is like a flowing stream. Sometimes you flow through rough, rocky sections that test your resolve. Sometimes you flow through sunny, calm sections that are warm and beautiful. Most of it is something in between—rocky sections that can still be beautiful, like this scene from Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
You never know what is coming around the next bend, but you can be sure it will be interesting.
I think the analogy works especially well for mental health. As we live our lives, we have times that are wonderful, where everything is going our way. I used to say I was going to write a book called “Magic Days,” because wonderful things seemed to just magically appear—many at once—sometimes when I was younger. I would meet a very influential person in an elevator who would give me an opportunity to work on a great project, and a couple of hours later a good friend from the past would call to chat. My boss would call me in and give me a bonus for some work I’d done. And that night my wife and I would go see a ballgame that turned out to be very exciting. All of that really happened to me on a single day a few years ago.
But then, sometimes the opposite happens—a letter from the IRS arrives at the same time as the illness or death of a loved one, your flight home is delayed, the kids are sick, and a project at work goes south and needs extra work. I’ve had a day like that too. Those days can test your mental toughness.
So mental health, the way I see it, is really two things stacked on top of each other. There is the water you happen to be in—the luck of the draw, the good days and the bad. And there is how you carry yourself through it. You don’t control the first. You control almost all of the second. These days there’s a third thing worth naming up front: there are people and institutions actively trying to churn the water, because your anxiety and your anger are worth money and power to them. I’ll come back to that one.
The way I’ve made it through with something of an even keel is a handful of rules of thumb I’ve lived by. Here they are.
1. The most important thing for your mental health is to make good life decisions
Almost everything downstream flows from the decisions you make at the forks in the road. Get the big ones right and a lot of the rest takes care of itself.
Choose good friends. The people you spend time with will help determine your future, and you will help determine theirs—so choose very wisely. We rub off on each other more than we like to admit. If someone around you is negative, or has habits that pull them down, they will pull on you too. Find better people to spend your time with. It isn’t cold; it’s self-preservation, and it’s fair, because you owe the same quality to the people who choose you.
Choose your habits. Eating right, drinking, smoking, drugs, how you dress, how you speak and communicate—these are all habits, and most of them run on autopilot. We don’t think about them, but they quietly decide how the world responds to us and whether we stay on an even keel or not. Habits compound. A small good one, repeated for ten years, becomes a different life. So does a small bad one.
Educate yourself. What you choose to learn, and how hard you work at it, will shape the options you have later—so give yourself the widest possible range to choose from. And don’t stop when school does. I’ve been an engineer my whole life and I’m still learning something new most weeks. Curiosity is its own kind of mental health; a mind with a problem to chew on doesn’t have as much room left over to spiral.
Work hard. Those who are successful generally work harder than those who aren’t. That’s mostly a choice. Some people overwork themselves into the ground, and that’s its own problem—so this rule has a governor on it. But all else equal, effort is the cheapest advantage there is, and it’s entirely within your control.
Choose a good career. Pick a career that fits your skill set and that will still be in demand well into the future. Ideally one you’re glad to get up and do, because you’re going to be doing it for a long time. The best careers are the ones where you don’t simply trade your hours for dollars—where the work compounds, or builds something, or keeps paying after you’ve done it. Most jobs aren’t like that. If yours isn’t, at least make sure it’s one you can stand, because a job you dread is a slow leak on your mental health that no weekend ever fully repairs.
Choose the right partner. This is really a special case of choosing good friends. Who you marry will shape your life in more ways than you can count. Get it right and you have someone in the boat with you when the water turns rough—and it will. My wife and I have been through things that would have sunk either of us alone. Get it wrong, or fail to take the decision seriously, and you’ve built a permanent headwind into every other part of your life. Choose deliberately.
Maintain your physical health. As you get older, and you watch people who didn’t take care of their bodies, it becomes obvious how much your physical health carries your mental health. You don’t have to be obsessed with it. You do have to work at it.
My stepsister Tricia is the clearest proof of this I know. She was born with cystic fibrosis—a disease that kills most people in their twenties. She’s in her mid-fifties. Seventeen years ago she had a double lung transplant, after already outliving nearly everyone in the state who’d carried CF as long as she had—and she’s lived far longer than expected since. Here’s the part people miss: keeping a body that is actively trying to fail takes staggering mental discipline. Every day of it is a decision. The medications, the therapy, the constant vigilance, the flat refusal to quit on a body that hands her every excuse to. Her physical health is really a monument to her mental fortitude—the two were never separate things. If the rest of us brought a fraction of that discipline to bodies that mostly cooperate, we’d be unstoppable.
2. The stuff that is hard is the stuff that is good for you
Strenuous exercise is good for you. Hard math, puzzles, writing, making music—good for you. And hard situations, the mental kind, are probably good for you too. Your body and your mind react to being stretched by getting stronger. It rarely feels that way in the moment, but the discomfort is the point, not a sign that something is wrong.
It’s a long haul, and the real prize is in the traveling, not the arriving. The people who learn to take some satisfaction in the daily grind—the problem in front of them today—are the ones who keep their balance over a lifetime.
I’ve picked up a strange habit at work. Over a career in consulting, the stress runs high—problems come in waves, deadlines are brutal, and the expectations are higher still. So when things get really tough, I’ve learned to say, out loud, “This is the fun part,” or “This is why we’re here.” My colleagues usually think I’ve lost my mind. But here’s what happens: it motivates the team. When they see me lean in with the chips down, they lean in too. More than once, the attitude alone has pulled us out of the ditch—before any of us even had a plan.
I do the same thing under a car when a bolt shears off for the fourth time. “This is where I’m actually learning,” I’ll say, or “this is how I earn my money,” and I go back at it. Most of the time I don’t believe a word of it. Doesn’t matter. Saying it changes what I do next, and what I do next is the difference between finishing and walking away. You can talk yourself into effort even when you can’t talk yourself into feeling good. That turns out to be most of the trick.
3. Never quit
This is maybe a special version of the one above. When I was in high school, I was on the wrestling team. It was the only sport I could do, because it had weight classes. I was small—a “late bloomer,” as they so often told me to my embarrassment—so I got to wrestle kids who were also small. I was probably a little below average in ability. I won a few matches and I lost a few.
The summer after my freshman year, I went to wrestling camp in Bloomington, Indiana, at a camp called Top of the World Wrestling Camp, run by a guy named Doug Blubaugh. He was the 1960 Olympic champion and the Indiana University wrestling coach. And he taught me one thing: never give up. When you are in a struggle, the person who gives up first is the one who loses. I didn’t get stronger at that camp. I may have learned some new skills.
That summer I competed in the AAU state tournament—and I went all the way to the state championship match, using just one technique: never quit. In the state final—under the lights at Indiana University’s Assembly Hall in Bloomington, with 5,000 fans, on the Indiana tournament mat, with Blubaugh looking on—I had to wrestle the best wrestler in the state: a graduated senior who had just won his third high school state championship and hadn’t lost in three years.
I had wrestled him the previous season, and he pinned me badly. But I remembered he made one mistake—he got too high on top of me when starting in the up position, and I thought I could maybe throw a move I was pretty good at on him. I had tried it, but did it too late, and he countered me. It was a long shot.
So when the match started, I immediately gave him a takedown and two points. He had to feel confident he already had this match in the bag. Fifteen seconds in, I scrambled off the mat, and we had to restart with him in the up position and me down. When we set up, sure enough, he was high on me, just like I anticipated. I was like a tiger waiting to strike. When the whistle blew, I instantly threw my move—and it worked perfectly! I had my opponent on his back and was working to pin him for the win.
I could hear the crowd roar. Everyone in the arena knew who this kid was—and I had him on his back. Guess what? He knew the trick too. He did not give up. He fought like a cornered wildcat—but so did I. For a minute and forty-five seconds I had him on his back. Everyone—everyone—thought I had him pinned. Coach Blubaugh was screaming at the referee to call it, I was begging him to call it—but he didn’t—and the period ran out.
I ended up losing the match. But I did not quit, and neither did my opponent. The kid was visibly shaken when he shook my hand, and he told me afterward that it was the toughest match he’d ever had. Coach Blubaugh angrily confronted the referee, who told him that this kid was the best wrestler to come out of Indiana—maybe ever—and that he was going to give him every benefit of the doubt. In other words, I could not have pinned him. That kid won his own Olympic medal a few years later. I did not. But I got something better. I learned the lesson not to quit. In every aspect of life, I’ve used it, and it has gotten me through some tough times.
And that lesson has nothing to do with wrestling. When a dark stretch comes—and they come—the person who outlasts it wins, and outlasting is a skill you can practice.
4. Do what comes naturally
You’re better at some things than others—take advantage of it. I have no musical talent and not much artistic ability, but I’m naturally good with mechanical things, and I’ve built a lot of my life around that. Life gets easier when you lean on your strengths and route around your weaknesses.
This sits in tension with the last two rules, and the tension is the whole point. Rule 2 says do the hard thing. Rule 4 says do the natural thing. The way to reconcile them is this: push hard into the difficult things that grow you, or that you were built for—and don’t burn your one life grinding against a wall you were never shaped to climb. Wisdom is mostly knowing which is which. Fight the battles that make you stronger. Walk around the ones that only make you tired.
5. Don’t let others tell you what to think
You should make up your own mind. There are a lot of people out there with an agenda, and they will tell you what to think because it serves them, whether or not it serves you. The entire job of a salesman is to sell you his product. That’s fine when it’s something you need. It’s a problem when it isn’t—and it’s a much bigger problem when what’s being sold isn’t a product at all, but a way of seeing the world.
I don’t say this from the outside. Both of my parents were news reporters. I’ve read a newspaper nearly every day of my life. I grew up inside the business and I still consume it. So when I tell you that what passes for “news” today is mostly not news—it’s persuasion—understand that I’m not a man who never gave it a chance. Maybe it was always this way and I was too young to see it. But pick almost any big subject now—left versus right, climate, energy, whatever’s in today’s headline—and every outlet comes at you with an angle. The goal isn’t to inform you. It’s to make you feel something: usually afraid, or angry, or certain that some other group of people is the problem. Fear and outrage hold your attention, and your attention is the product being sold.
I’ve seen where that road ends. We traveled to Rwanda and stood in the aftermath of the genocide—the churches, the memorials, the places where neighbors killed neighbors. That did not come out of nowhere. It came after years of propaganda on the radio and in the papers, patiently teaching ordinary people to see a whole category of their countrymen as less than human. By the time the machetes came out, the work had already been done, over the airwaves, for years. Propaganda is not a harmless annoyance. Pushed far enough, it is the deadliest force there is.
I don’t think we’re immune, and I think the milder version is already doing real damage. The constant drip of manufactured outrage and manufactured division is, in my view, a genuine mental health crisis in its own right. It keeps people anxious, angry, isolated, and convinced their neighbors are enemies. That is not a mind at peace. So guard your inputs the way you’d guard anything else that goes into your body. Notice the angle. Read across sources and decide for yourself. I stopped watching television years ago over exactly this, and I’ve never looked back. You don’t owe anyone your attention—and you certainly don’t owe them your peace of mind.
6. Bad stuff does happen to good people, and vice versa
Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad ones. Luck is real, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But over a whole life, the biggest single factor in how you end up is the decisions you made—especially the hard ones you got right when the easy choice was sitting right there. You don’t control the cards. You control how you play them, and across thousands of hands, the playing matters more than the dealing. Own your choices. It’s more empowering than it sounds, because it means the next good decision is always available to you, no matter what the last bad break was.
7. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but the lack of it can and does create despair
You need enough to provide for yourself and the people who depend on you. That’s not optional, and pretending money doesn’t matter is a luxury belief held mostly by people who have some.
I grew up fairly poor. I worked hard through my career to end up with a little more than average, and I can tell you plainly: the second was better than the first. Not because of the things money buys, but because of the thing it removes—the low, constant grind of financial fear, which wears on your mind every single day you live under it. Above a certain point, more money adds very little. Below it, every dollar is also a dollar of peace. Plan your career and your finances to clear that line and leave yourself some margin. Margin is where mental health lives.
8. When things get really bad, they will get better
When things get really bad, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that they’ll get better. But here is something I’ve learned the hard way, and I’d bet my life on it: when things are at their absolute worst, that is usually the exact moment they start to turn.
I’ve had surgery a few times, and there’s a pattern to it. A day or two after, you crash—you feel miserable, the pain spikes, and I’ve gone so far as to think, “Oh please, just let me die.” I didn’t mean it. But at the very bottom, you can lose your will, temporarily. And that bottom is precisely the hinge point—it’s the moment recovery begins. The danger isn’t the low itself; the low passes on its own. The danger is doing something permanent in response to a feeling that was always temporary. Never make a lasting decision at the lowest point. The low is not information about the future. It’s just the floor—and the floor is what you push off of.
I think this is the trap people fall into when they get sick, or grieve, or slide into depression. They treat the bottom as the verdict instead of the turn.
I’ll be honest about the professional side of this, because I think honesty helps more than a tidy answer. Counselors have not worked for me. In my experience, they sit and listen and don’t actually do anything—and more than once, when I’ve told one what my wife and I have been through, the counselor is the one who ends up in tears. I’ve come to suspect that some people go into that field to work on their own wounds. I’m sure there are good ones out there. Their methods just haven’t reached me.
What has worked for me is everything else in this article. Action instead of rumination. Taking care of the body. Keeping good people close. Finding a purpose big enough to get up for. And the plain, stubborn refusal to quit during the exact stretch when quitting feels most reasonable. That’s not a prescription for everyone—different things reach different people, and if talking to someone works for you, do it without apology. But if you’ve tried the standard route and come up empty, don’t conclude that you’re beyond help. It may just mean your way out looks different from the one you were handed. There is a way out of the dark place. I only wish more people believed that long enough to go find theirs.