My Mental Health Improved When I Stopped Talking About Things I Don’t Care About

Listen to your energy. It knows your deepest, truest desires.

I once watched a Youtube interview between Alicia Keys and Shawn Mendes and I melted into their conversation. It was the middle of the COVID-19 quarantine of 2020. Human contact was limited. And I was starved for meaningful interaction.

Maybe my thirst for connection is what made me particularly receptive to their words.

Thirst, hunger, desire — these are very powerful emotions. When you’re truly thirsty, when you can vividly feel every cell in your body tearing itself apart because of absence, you hang onto the object of your desire like you could die without it.

And if that’s true. If it’s true that I only appreciated the words of two celebrities, words that had nothing to do with me, only because of absence, then I am glad I was thirsty.

See, at that moment, I thought: I want that. I want each word that comes out of my mouth to somehow resurrect parts within myself that for so long have remained dormant. I want to come alive just by speaking my truth.

Because Something beautiful happens when people talk about things they love

When people talk about things they truly care about, life(joy) rises within them. Behind the words. Riding the wave of their deepest, truest desires. Lighting up every cranny in their soul. Dissolving all anxiety and momentarily wiping away depression. Suddenly people come to life. Suddenly people shine brighter than they ever did.

I saw this while watching that interview. I saw this truth in Shawn Mendes’s eyes. And in Alicia keys’s smile. But for the most part, I felt it within every crack in my spirit. I felt it by the silence behind my thoughts. Suddenly I went still. I wanted to savor each moment of that interview. To become one with it. I wanted to dissolve and be absorbed by these celebrities’ sentences.

That’s what truth does. It has the power to heal. To disrupt our mental noise, to stop us in our tracks by reminding us that we don’t need to be anything other than what we are — that we are complete. Truth reminds us that we don’t need to put on a show to be happy.

So Listen to Your Energy. It Knows the Truth of Who You Are

It started small. I didn’t suddenly decide to stop having conversations that I deemed less than entertaining. I simply followed my anxiety — my energy.

It was a phone conversation with a friend. He had called to check on me. It had been a few months since I had moved back home(with my parents) out of his apartment building. And right there in the spaces between his kind, endearing words, I thought: “My Lord, I can’t wait for this conversation to be over!”

Actually, I didn’t quite think it as much as felt it: The anxiety. Tinny bubbles of sweat welling up in my armpits. My hands shaking. Signals of extreme discomfort. My body telling me that I was in danger. Here I was, a thousand miles away from this person(my friend), in the safety of my mother’s house, and still feeling unsafe. I needed to run from this conversation — from this person’s voice. I simply didn’t want to be in conversation with him.

Anxiety is a very strange reaction. An extreme measure of sorts. No matter how big or small the trigger is, no matter how minor your discomforts(fears) are, the reaction is always the same. The feeling is always the same: you are in danger, run for your life!

So I chose to run.

Because Sometimes Running Away from Your Fears Makes Them Disappear

Over time, whatever conversations gave me anxiety, I stopped indulging in. I stopped posting WhatsApp status updates. The small talk that followed them was so draining. That said, I wanted to know that I am not running from life, from the dull encounters that social interaction can be.

So I waited and watched myself. I listened for conversations that I truly enjoyed. Conversations with people I felt most comfortable with. Some of them weren’t necessarily my close friends. Some of them were just lovely people who had embraced the subtle art of being themselves. Of not taking themselves seriously. Of simply being alive.

I came alive in these people’s presence. I basked in their truth and slowly it ignited the fire within me as well. And that fire, slowly burned away my anxiety, creating space within me. The space to be me. The space to heal.

“When you choose to be your most authentic self, It gives other people permission to be themselves as well.” — Unknown

SImilarly when you edit yourself, when you split yourself up, when you fail to embody your truth whether directly or indirectly, you inspire the same madness in the people around you.

My friend was an anxious person. At least around me. He was defensive in conversations, no matter how much I tried, or how I brought things up. I didn’t talk about what I wanted to talk about with him. I wanted to discuss life. To talk about him and me and his defensiveness. Or how(and if) I was contributing to it.

I wanted to deepen our friendship. To laugh with him while also having meaningful transformative conversations about life. About society. About his mental health and mine as well. He didn’t want any of that deep stuff with me. We were just friends and according to him, that stuff (depth and meaningfulness) is for romantic relationships.

I tried to fake it for a while. To pretend to enjoy the conversations. But my soul wanted nothing to do with that. My heart wanted more depth. And because I was fighting it, it sent me anxiety to let me know it had had enough.

Listen to Your Anxiety. It Knows Your Deepest, Truest Desires

Anxiety is what happens when you force yourself into being someone(something) you don’t want to be. In small ways, on a daily basis, we train our bodies how to manufacture anxiety.

Every time you don’t pay full attention, you’re teaching your body how to be anxious. Every time you don’t want to be in a place, part of your attention — your energy — will be taken up by fantasy, a war, the need to be somewhere else. To escape and run for your life.

On the level of the mind, anxiety shows up as overthinking. And in the body, it shows up as fear. Inexplicable sweats, a pounding heart, pits of fire in your stomach.

And with mental health, as with all things in life, practice makes perfect. The more you split yourself up to fit in, to appease society, to seem more agreeable to your friends, the more your body becomes good at becoming anxious.

And with time, that anxiety will spread through other areas of your life. From small conversations to performance at work. But the good news is, the same is true for healing. If you heal one area of your life, it starts to flow into other areas of your life.

It’s okay to be anxious. It’s a signal that you’re in a place you don’t want to be in. It’s a sign that you don’t enjoy the particular situation you’ve found yourself in. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes you have to muscle through it. But other times it’s completely unnecessary.

So next time you find yourself sweating uncomfortably in a situation, ask yourself this: what about this situation is making me uncomfortable? Is there anything I can do about it? And if there isn’t, is staying in this situation, this meaningless conversation, more important than my mental health?