We Can All Be Healthier for It

Mental and emotional well-being and the health of our relationships is at the core of Someone To Tell It To’s mission. We believe that in helping the world to listen, we are creating the environment for better relationships and stronger mental and emotional health. 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Observed in the United States since 1949, it provides a platform for awareness, advocacy, and education, of and for the distinct challenges and opportunities in creating an understanding that mental and emotional health are just as important to our well-being as our physical health is. It’s about eliminating the stigmas and misconceptions about mental and emotional health and showing a better way to enhance holistic well-being - body, mind, and spirit. 

Dr. Brene’ Brown, the sociologist, research professor at the University of Houston, visiting professor at the University of Texas Austin, best-selling author, and podcaster has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. Mental, emotional, and relational health are a particular focus of her work. On the Dare to Lead podcast with Dr. Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a cofounder of CultureX and Charles Sull, a cofounder of CultureX, Br. Brown discusses with them a 2022 article they wrote in the MITSloan Management Review, along with William Cipolli, an assistant professor of mathematics and cofounder of the Data Science Collaboratory at Colgate University and Caio Brighenti, a football information analyst with the Detroit Lions - “Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture”.

While the article and the podcast discussion focused on work and organizational cultures, we believe that their findings and conclusions can also be applied to the culture at large, and to all of our relationships. The toxicity they describe that can permeate individual and collective cultures is very much worth paying attention to. Toxicity affects our mental and emotional health, and also our spiritual and physical well-being.     

Toxic environments - in our personal, professional, and collective lives - drive insomnia, depression, abuse, dysfunctional relationships, physical health issues - heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and strokes.

When any aspect of our health is violated, this drives costs attributed to health care and all the other consequences of compromised health up 35 - 55%. There are many hidden costs to this - productivity, attrition, healthcare, and relationships at work and at home.

The top five reasons that people suffer from toxicity in their lives and the cultures that they are part of are because the cultures are marked by:

1. Disrespect - people feel as if their personhood, their very being, is assaulted. They feel dehumanized and as if they are less-than, that they don’t matter and are not respected. There is a lack of consideration, courtesy, ad dignity
2. Non-inclusivity  - which corresponds to the disrespect, that there is little or no effort for validating and including diverse perspectives and experiences into the culture. Inequality based on gender, identity, race, age, disability, religious perspectives
3. Lack of Ethics - dishonesty, that there are those who will not respect common and established norms and standards of fair and moral treatment that have historically been recognized and valued, integrity
4. Cutthroat Behavior - intentionally hurting, undermining, diminishing others, tearing others down, instead of lifting them up. There is backstabbing and ruthless behavior.
5. Abusiveness - intentional hostility, harassment, bullying, and verbal, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse

These are all actions that poison our lives and relationships, and contribute negatively to the culture around us. These actions can destroy peoples’ spirits, relationships, and mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health if they are chronic and pervasive. They create an atmosphere for loneliness and disconnection - which Someone To Tell It To strives to alleviate - to manifest and fester, and further disintegrate our well-being.

This lack of respect and agency that so many people feel when we are confronted with toxicity around us can be soul-crushing. It is a sad and troubling indictment on the ways in which we can diminish one another. When any one of us is diminished, it affects us all. We are all diminished when one of us is. For we are all in this life and world together We all need one another to enable us to be our best and most complete selves. 

Mental Health Awareness Month can remind us of that, and help us to look within and around us to identify the ways in which we can help to alleviate toxicity in our midst. Whether it is not recognized or addressed when it happens, or whether we ourselves may be contributing to the toxicity, we all need to look around us and into the mirror. We need to recognize if we are living in toxic environments and situations and if we are  contributing to them in any way. We can be part of the solution. 

And then, we can all be healthier for it.

Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash