On Mental Health and Environmental Protection

The environment on Earth is a beautiful mix of strength and delicacy. It can rebuild entire forests after massive fires pillage the wooded havens and it can die at the hands of a minute increase in global temperature. The atmosphere can disintegrate large pieces of rock and fall prey to cans of hairspray.

Your mind is one in the same. It can rewire itself after major traumas and degrade from simple daily habits. Your brain can solve complex problems and be eroded by simple friendships.

This is why we need to take a strong stance to protect our mental health before it spirals out of control like global warming. Like the trees of the forest, even after the strongest natural disaster our minds can recover and grow stronger.

It won’t happen overnight, however, and there is no master plan that can save everything. It’s doing the little things right on a daily basis that will conserve our mental health.

The first step is to sort our trash instead of mindlessly dumping it. Just as a suburban family takes a few extra minutes to put bottles in the recycling bin, we must sort through our negative experiences rather than throwing them all away.

We do this because within every negative experience is a piece of learning that may help us grow. We can’t just discount an entire experience as negative just because one bad thing happened. That would be a waste.

The next step is to be proactive in protecting our delicate mind. We need to stop doing activities that will destroy it the same way we take an active approach to reducing our use of chlorofluorocarbons. By releasing more good than bad, we can keep our mind strong rather than putting it in an environment where it will wither.

Just like environmental protection, our minds are ultimately in our hands. Let’s seek to be proactive and cultivate them.