Revising the Just-Do-It Principle: Taboos, Phrasing, and Realities of Mental Health Advice

The urge to give advice is natural and human, but the method of delivery is a learned behavior with different motives. It could be a subtle way to boast about superior knowledge, you might see this in a senior employee giving advice to a new hire. It could be a display of empathy and concern, such as urging a loved one to seek help in a difficult situation. More broadly speaking, it’s an attempt to improve another’s quality of life. Like all communication, however, it can be a minefield of misunderstanding. Mental health advice is no different.

The challenge here is that the issue is more ethereal than, say, telling someone how to change a tire or remove a stain. The ability to see a brain’s activity is incredibly recent, so otherwise the science of understanding and explaining thoughts, habits, behaviors, and disorders thereof is still stuck with a chasm between defining what those are and what they feel like. A thought is an exchange between the arm of one brain cell to another, lightning-fast, semi-electric and semi-chemical, the never-ending activation and reactivation of microscopic patterns made of flesh. A diseased thought is all that, except some components are missing or overdrawn. A clock without a cog. A power surge exploding a light bulb. It’s a physical issue within the most complicated organ in your body. But it doesn’t feel like any of that, does it? Thoughts don’t feel physical, and they don’t feel involuntary (even when they are). 

These illnesses feel like something wrong with the most intangible parts of yourself–your soul perhaps–that you could get past if you were just a little stronger, or if you weren’t so stupid and weak. This is entirely false (due to the reasons described above), but I’m no stranger to how it feels or the many ways people say it. The most common of which is “just do something.”

Just be happy, just exercise, just talk to your friends more, just shower, just do something. Of the thousand little things a mentally ill person can’t do, the worst thing someone could possibly request is that they pretend to be well, mainly for the sake of their ignorance and comfort.

The first problem to address here is that it isn’t that simple. If the person could, they would. No one likes the feeling of being ill, unclean, or repellent, and, with very few unrelated exceptions,  no one would fake those symptoms for attention. People’s reasons for inaction are rarely laziness, and more often have to do with an underlying problem: for instance, a serotonin deficiency will interfere with someone’s ability to create, anticipate, or enact future plans. An overabundance of stress hormones can make someone so irrationally scared that they’ll avoid all possible human contact, among other things. 

The second problem here is when it comes right down to it, the best type of therapy we have for mental illness is finding ways to make someone just do the thing. Because God’s a comedian, the first step to making life easier for anyone is to make life even harder than it already is. It means abandoning comfortable habits, throwing away inefficient coping mechanisms, and even cutting out some of the few things that bring that person comfort: sleeping in and nicotine for instance. That means there isn’t a lot of immediate incentive to get better. To an outsider looking in, it makes the person struggling look complacent. To the person struggling, it makes them feel trapped and weak. Like most things in life, the solution is to seek a balance. 

In terms of giving advice, examine what you’re about to say and consider if you’re telling them to just do it. Think of a time in your life when you were at your very worst, and consider if you’d receive that advice gracefully. If not, then deconstruct that thought. How can you make that advice easier? How can you ease your friend into the habits and actions you’re aiming for? For instance, you may know that your friend would benefit from a good dose of sunlight and exercise. You’ll probably have limited success by telling them to just get out there, and even less if you urge them by teasing them about their weight or complexion. 

Encourage them to step outside and enjoy the sun for five minutes, or take an existing morning ritual outside (coffee, checking their phone, journaling, etc.)  and expand from there. If they’re still having trouble, don’t take it personally. Your friend isn’t “ignoring your advice” out of malice. Consider that perhaps their illness is more severe than you originally thought. Use your own relative wellness to your advantage (or, if ill yourself, ask a healthy friend for help with a step like this). Come up with excuses to visit often and invite them to go on a walk with you, or invite them to events that would require them to walk or be outside even for a little while. Getting better is a mountain of baby steps, but they pile up faster than you think. Given enough time, the mere strength of habit and muscle memory will carry them through these healthier rituals on their own. 

The same principle can be carried over to other aspects of wellness too. You can use visitation to negate the effects of self-isolation or bad nutrition if you bring over a meal for them. If you know they tend to clean before announced visits, say you’ll arrive a bit later than you actually need to give them that extra time. If you’re feeling particularly forward, and you know the friend would take this well, you can even politely offer to do some tidying for them while you’re over. It’ll help a lot to cast away the word “lazy,” hesitate before you tease someone, and consider how your mental wellness could be a prosthetic to someone’s illness. 

Giving advice for mental health is to do away with the just-do-it vocabulary, but I encourage those of you struggling to accept that sometimes it’s simpler than it feels. You are the arbiter of your own life. I couldn’t have made any of the progress I have without acknowledging the ways I could treat myself, realizing I was tired of being so ill and accepting an annoying lack of shortcuts. Joining invitations to exercise and socialize were conscious decisions I had to tell myself I could “regret later,” even if I never did. I could plan and fantasize and wallow all I liked, but at a certain point, the only thing left is pure action. It’s difficult. There’s no advice I can give that doesn’t sound like I’m telling you to just not be scared, just invite the friend, or just ask for help. People in recovery from mental illness in any capacity tend to look back at those steps and think of them singularly, forgetting how much sweat, blood, and tears went into the first actions. We are not immune to giving that bad advice, even if we can empathize much more than others.

The problem word here is “just”. It hides the different motivations for advice and implies that getting better is a much easier and more independent process than it really is. We’re too used to saying it this way. In truth, you will do it, you need to do it. In many cases, especially in the beginning, you will need to do it together. It’s not enough to say “you aren’t alone,” or to take that at face value. We must make sure of it.