My thoughts on mental health
Published 6/22/25
Society and brain stuff and whatnot
Oh no I accidentally went over a year without writing a blog post hahaha oops.
Let’s talk about mental health. I can’t speak for everyone, but here are some thoughts / observations I’ve been mulling over lately:
- I want to feel happy, relaxed, and fulfilled (AKA my personal definition of positive mental health)
- Different activities in my life contribute either positively or negatively to my overall mental health
- I frequently choose activities that negatively impact my mental health over activities that positively impact my mental health
Why would I choose to self-sabotage like that? What's the root of this weird contradiction, and how can I avoid it going forward?
Activity —> mental health impact
First, I want to break down how I view certain activities in my life, and how I feel they contribute to my long-term mental health. Please note this is a personal list based on my own lived experience - if you disagree with any of these, or have a different experience, that’s totally okay.
| Activity | Overall impact on my mental health |
|---|---|
| Cleaning / tidying | Positive |
| Cooking | Positive |
| Exercising | Positive |
| Hiking | Positive |
| Journaling (blogging included) | Positive |
| Learning guitar | Neutral |
| Meditating | Positive |
| Playing board games / doing puzzles | Positive |
| Playing competitive video games | Negative |
| Playing relaxing video games | Positive |
| Reading fiction | Positive |
| Reading non-fiction | Positive |
| Reading the news | Negative |
| Scrolling social media | Negative |
| Spending time with friends | Positive |
| Stretching | Positive |
| Taking dog for walk | Positive |
| Watching documentaries | Positive |
| Watching TV / movies | Neutral |
| Working on house projects | Positive |
Pretty big list! The first thing you might notice is there are many more Positive activities than Negative or Neutral ones. Shouldn't my mental health be consistently great then?
Brain stuff
I’m not an expert scientist, so this section might seem a bit fluffy. However, viewing my life within the context of this “framework” sure explains a lot, so I think there’s still some merit here. For this next step, we need to take a look at all of the same activities, but contextualized in terms of how my simple monkey brain views them. I’m using the term “dopamine hit” as a way to categorize the immediate gratification / reward that my brain feels, which might not be totally scientifically accurate. I’m using a scale of 1-5 to roughly rank activities on a scale of Effort vs Immediate Reward.
| Activity | Overall impact on my mental health | Effort | Dopamine hit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cleaning / tidying | Positive | 4 | 2 |
| Cooking | Positive | 4 | 2 |
| Exercising | Positive | 2 | 2 |
| Hiking | Positive | 3 | 2 |
| Journaling (blogging included) | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Learning guitar | Neutral | 4 | 2 |
| Meditating | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Playing board games / doing puzzles | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Playing competitive video games | Negative | 1 | 5 |
| Playing relaxing video games | Positive | 1 | 4 |
| Reading fiction | Positive | 2 | 4 |
| Reading non-fiction | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Reading the news | Negative | 2 | 5 |
| Scrolling social media | Negative | 1 | 5 |
| Spending time with friends | Positive | 2 | 5 |
| Stretching | Positive | 3 | 2 |
| Taking dog for walk | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Watching documentaries | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Watching TV / movies | Neutral | 1 | 4 |
| Working on house projects | Positive | 5 | 1 |
In my view, it's all about misaligned incentives. OF COURSE I'm going to choose the activities that are optimized based on lowest effort for highest reward. Why wouldn't I? It makes perfect sense that my brain would seek those activities out, regardless of longer term effects.
Let’s look at the exact same table, but sorted by Effort vs Dopamine ratio:
| Activity | Overall impact on my mental health | Effort | Dopamine hit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Playing competitive video games | Negative | 1 | 5 |
| Scrolling social media | Negative | 1 | 5 |
| Playing relaxing video games | Positive | 1 | 4 |
| Watching TV / movies | Neutral | 1 | 4 |
| Reading the news | Negative | 2 | 5 |
| Spending time with friends | Positive | 2 | 5 |
| Reading fiction | Positive | 2 | 4 |
| Exercising | Positive | 2 | 2 |
| Playing board games / doing puzzles | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Reading non-fiction | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Watching documentaries | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Hiking | Positive | 3 | 2 |
| Stretching | Positive | 3 | 2 |
| Journaling (blogging included) | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Meditating | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Taking dog for walk | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Cleaning / tidying | Positive | 4 | 2 |
| Cooking | Positive | 4 | 2 |
| Learning guitar | Neutral | 4 | 2 |
| Working on house projects | Positive | 5 | 1 |
It's actually not surprising how closely this lines up with how I end up spending my time. It's a tough pill to swallow though, because even the activities towards the bottom of the table that are high effort and low reward are valuable, worthwhile, and important. How can I balance the conflicting portions of my brain - instant gratification vs. long-term mental health and fulfillment?
Availability
I believe my brain subconsciously constructs its own ranked table of available activities at any given time, and pushes me towards the easiest available reward. How can I move towards more positive mental health without rewiring my brain?
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with restricting availability, and it feels really promising. The idea is basically choosing certain days of the week where certain activities are entirely off-limits. This effectively changes which activities are rows in my table. Even though the activities’ efforts and rewards haven’t changed at all, I find my monkey brain simply choosing whichever rows show up closer to the top.
For example, imagine you decided that on Wednesdays, friends and screens are completely unavailable, because you want to be unreachable while spending time with family. Your available activities for the day might look like this:
| Activity | Overall impact on my mental health | Effort | Dopamine hit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading fiction | Positive | 2 | 4 |
| Exercising | Positive | 2 | 2 |
| Playing board games / doing puzzles | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Reading non-fiction | Positive | 3 | 3 |
| Hiking | Positive | 3 | 2 |
| Stretching | Positive | 3 | 2 |
| Journaling (blogging included) | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Meditating | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Taking dog for walk | Positive | 3 | 1 |
| Cleaning / tidying | Positive | 4 | 2 |
| Cooking | Positive | 4 | 2 |
| Learning guitar | Neutral | 4 | 2 |
| Working on house projects | Positive | 5 | 1 |
Ultimately, it just becomes so much easier to do a 3/2 activity when there aren't any 1/5 activities available as options.
Trying out this concept has felt great for a few reasons:
- It doesn’t completely remove activities from life permanently (after all, there are some great reasons to use screens)
- I’ve started to feel bored again (I think being bored sometimes is essential for positive mental health)
- I feel more in control of my life, since I’m able to be more intentional with my choices without my brain defaulting to “standard” activities
- I feel that I’m building a richer life with more variety
Final thoughts
This brain dump is an attempt for me to clarify my thoughts about my own mental health. I’m sure the ideas here won’t work for everyone, but I’m feeling excited and motivated to keep pondering on this topic. I think as a next step, I’ll keep tweaking my schedule of available activities and finding the balance that feels right.
I want to make it clear that I don’t view any of the activities listed above as inherently “good” or “bad”. Life is all about trade-offs. Viewing the information like this helps me to understand what trade-offs I’m subconsciously making, which ultimately can help me be more intentional about the type of life I want to live. I will say it’s pretty frustrating that certain aspects of society are specifically geared toward spiking the reward centers of our brains, making it easier to become addicted and harder to make intentional choices.
Anyway, rant over. If anyone has thoughts about this topic, I’d love to hear from you! Thanks for reading.