Editor's Note: Throughout May, DTN/Progressive Farmer's special series "Mental Health Hope & Help" is exploring the unique mental health challenges people in rural America face, highlighting efforts to overcome stigma and looking at ways farmers and ranchers can manage their mental wellness. This is the 11th story in the series.
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The prevalence of mental illness in our society is significant, and the chances are high that you or someone in your family or your company, or simply an acquaintance in your rural community is struggling with his or her mental health. According to the National Institutes of Health, anxiety disorders, including panic, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, various phobias and general anxiety affect about 19% of the population, while depression affects another 7%. Thus, more than a quarter of the U.S. population experiences a diagnosable mental health disorder in a given year.
In his 2020 book "Permission to Feel," author Marc Brackett, Ph.D., suggested that a significant contributor to our society's mental health challenges is our inability to understand and regulate our emotions. "If we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones," he wrote, "we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives."
Brackett used the acronym RULER to help us recall how to deal with our emotions. Here is a summary of each step in his process.
RECOGNIZE OUR EMOTIONS
The first step is simply noticing a change in your emotional state. You might detect a shift in your own thoughts, energy or mood, or in someone else's facial expression or voice. When you pay attention, you notice that something is "going on" with yourself or another person.
UNDERSTAND OUR EMOTIONS
The second step is to understand the reason for the emotion. In my case, I've found that everything from the time of day, the weather, the length of my to-do list or my latest interaction with someone can change how I'm feeling. In communicating with others, the ability to pinpoint the reason someone is experiencing an emotion vastly improves your communication with them.
LABEL OUR EMOTIONS
When it comes to naming my own emotions, I'm remarkably lacking in creativity, often vacillating between the words "great" and "OK" and "frustrated." A quick internet search, however, suggests there are more than 3,000 words for our feelings. After reading Brackett's book, I downloaded the "How We Feel" app (you can find it at howwefeel.org) to improve my ability to name, and thereby pay more attention to, my emotions. The app lists 144 words to describe our feelings and connects those feelings to other events, the weather, sleep and physical activity to detect trends in one's emotional state.
EXPRESS OUR EMOTIONS
Expressing how you feel doesn't mean you have to share all of your feelings with everyone you meet. Rather, having a sense of how and when to display your emotions, and knowing the appropriateness and the "unspoken rules" (also called "display rules") of your audience and the setting are key.
REGULATE OUR EMOTIONS
Managing one's emotions isn't the typical kind of hard work you are used to on a family farm or ranch, but always being on top of your emotional state can wear you down, particularly when there is a gap between how you feel and how you present yourself to others. Regulating strategies can include focused breathing, performing rituals to prepare for emotionally taxing circumstances, shifting your attention away from certain feelings, reframing how you see a situation and pausing to take a third-person view of your current state.
Brackett pointed out that "our cognitive abilities -- what we focus on, where we devote our efforts, what we remember, how we make decisions, our levels of creativity and engagement -- all depend on our emotional state." Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing and Regulating our emotions can not only improve our mental health but also improve our relationships, our physical health and our performance in our family businesses.
Lance Woodbury can be reached at lance.woodbury@pinionglobal.com
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For more articles in this series:
Blog:
-- Editors' Notebook: "Take Time for Mental Health," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
Stories:
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 1: "Rural Americans Still Face Mental Health Stigma, Scarcity of Resources, But Outlook Is Improving," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 2: "Farmers Urge Fellow Farmers to Reach Out When Life Overwhelms," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 3: "Obstacles, Solutions Abound in Rural Youth Mental Health," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 4: "Gender Differences Exist in Farmer Emotional Health," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 5: "Be Mindful of a Mother's Mental Health," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 6: "Mental Health Services Sparse But Still Within Reach in Rural Areas," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 7: "Suicide Prevention Training Teaches Lifesaving Techniques," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 8: "Training Empowers Rural Clergy, Other Community Leaders to Respond to Mental Health Crises," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 9: "Falling Crop Prices Add to Farm Stress," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
-- Mental Health Hope & Help - 10: "Mental Health Help Available for Rural Veterans," https://www.dtnpf.com/…
Additional resources:
For more information and mental health resources, visit our "Spotlight on Rural Mental Health" page at https://spotlights.dtnpf.com/…
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