How Our Mental Health Is Like A Seed And Plant
When we’re born, we are the seed of our own lives. That seed grows and grows with care by our parent(s) or family members until it brings about a beautiful woman or man. However, mental health doesn’t begin to really take hold in a person’s life until about 3 to 4 years old according to research, the age when explicit memories become more frequent, detailed, and adult-oriented. However, if you’re lucky, you can remember when you were as young as 14-18 months old as well, the age when specific events could be remembered. When you reach 6 to 7 years old though, your memory is equivalent to an adult’s memory and that’s the age many people remember as they get older. I’m saying all of this to say this: our minds will store whatever events or situations happen in those several years and it will influence your mental health.
If you have a smooth ride through your first 6-7+ years of your life, your mental health will more likely stay on a positive path. If you experience a lot of bumps and rocky roads in your first 6-7+ years, your mental health is more likely to enter a negative path. This all sounds like common sense right? That’s where things get a bit tricky and confusing because mental health isn’t easy to understand by the general human without any solid knowledge of it. Your ride doesn’t stop there in your first 6-7+ years of life because the ride is lifelong.
What if you have a great home life or childhood, but then run straight into bullying at school or online or you start falling behind in school? All that mental health progress you’ve made is backtracked and your mental health will start falling downhill instead of uphill. What if you’ve had a horrible childhood or home life and you have the most amazing support and people that are around you? Your mental health will then start climbing uphill. Again, it all seems like common sense right? It’s a lot more complex than that. Every single event, moment, memory, situation, etc that occurs in your life will have an effect on your mental health and many times, you won’t even notice.
Mental health is like a seed. You plant that seed in the ground, nurture, care for it, water it, and then voila! You’ve got a nicely growing and sprouting flower, fruit, vegetable, or whatever your seed is for. If you don’t take care of that seed, giving it enough sunlight, water, etc, that seed will never sprout to its full potential and therefore, will die. Mental health is very similar to that analogy I just provided of the seed sprouting into a plant or flower of some sort. Many times, we allow our mental health to hold us back from our full potential or our full strength. We don’t take care of or nurture our mental health enough or not at all, allowing our mental states to deteriorate, wilt, and die.
The great news out of all of this is the fact that we aren’t that plant or flower that wilts or dies, and we can’t revive it. We have the full capabilities of reviving our mental state, reviving our mental health, and reviving our mind. Anytime someone says something mean to you, you can either let that destroy your mental health or you can put up a block and say “you’re not worth it” in your mind not out your mouth and that’ll prevent those words from intruding into your mind, inflicting damage. The common phrase “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words could never hurt me" is very untrue and truly disappointing because words do hurt and words can either kill or revive someone. Our words that come from us are like a sword. They can either inflict damage on someone’s mind and mental health or they can slay the negative words that’s been said to them out of their mind. Your words are the most powerful weapon on this Earth and I’ll cover the full importance of “our words" in a separate article. We have free will to take control of our mental health and grow in a positive light or to not take control of our mental health, leading us down a negative, dark path. The choice is yours: do you want to be like that plant or flower that wasn’t cared for or nurtured properly and die inside or do you want to be like that plant or flower that bloomed and grew to its full potential?
Resources Used In This Article
- https://www.babycenter.com/baby/baby-development/when-will-my-baby-start-remembering-things_6888#:~:text=Long-lasting%20conscious%20memory%20of,14%20and%2018%20months%20old.
- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fatherly.com/health-science/when-do-memories-start-what-do-kids-remember/amp/
