The stress we feel is often a normal part of life
Over the past few years, conversations about mental health have become more open and widely accepted, and that’s a good thing, on the whole. Many people have found language for experiences they previously struggled to describe, and it’s become easier to talk about stress, anxiety, low mood, and emotional strain without immediate shame.
However, with that progress, there’s also a tendency to take ordinary human experiences and describe them using mental health language that makes something more than it is.
This is often described as pathologising. Put simply, to pathologise means treating normal reactions to life events as evidence that something is clinically wrong. When discomfort, stress, or emotional difficulty are automatically framed as symptoms, we lose sight of the fact that to struggle at times is an ordinary part of everyone’s life.
Human experience is a mixed bag of emotions and states – and they all serve a purpose. We feel joy, excitement, contentment, curiosity, and affection, and we also feel sadness, boredom, irritation, loneliness, uncertainty, and overwhelm. These can sit alongside each other, sometimes within the same week or even the same day.
Anyone who has watched Inside Out will recognise this idea straight away, that all experiences and emotions play a role in helping us understand what’s important to us and what needs attention. When we’re sold the idea that we should be happy, motivated, and emotionally steady most of the time, it becomes easy to read any disruption as a problem to be fixed.
We see this often, when social media reels encourage self-diagnosis. For example, someone finds it hard to concentrate during a stressful period and begins to wonder if they have ADHD, or they feel awkward or drained in social situations and start to wonder if they’re on the autism spectrum. Other people might notice intrusive thoughts during periods of anxiety and fear this means they have obsessive-compulsive disorder. These interpretations are understandable, especially when social media presents ‘5 signs that mean…’, which blurs the line between everyday experiences and clinical conditions.
What’s often misunderstood is how specific mental health diagnoses actually are. Conditions such as ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, or OCD involve patterns that are long-standing, consistent across different situations, and significantly disruptive to daily functioning. They affect a minority of people, which is reflected in scientific research, and they’re diagnosed through careful assessment rather than a checklist alone. Many people will recognise occasional traits that resemble these conditions without meeting the criteria for a diagnosis, particularly during periods of pressure, loss, or transition.
Stress and loss are good examples of this. After a breakup, bereavement, or major life change, people often experience disrupted sleep, changes in appetite, irritability, low motivation, difficulty concentrating, and emotional confusion. These reactions can be intense and unsettling, especially when they arrive together, but they’re typically natural responses to disruption rather than signs of mental illness. With time, most people recover from unpleasant experiences well enough without professional support.
If you find yourself worrying whether you might have a mental health issue, it helps to ask yourself a few reflective questions before jumping to conclusions:
- Has this experience been present for most of my life, or has it appeared in response to a recent change or stressor?
- Does this difficulty affect nearly every area of my life, or does it fluctuate depending on context and circumstances?
- Have I been able to cope with similar challenges before, even if they felt overwhelming at the time?
- Am I seeking help to build understanding and resilience, or because I feel I can't tolerate any distress at all?
Access to mental health care is important, and seeking help can be a responsible choice, particularly when difficulties are persistent, overwhelming, or disruptive. At the same time, not every stressful experience calls for professional intervention. When support becomes the automatic response to all discomfort, there’s a risk of conditioning ourselves to believe distress itself is something we can’t deal with, which can gradually undermine confidence in our capacity to cope.
Most of us can look back at a problem from several years ago that, at the time, felt unbearable, and might even have seemed like proof that something was wrong with us. In some situations, there is a genuine need to consider clinical assessment, but in most cases experiences of emotional strain, uncertainty, and struggle are part of ordinary human life. Expecting a life free from stress or difficulty, or assuming we should feel happy most of the time, sets a standard that none of us can meet.
