World Mental Health Day always hits differently for me. Not because it’s a reminder of what I’ve been through, but because it’s a mirror for where I am now. We talk a lot about awareness—hashtags, campaigns, green ribbons—but the real work of mental health starts with something quieter: honesty. Not the social kind, but the kind that sits with you at 2 a.m. when your thoughts don’t match your highlight reel.
Honesty is heavy because it’s the first real step toward healing. It’s what turns awareness into action. According to research from Frontiers in Psychology, emotional openness—especially when paired with self-reflection—has a direct impact on long-term mental well-being, reducing anxiety and improving emotional regulation (Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016; Kross et al., 2021). In simple terms: the truth hurts, but it helps. It’s the mental version of physical therapy—you stretch what’s been tight, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Studies have shown that emotional suppression is one of the strongest predictors of burnout and workplace disengagement. A meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology found that employees who feel psychologically safe to express emotions and admit mistakes have significantly higher job satisfaction and lower turnover (Frazier et al., 2017). Honesty, it turns out, isn’t just personal therapy—it’s professional sustainability. You can’t build healthy cultures on emotional silence.
Sometimes I think of honesty like a prompt you give to your own mind—like when you feed an AI the right question to get the answer you’re looking for. The quality of the response depends on the clarity of the prompt. Healing works the same way. If you don’t tell your mind the truth, it can’t generate peace. If you keep feeding it half-truths, it’ll keep producing confusion. The prompt has to be honest for the process to work.
That’s what this whole Unspoken Truths series has been about—learning to write better prompts for myself. From “The Armor We Wear” to “The Gravity of Letting Go,” each essay was me asking a new kind of question. Not “How do I fix this?” but “What am I really feeling beneath all this noise?” And somewhere in between, I learned that honesty doesn’t make life easier—it just makes it real.
But I’ve also noticed how many people around me still hold everything in. Friends, coworkers, even family. You can almost see the pressure behind their eyes. It’s not that they don’t want to talk—it’s that somewhere along the way, they were taught that silence was strength. I get it. I still do it sometimes too. But I was lucky enough to learn early on that talking about things doesn’t make you weaker. It’s just acknowledging that you’re human.
And I see it especially at work—people burning out not from workload, but from emotional lockdown. We’re surrounded by campaigns about mental health, yet inside teams, people are still afraid to say, “I’m overwhelmed.” According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report, nearly 60% of employees feel emotionally detached from their work, and the biggest driver isn’t stress—it’s silence. The inability to express what’s really going on.
It’s wild how often we treat honesty like a threat instead of a tool. We think if we admit we’re struggling, we’ll lose control—but really, that’s the moment we start to take it back. The truth can feel like a collapse at first, but more often, it’s a rebuild. Honesty isn’t just saying “I’m not okay.” It’s allowing that sentence to exist without shame.
And once you get past the fear of hearing yourself, something shifts. You start recognizing how honesty builds connection—how saying “me too” can turn isolation into empathy. There’s a kind of quiet peace that follows those moments, like the air after a storm. It’s not lightness, exactly—it’s grounding. The kind of calm that makes you feel heavier in a good way. More here. More human.
Looking back, I realize that’s what Unspoken Truths has been leading to all along. Every essay—about identity, fatherhood, masculinity, letting go—was a small act of honesty. Each one carried a bit of weight I didn’t know I was still holding. And today, on World Mental Health Day, I’m not here to say I’ve dropped it all. I haven’t. I’ve just learned how to carry it differently.
Because healing isn’t about emptying yourself—it’s about organizing the chaos inside. It’s learning to listen to your thoughts without letting them narrate your worth. And most of all, it’s understanding that the goal of mental health isn’t constant happiness—it’s integration. The ability to exist with both peace and pressure, fear and faith, exhaustion and hope.
Honesty also activates something psychologists call cognitive congruence—when your inner beliefs and outer behaviors start to align. According to research from the Journal of Counseling Psychology, people who practice authentic self-expression show higher emotional stability and long-term resilience (Wood et al., 2008). It’s what happens when your life finally stops arguing with itself.
So maybe honesty is the real therapy session we all need. The one that doesn’t start with “How are you?” but with “What’s true for you right now?”
That’s the weight I’ve learned to appreciate—the weight of honesty. It’s not light, but it’s real. And maybe that’s what makes it healing.
Unspoken Truths started as a space to break silence. Now, it ends in gratitude for what honesty taught me about being human. And as we move into the next chapter, I hope we all remember this: healing starts with a prompt—an honest one. Because even our minds, like any good system, can’t give us clarity if we keep feeding it lies.
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References
Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183
Gallup. (2023). State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Report. Washington, D.C.: Gallup Press.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
Kashdan, T. B., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2018). The upside of your dark side: Why being your whole self—not just your “good” self—drives success and fulfillment. New York: Penguin.
Kross, E., Ayduk, Ö., & Mischel, W. (2021). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 684578. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.684578
Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening up by writing it down: How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain (3rd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
Wood, A. M., Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Baliousis, M., & Joseph, S. (2008). The authentic personality: A theoretical and empirical conceptualization and the development of the Authenticity Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(3), 385–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.55.3.385