At the Jaipur Literature Festival 2026, a packed session at Surya Mahal posed a deceptively simple question: how do you know when you are not okay? The answer, experts suggested, is not when life collapses entirely, but much earlier, when stress lingers, sleep suffers, emotions feel overwhelming, and the mind grows noisier than usual.
The panel, titled Where Is My Mind?, featured psychiatrist and global mental health leader Vikram Patel, mental health entrepreneur Neha Kirpal, and journalist-author Amrita Tripathi, in conversation with Puneeta Roy, founder of The Yuva Ekta Foundation. Drawing on clinical research, lived experience, and public advocacy, the discussion focused on practical, compassionate ways to manage everyday anxiety in contemporary India.
Do not medicalise being human
Vikram Patel, who played a key role in shaping India’s National Mental Health Policy, cautioned against the growing tendency to label normal emotional distress as illness. Negative emotions such as sadness, fear, anger, and anxiety, he emphasised, are not problems to be eliminated but signals that deserve attention.
Every emotion, Patel explained, has an evolutionary purpose and an adaptive function. The concern arises when these feelings persist despite attempts to cope and begin to interfere with daily life, affecting work, relationships, sleep, or basic functioning. That, he said, is when individuals should consider seeking external support. Importantly, Patel framed help-seeking as a rational escalation, not a personal failure, no different from consulting a doctor when home remedies no longer work.
Using the internet wisely
When the conversation turned to online health searches, Patel offered a nuanced view. The internet, he noted, has expanded access to information and can be helpful when used responsibly. The risk lies in sensational or ideologically driven content that amplifies fear rather than understanding. His advice was to rely on credible institutions, professional bodies, and collective voices, rather than isolated individuals promoting extreme or alarmist narratives.
However, Patel stressed that proactive coping should begin well before anxiety spirals into panic.
Three strategies to cope before burnout
Drawing from both evidence and personal practice, Patel outlined three foundational coping approaches. The first is calming the mind through meditation, yoga, or breathing techniques, practices rooted in Indian tradition and proven to regulate stress. The second is resisting avoidance. Avoiding anxiety-provoking situations may bring temporary relief, but over time it restricts life and deepens distress. The third is strengthening social connection. Mental health, Patel reminded the audience, is inherently relational and sustained by family, friends, community, and shared belief systems.
Used consistently, these strategies resolve distress for most people without the need for clinical intervention.
Trauma is stored in the body
Neha Kirpal, co-founder of Amaha, highlighted how unresolved trauma, especially from childhood, often manifests physically as well as emotionally. Many people, she said, learn survival responses such as running, freezing, or fighting, which may protect them early in life but become limiting later on.
Trauma does not disappear through avoidance or suppression. Instead, it embeds itself in the body. Kirpal emphasised the importance of reconnecting physical awareness with mental health, recognising how bodily sensations, tension, and fatigue are linked to emotional states. Her message was clear: between meeting external expectations and honouring personal needs, individuals must choose themselves.
Disconnect to reconnect
Amrita Tripathi, founder of The Health Collective and author of The Age of Anxiety, spoke candidly about the paradox of digital awareness. Despite knowing the mental health costs of excessive screen time, she acknowledged how easily stress leads people to scroll late into the night, worsening anxiety.
Her advice was deliberately simple: put the phone down, particularly before sleep. Tripathi also shared a powerful coping insight from the pandemic years: doing something for someone else. Small acts, such as calling a family member or checking in on a friend, can counter loneliness, which she described as a growing epidemic amplified by social media.
Compassion as structure, not sentiment
As the session closed, Patel returned to a central theme of his work: humans are fundamentally social beings. Mental health cannot be understood solely as an individual issue detached from family systems, communities, and digital environments.
Future historians, he suggested, may view the rise of the digital world as a turning point in how human relationships are organised. The challenge today is not to romanticise the past, but to rebuild trust, empathy, and connection in new forms, treating compassion not as a soft ideal, but as essential social infrastructure.
The conversation left the audience with a grounded message: managing anxiety is less about eliminating discomfort and more about listening early, connecting deeply, and responding with care, both individually and collectively.
