Finding the root cause of various physical and mental health issues can sometimes be a long, painful process because physical and mental health have such a direct impact on each other. It can be hard to determine if a physical health issue is the root cause of a subsequent mental health issue or if an untreated mental health issue has led to poor physical health. In the end, however, it is more than worth the effort to address both. Here are 3 reasons why.

Any type of poor health can be difficult to hold down a job at all, let alone really thrive at work. When you’re just going through the motions at work—or even having a hard time just doing that—it can only further exacerbate any mental health issues you may be struggling with. Sometimes, the only way to truly thrive is to do the work of getting down to the bottom of the issues and addressing them at their source. When you’ve dealt with the issue keeping you from thriving, you may be shocked at what you can accomplish.

Good relationships require the ability to sometimes put aside your own needs to focus on meeting the needs of someone else. People who have overwhelming physical or mental health issues, however, have a hard enough time just getting through the day, let alone have any energy to direct towards someone else. For instance, if a person has a healthy, developed relationship before they get cancer, their relationship may survive the time they need to spend focusing solely on their own health needs. Conversely, it would be much more difficult to build a healthy relationship while a person was in the midst of battling cancer. Poor physical and mental health can take a strong toll on already developed relationships and make it nearly impossible to develop new ones.

Your body and mind are a complete system, which functions as one complete unit. More often than not, when you have a chronic health condition, it will almost invariably lead to a mental health condition, which needs to also be addressed. For instance, if you live in chronic pain, it will often lead to depression. The depression itself may actually make you feel so hopeless you don’t even have the wherewithal to access available chronic pain services. In some cases, you may actually need to deal with the depression through therapy or ketamine treatments in order to find the resources to focus on finding the source of the chronic pain.

Some physical or mental health issues are fairly easy to understand, diagnose and treat. Suffering a bout of depression following the death of a loved one is a fairly simple issue to diagnose and treat. In many cases, however, mental and physical health issues actually occurred in childhood and therefore have been left untreated for years if not decades. Those can be some of the most destructive and damaging issues, which are also the most difficult to treat. They are also the most important to seek treatment for if you ever hope to truly thrive.