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Mental Health is a key part of our overall health and wellness! Many physical diseases and mental illness diagnosis stem from dis-ease in our mental and emotional well being.
Behavioral Psychology was originally founded for the purpose of understanding our human behaviors, and not for diagnosing. Let's take a look out what the founders of psychology taught us about the human experience and how it relates to mental health!
Here we have listed 8 essentials of positive mental health. It's important for us to remember mental health is not a destination, but a journey. Let's embrace this journey of life together!
Attitude Towards Life
Our attitude about our experiences is critical to our mental health. Our attitudes are developed over time by experiences, learned thought patterns, repeated behaviors and our social and emotional environments. The great news is that we can actively change our attitudes by choice! We can choose our environments as adults. We can put in effort and connect with resources to help us into better environments. We can choose our friends and influences. We can choose to accept or reject the opinions and advice of others. We can choose more helpful thinking styles and replace unhelpful learned ones. We can choose different actions and create new behavioral patterns.
Have you heard of the silver lining? When we experience negative outcomes, we can look at them as an opportunity to learn from, grow from, and ultimately find the good in every situation, even the devastating ones. Take it from Viktor Frankl, who was in a Nazi concentration camp for 3 years, facing death and witnessing death for 1,095 days:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
Accurate Thinking Styles
Even the most mentally healthy people out there cannot escape some unhelpful thinking styles learned from upbringings and life's experiences. What can turn our whole state of being around is our ability to be aware of our thinking styles, where they come from, and adopt more helpful thinking styles to cultivate better mental health and well being.
Explore more in our blog about Thinking Styles & Mental Well-Being.
Awareness to Grow
Did you know we always have room to grow?
We can place ourselves into two categories, one being completely inflexible in our ways of being, and the other is adopting flexibility in our being. Once we become aware that our current state of being doesn't have to define us, or remain the same, we can connect with the hope of growing into better mental health practices.
Knowing we ourselves have room to grow allows us to give others the grace to grow as well. This can save us from resentments and other harsh mentalities that prevent us from feeling and being better. Holding on to resentments is a bitter drink that only poisons ourselves!
Strength, Consistency, Decisiveness, and Responsibility
Building inner strength, consistency and decisiveness comes directly from our connection to self responsibility and accountability. We develop defined boundaries from our values and learn helpful strategies to meet our values and how our values play a part in our feelings we experience.
We all have strengths and we all have the same set of values. Taking responsibility for discovering our values and making consistent choices which align with our values builds upon our strengths, strengthens our weaknesses, and improves our over all mental health and sense of identity.
Learn more about our values, or "needs" here.
Mature Sense of Identity
We often identify ourselves in many ways outside of our core being. This includes identifying ourselves by our roles, such as parent, job title, sexual orientation and so on. Our identity is much more than our external roles and appearances, but more defined by our values and how we effectively meet them in every day choices.
How do you identify yourself? Many who are in a spiritual relationship with God use the practice of writing these self-identifiers on a sheet of blank labels, then tear them off, throwing them in the trash. They then replace all those labels with one label that reads "Child of God". Review the list above "learning more about our values, or "needs", and try to identify who you are by your values. How does this practice feel to you and your sense of identity?
Ability to Self Regulate
Some of us were raised by parents who possessed less than helpful ways of regulating emotions, thoughts and feelings. Some of us have experienced traumatic situations that have disrupted our regulatory patterns. Maybe we learned unhelpful ways of self regulation. The good news is that we are capable of learning new ways to self regulate that can be helpful, and holistic! Simple exercises such as breath work, tapping, adopting more helpful mindsets all play a huge role in self regulation.
In our past blog Emotional First Aid for Helping Trauma Responses we give some exercises that are helpful for self regulation.
Vision and Goal Setting
Having a track envisioned is the first step to staying on track when it comes to our mental health and wellness goals. Without goals, we can easily feel like we are just floating through the black space of nothingness, going nowhere really fast. In Stephen R. Covey's renowned book of powerful lessons for personal change, "7 Habits of Highly Effective People", he emphasized to begin with the end in mind.
We offer peer support services include Life Coaching which can help you specifically with vision and goal setting in addition to accountability. Explore our peer support service today at https://www.evenoneless.com/book-online .
Communication, People & Social Skills
The quality of our being is determined much by the quality of our personal relationships. The quality of our relationships depends much on our social skills and our ability to communicate our needs and values effectively with compassion. Did they teach us these skills in school? Of course not! This is why we see more behavioral programs such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy for interpersonal relationship skills. Non-profits focusing on social/emotional skills are popping up to teach us these much needed skills as adults. It is essential we begin to teach our youth these skills early as a preventitive measure.
Listen to a great podcast that discusses this matter here. You can also follow All About Understanding who is pioneering this cause in rural western Oklahoma.
These aspects of positive mental health have been adapted from the founders and followers of psychology. These founders and newcomers include Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Kain Ramsay, Freud, John Locke, William Glasser, Albert Ellis, Virginia Satir, Erik Erickson, and Viktor Frankl.
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