We all know how to take care of our physical health, but what do we know about maintaining our mental health? And what do we teach our children about maintaining their mental health? Nothing. Why is that so?
I apologize for how gloomy this may be, but it’s the unfortunate reality we’re currently living in today, and in order to do anything about it, we have to personally take responsibility for it and take action.
The first and most important thing to discuss is:
Loneliness
Loneliness can make us believe that those around us care much less about us than they do. It makes us afraid to reach out and ask for anything, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can bare?
But it gets worse than that, loneliness won’t just make you miserable, it can kill you. A survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by the Harris Poll on behalf of the American Osteopathic Association found that 72% of people reported that they experience loneliness. Another study in Canada on 43,000 university students found that 66% of them admitted to feeling very lonely, despite hundreds of them sitting in large lecture halls together.
Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and even suppresses the functioning of the immune system, making you more vulnerable. Loneliness is more often reported in individualistic cultures than in collectivistic ones.
If you recognize that you're lonely, try joining a club or group of some sort, and don't be afraid to ask for help.
Failure
Failure can be painful too. We all have a set of default feelings and beliefs that get triggered whenever we encounter failure and setbacks. Are you aware of how your mind reacts whenever you encounter failure? Because you need to be. If your mind and by extension, your thoughts try to convince you you’re incapable of doing something after failure, and you believe it, you’ll begin to feel helpless and stop trying too soon.
And then you’ll be even more convinced that you can’t do it. It might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail, but you CANNOT allow your mind to make you believe that you that you can’t succeed. You have to fight feelings of helplessness, you have to gain control over the situation, and break this kind of negative cycle before it begins!
Psychologist Guy Winch likens the process of this negative self talk to getting a physical cut on your body, and then grabbing a knife and making that cut deeper. But we all know not to do that to our physical cuts and yet we don’t pay much attention to the mental cuts we may sustain, making it all the more important to pay attention to our minds when we do sustain them, and to spread the word about mental hygiene.
Our minds and our thoughts aren’t the trust worthy friends we seem to think they are. They’re more like really moody friends who can be really supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next.
Rejection
Rejection is also extremely painful. For example, if you go ask someone out and gather all the courage you’ve got and go do it, only to be rejected, this can be painful too.
If after getting rejected, you then went and told your friend about how you got rejected and they said “well, you’re not that attractive and you’re not that successful, so why would anyone want to go out with you?” We would in all likelihood, get rid of friends like that from our life. But wouldn’t it be less surprising if I told you that it wasn’t a friend that told you this, but rather your own mind? We all start to think about our faults and shortcomings after a rejection.
Again, when we sustain a physical injury, we know what to do about it, but when we take a mental hit, we sit there and instead of bringing our self esteem back up, we sit there and beat it to a pulp. We do this with psychological injuries all the time, but why?! Because we don’t take care of our mental health, and nobody teaches us how to do it.
We know from psychology that when your self-esteem is lowered, you’re more vulnerable to stress and anxiety. So when we do get rejected, we need to revive our self esteem. Treat yourself and speak to yourself with the same compassion that you would expect from a truly good friend.
Rumination
The last of our terrible mental hygienic habits is rumination. To ruminate means to continuously think about something again and again and again. For example you have a big fight with a family member or a friend and you just can’t stop replaying what happened in your head.
Ruminating is one of the most common habits, and it is a very costly one. Because, spending so much time on upsetting and negative thoughts puts you at significant risk of clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease.
The problem is that the urge to ruminate can feel really strong and really important, so it’s a difficult habit to stop. Studies tell us, that just a 2 minute distraction is enough to stop the urge to ruminate in the moment. That's all there is to it.
So to recap, by taking action when you’re lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self esteem when you face rejection of any kind, and by battling negative thinking, you won’t just heal your psychological wounds, but will instead build emotional resilience, and you will thrive.
I believe that if we all practiced proper mental hygiene, the quality of our lives would increase dramatically, and we would all lead much happier and more fulfilled lives. Can you imagine if we lived in a world where everyone practiced proper mental hygiene?
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
I hope you all enjoyed and benefited from this
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Sources:
All credit goes to Psychologist Guy Winch.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/many-americans-are-lonely-survey-finds/
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/09/lonely-university-students_n_11932012.html