How to Maintain Good Mental Health
Posted January 16th, 2017
To perform well in our jobs, mental health is important. Mental health is having a well-rounded, nuanced, balanced and sober view of ourselves and world. Too often, however, we fall into bad habits of thinking and ways of seeing the world that can affect our mental health and well being. Here are a few of those habits to watch out for, as identified by psychologists.
1. Confusing thoughts and facts
Simply put, our thoughts are not the real world, nor do they always accurately reflect the real world. So, we must be careful that we do not give them the credence we do to reality itself. Our thoughts are inherently biased – they reflect our own particular experience, knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, which color our vision of reality. So, we often need to be skeptical about them and their degree of truth and usefulness.
2. Confusing emotion with truth.
Again, this is confusing the subjective – our emotions – with the objective, what is true. Simply because we feel something strongly and deeply does not mean that it is necessarily true. There are many reasons why a particular stimulus could be having this effect on us.
This is not to say that emotions are unimportant. They are important vehicles for helping us to understand and navigate in the world, but we must be careful not to trust them to the exclusion of everything else, such as reason.
3. Believing that feeling uncomfortable is bad.
Not necessarily. You have by now probably heard of the popular phrase “get out of your comfort zone if you want to succeed.” It is, in fact, good to get out of your comfort zone. It means you are growing and learning.
4. Relying too much on past experience.
Past experience is valuable, maybe the most valuable way of helping us to understand the world. Yet, it can also distort our vision of the world depending on what we have experienced. So, we need to rely on our experience, but other things as well – the perspectives of others, the knowledge gained from learning.
5. Placing having over doing.
Too often, we value what we have, when we should be focusing on how we got what we have. We need to pay more attention to the processes we use in our lives, rather than just the fruits of those processes. Often, we focus on the decision we make, rather than the process we use to make that decision, which in the end is more important.
6. Not valuing action
As the philosopher Aristotle noted a long time ago, we are what we habitually do. Our mental states are connected to our actions and are influenced by our actions, and vice versa. Our mindset affects what we do, but what we do affects our attitudes and beliefs. To change how you feel, you need to change how you act.
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