It is often thought that the state of one’s mental health dictates how we think. Can it be the other way around? Let’s dive into this below.
First, mental health includes emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It is one of the eight pillars of wellness: 1) Emotional, 2) Physical, 3) Spiritual, 4) Social, 5) Financial, 6) Intellectual, 7) Occupational, and 8) Environmental. In fact, it plays the most critical role of these eight pillars of wellness with how it can impact your life for better or worse. Mental health is important at every stage of life from childhood through our adult lives. It determines how you address stress, relate to others, and make choices which can all impact the other pillars of wellness in a healthy or not so healthy way.
A big part of our mental well-being is shaped by our belief systems. Beliefs are conditioned perceptions that are built upon old memories of pain and pleasure. By attaching ourselves emotionally to people, events, and circumstances, we effectively build the foundations of our belief systems from our childhood into our adult lives. These commands that influence what you will consciously delete, distort or generalize as you go about your day. Over a lifetime your beliefs are ingrained into your nervous system due to repeated situations that prove their legitimacy. Throughout your life, you collect facts, evidence, and references that help you form your idea of reality. Over time, you build up more references through the use of your imagination, through the knowledge you acquire, through personal experiences, and through the influence of your peer groups. These references help you form ideas about things. Eventually, some of these ideas turn into opinions that are backed by more certainty and emotional intensity. This pattern leads to people developing limiting beliefs forged during their childhood years and how they live their lives subconsciously from it. They impact our confidence level, self-esteem, how we communicate to ourselves and others, how we behave, our attitude, emotions, and ability to take calculated risks and action.
A big reason why people get caught into this pattern is through conditioned thinking and our survivor mindset over time. We are triggered by fear daily from life situations that draw up these limiting beliefs subconsciously where we react from past and future thinking. This is called the fixed mindset. Fear thrives in the past and future. It creates more stress in your mind which leads to various levels of anxiety. It impacts your focus to make decisions, getting caught up in procrastination, and then repeating the pattern to cause more stress on the body and other pillars of wellness mentioned above.
So, what can be done to shift how you think to create more harmony or alignment with your mental health? It comes down to changing the way you think from the past and future to being present. It’s shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset through mental toughness.
What is mental toughness? According to Oxford Reference, the definition states it’s a quality of mind or intellect characterized by, among other things, a refusal to be intimidated, a determination to finish a contest even when things are going badly, and an ability to control emotions and remain highly focused when under the pressure of intense competition. Mental toughness is acquired over time through a daily routine of habits that create clarity by being present. These daily habits can include a combination of meditation, journaling, making your bed, exercise, reading, and so on. Learning to think in the moment rather in the past and future rewires the brain for more clarity and focus. This change in thinking over time has a dramatic effect on your mental health. Let’s explore below how this impacts the mind in a better way.
People who acquire mental toughness over time like an Olympian athlete see challenges now as opportunities or blessings to learn and grow. They embrace them as they see a life of harmony as a process and not a destination. People often resist or avoid a challenge which creates more stress and leads to lower levels of confidence and self-esteem. They also understand there are things in life we can control and not control. Here are the five things every day a person can control in their lives:
- Communication with self and others.
You are listening to your inner critic from limiting beliefs or inner champion from mental toughness. You are communicating to others in a specific, clear, and concise way free from expectations rather than from assumption and speculation bundled in expectations. One is interdependent and the other being codependent.
- Behavior
Passive and/or aggressive in a codependent or assertive in a interdependent way
- Attitude
This is either practicing daily gratitude everything while seeing a challenge as a process to become more or operating from excuses and expectations of others.
- Emotions
It knows to see challenges as happening for and not to you. The ability to choose the emotion that serves you in any situation.
- Action
It knows to take action regardless of the situation to see the opportunity and blessings so you respond from a place of gratitude.
The reality is that we can control the same five things above in other people. We don’t realize when we get caught up in the past and future triggered by situations from fear that we are being caught up in a pattern of expectations tied to outcomes with others. The secret is to let go of the control you cannot control in others like you cannot control the weather, inflation, and the economy. Focus on only what you can control daily. See as a puzzle. You work only with the pieces today within your control. Trust the process of focusing on being present to what you can control and let the results be a byproduct of it. This leads to harmony with mental health.