What is mental health?
Mental health can hold diverse meanings for different individuals, shaped by their experiences, beliefs, and cultural backgrounds. Consider the diagram below and recognise the complexity of mental health. All components are connected and place an influence on one another. Therefore, positive mental health strategies need to consider each component.
Why do we have negative emotions?
It all goes back to our cavemen ancestors!
We experience negative emotions as a natural response to various situations and stimuli in our lives. These emotions often arise from factors such as stress, disappointment, fear, or loss. They serve as signals that something in our environment or within ourselves needs attention or adjustment. These responses link back to our primordial existence, and each response or feeling originally had an excellent reason. You may often have heard this touched upon in the form of flight, fight or freeze reactions.
[Image – this was in the notes, do you have one in mind?]
In short: Negative emotions are primal responses that have evolved to help us survive and thrive in challenging environments. Except they don’t always protect us.
Some examples include:
- Fear which is the fundamental emotion designed to protect us from danger. It triggers a physiological response known as the fight-or-flight response, preparing the body to either confront a threat or flee from it. This primal response helped our ancestors survive encounters with predators and other threats in the environment by heightening awareness, increasing adrenaline levels, and mobilising energy for action.
- Anger is an instinctual response triggered when we perceive a threat, injustice, or frustration. It can mobilise us to assert boundaries, defend ourselves, or confront obstacles. This primal response likely helped early humans compete for resources, establish dominance within social hierarchies, and protect themselves and their kin from harm.
- Sadness is the natural response to loss, disappointment, or separation. It serves as a signal that something is wrong and prompts us to reflect on our experiences, seek support from others, and adapt to changing circumstances. This primal response may have helped our ancestors navigate the complexities of social bonds, grieve losses, and form resilient communities.
- Disgust is the innate reaction to unpleasant stimuli such as foul odours, contaminated food, or potential sources of disease. It evolved as a protective mechanism to prevent us from ingesting harmful substances and avoiding pathogens. This primal response helped early humans avoid toxins, pathogens, and other sources of illness in their environment.
Negative emotions are adaptive responses shaped by evolution to help us navigate the challenges and threats of the environment, protect ourselves and our kin, and maintain social connections within our communities.
While these emotions can be uncomfortable, they play essential roles in our survival, well-being, and adaptation to changing circumstances, however we are not meant to dwell on them, like quick response ‘twitch’ muscle responses, these negative emotions were designed to prompt us to move into a reflective state and take action, moving us forwards.
Easier said than done, right?
“Mental Health is a journey not a destination”
Anon
Channelling our emotions the right way
What’s amazing is that we can build our mental resilience the same way we can build muscle in the gym.
There is a common myth that says our brains are set in their ways based on how they form in early childhood, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
If we look at Positive Intelligence theory and the science behind our emotions, it is easy to learn that memories and knowledge are stored not just in our brain but our whole body, but moreover the brain is capable of massive regeneration and through use of grounding, mindfulness and positive intelligence workouts our brains can create new neural networks.
If you think about your neural network like a series of road, over time the roads which are most travelled get enlarged and built from single lanes to motorways etc. The same is true in our brains the neural links we create and use will be the ones that grow.
If you think about someone you know who is always brusque and angry in how they speak, this is likely because they have created a road to this state which makes it their default, you may also notice that over time they show this front increasingly often, because the road to get there becomes more used and therefore faster.
The same is true for someone who looks for and finds opportunities in every problem, at first it may be difficult to find a positive, but with time it becomes easier and quicker for them to spot the opportunities.
Creating Positive Self Regard
It could be said that to be yourself you have to know yourself, because only then can you choose who you want to be.
The easiest way to build positive intelligence neural networks as described by Shirzad Chamine is to focus on physical sensations for at least 10 seconds. This helps us grow our self-command capabilities. Based on our learning preferences we may have a stronger connection to one sense or another, for myself I find visual reps easiest to focus on, however breathing is one which most people have used before and is a good place to start.
Let’s have a go. Make sure you have the time and space to do this exercise, which will take up to 5 minutes. Get yourself comfortable where you can be free from distractions.
Following the exercise you have just done, you will probably notice that your body now feels more relaxed and you may feel grounded or more in control. There are lots of different exercises you can do that focus on breath or one of the senses, such as touch, sight or sounds.
What you may not notice immediately, but what is happening in your brain, is that when you focus on one sensation, your brain is strengthening pathways to a relaxed state of mind.
The result of increased self command and the positive self regard that you can grow from it is that you will be able to pull away from the primal negative emotions more quickly and therefore bring yourself into an open, engaged and positive mindset when making decisions or taking action.
Whilst you are still in this relaxed state of readiness, have a go at this task.
Task Two
Take 5-10 minutes to list all the positive things about yourself. Think about how you would have been as a child, with every possibility before you.
Even better if you have a photo of yourself as a young child to focus you thought on seeing yourself as you were when you were born radiating your original true spirit. Notice all the amazing things about yourself, the little things and the big ones.
If you are struggling with this exercise, ask up to 5 individuals who know you well, family or friends, to tell you their perceived strongest attribute of yours. If there is overlap with another suggestion, ask for a unique one, such that you have 5 at the end. Compare this to your list – are there new ones? Are you therefore aware of and taking credit of the attributes you have?
See some examples on the links below
A Powerful Concept
We know we are all unique, from our fingerprints to our looks, to how we perceive the world around us, but we equally have things in common whether we know them or not and we all have our own battles, visible and hidden.
It is important most of all to remember that people around you may not understand your journey, but they do not need to because it is not for them, but one common thread holds true: Resilience turns challenges into success.
“The strongest people are those who fight unseen battles.”
Jonathan Harnisch
What if we treated mental health with the same urgency as physical health?
They are calling it a crisis in today’s society. The prevalence of Mental Health difficulties is growing. This is particularly noticeable in schools and amongst those who identify as neurodiverse.
Mental health struggles are the most common cause of death particularly amongst men under 50 and women with ADHD or Autism today although according to Samaritans statistics, men are 3 times more likely to succeed in dying by suicide than women.
However it is important to recognise that mental health is a spectrum. We all have differences in our mental health due to genetics, neurology and environmental factors and our mental fortitude, or resilience changes throughout our lives based on our experiences and how we respond to/process them. As a result, levels of positive or negative mental health fluctuate for all of us depending on internal and external stimuli.
There is a simple science to happiness, which includes the balance of wealth and knowledge. As we did in the brief breathing exercise earlier, through positive psychology we can improve our mental fitness, just like going to the gym or using other muscles. However, this takes time and requires the creation of good habits in relation to our mental health.
Now it’s time to really focus on putting your learning into practice in the next lesson.