EMOTIONAL WELLNESS
Mental wellbeing describes your mental state - how you are feeling and how well you can cope with day-to-day life.
Our mental wellbeing is dynamic. It can change from moment to moment, day to day, month to month or year to year.
If you have good mental wellbeing you are able to:
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adapt and manage in times of change and uncertainty
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build and maintain good relationships with others
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cope with the stresses of daily life
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feel and express a range of emotions
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feel engaged with the world around you
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feel relatively confident in yourself and have positive self-esteem
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live and work productively
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If you have low mental wellbeing you may feel:
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guilt for spending time or money on yourself
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like no one likes you
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like you hate or dislike yourself
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low in confidence
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unable to make decisions or assert yourself
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unable to recognise your strengths
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undeserving of happiness
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worthless or not good enough
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you blame yourself for things that aren't your fault.
“You can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured.” -Guy Winch
“Being strong is killing us”
- Kelly Pierre-Louis
I watched a TedX talk by Guy Winch and this really stood out for me:
"Oh you're feeling depressed, just shake it off; it's all in your head." Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg. "Oh just walk it off; it's all in your leg."
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Loneliness
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"Loneliness can create a deep pyschological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It makes us really afraid to reach out because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand?" - Guy Winch
Failure
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"Failure also distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. Our adult mind can trick us all the time. In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and set backs. Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? You need to be because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something, and you believe it, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon or you won't even try at all. And then you'll be even more convinced that you can't succeed. Once we become convinced of something it is very difficult to change our mind." - Guy Winch
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"We are all going to fail now and then. The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimise the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place" - Daniel Levitin, Neuroscientist