Positive aspects of mental health and cultivating them to stay well.
Our last blog we looked at the things we could do to support our immune system to put us in the best position should we come across Coronavirus.
We are all going through a major event in life, in history, and we are all experiencing it in different ways….
Now, with the radical changes we have had to make to our lives, it makes sense to look at its impact on our mental health and take care of that..
From a Traditional Chinese Medicine model this is especially important. The view that each aspect of our health – our mind (Shen) Physiological functioning (Qi) and Genetics (Jing) constant interact and engender the health and existence of the other, means we have to look after each with equal measure.
We will look at what Chinese medicine has to offer in understanding and helping our mental health.
I thought this would be interesting to look through Carol Ryffs model of positive dimensions of mental health. She is a psychologist who looks at the impact of our mental health on physical health and longevity.
She drew together all the major psychological theories of mental health and mapped out the dimensions of the positive aspects of our psychological experience.
Carol Ryffs model of positive dimensions of mental health.
Positive dimensions of mental health.
This was a really insightful, meaningful way at looking at our mental health. It didn’t just take in the negative aspects of mental health that have been studied from the medical model, and It didn’t purely focus on the subjective feelings of happiness, pleasure or discomfort; called ‘Hedonic’ (either positive or negative affect).
It took major note of what is called ‘Eudaimonic’ wellbeing. That Is the purposeful aspects of wellbeing. She developed six categories or dimensions of psychological wellbeing.
AUTONOMY
ENVIRONMENTAL MASTERY
POSITIVE RELATIONS WITH OTHERS
PURPOSE IN LIFE
SELF ACCEPTANCE
PERSONAL GROWTH
This is quite an interesting approach because as humans we experience a huge range of feelings and thoughts, not just negative but a huge range of positive experiences of ourselves, and a range in between.
I thought it might be useful to look at each of these dimensions of positive mental health and see if there is anything we can learn from them and things we can practically apply in our behaviour and thinking and feeling to help us in this situation.
Environmental mastery / Capacity for control
Although its definitely healthy to let it all go and dance around the room joyously, there’s probably a time and place for that, not always a party… but doing whilst eating your muesli in the morning might get a little messy.
At the moment it might seem we have very little control over our lives.
There’s a virus we cannot see, people are the carriers of that virus…. so people become a source of fear. The world out there is a pretty troubling one at the moment on one level. So it seems we have very little mastery of our environment and our worlds, even if we previously thought we did.
The skills we learned to use in a world out there where we worked, where we played and had social and familial time that made us connected, something as humans has been a prime aspects of our being and our success, may currently feel redundant in some or all aspects of our life. So all of a sudden those skills and routines are seemingly gone.
Is this the Perfect place and time to practice and experiment with new ways of doing things?
But actually, maybe the limited world we now live in, the smaller world may actually be the perfect place for us to practice new ways of doing things, and positive things.
So if we turn our attention away from all the fearful events currently in the world and focus on where we are, perhaps there is opportunity for greater health, here and now… and in building healthier ways of doing things that will continue after this situation passes.
Locus of control
The first skill that might help us is to work on our skill of where we put our attention, this in psychological research is called our ‘locus of control’.
A simple form of practicing and training our locus of control is simple meditation. Just siting quietly, taking a deep breath, bringing your attention to focusing on what you are hearing in the room you are sitting in, taking a deep breath in and out and bringing your focus on one object in the room. This simple process practiced for thousands of years is a fantastic example of working with our locus of control. Try it. It immediately takes us away from the fears out there where I minds maybe thinking about and simply brings our awareness into the here and now and immediacy of where we really are…and our immediate environment isn’t so frightening or out of control.
Thich Nhat Hanh - Mindfulness of Breathing
If our world is the world we inhabit, in this place here and now, then surely that is an easier environment to master. Rather than the enormous everything.
Simple lessons to prove to ourselves who is in control of how we respond to life’s tricky moments
We can only control the things we can control
So now we’ve established we can’t control what Donald Trump does with his disinfectant, we can focus on the bits of our lives we can control.
There is a fantastic story about an American boxer called Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter. He was wrongly convicted of murder and served 20 years of imprisonment, his liberty taken away from him in an instant. This would seem to be the ultimate in loss of control of your environment. But he made sure in a situation of loss of control he made it his prime objective to reclaim every ounce of control he could in his world. He controlled his sleeping pattern by sleeping in the day and being awake at night, he changed everything he could about his prison clothing, he taught himself law. He took control, even in a situation it seemed everything had been taken away from him.
So make a list of the things you need and want to do in your immediate environment and start to work through that list of yours, such a simple thing is empowering. You are acting on your world. Simple lessons to prove to ourselves who is in control of how we respond to life’s tricky moments.
Our internal Environment
As the world shows we cannot control major events out there, events in life will happen no matter how well we prepare.
But our environment isn’t primarily ‘out there’. A huge part of our environment is ‘in here’ our internal land scape, Our internal environment is perhaps the largest unexplored part of our existence.
And no matter if we can’t control what happens out there the only thing we truly can control is how we respond to what is happening in the world. and our thoughts our feelings our ideas our hopes. In fact our internal environment interprets and interacts with our outside world constantly.
Our brain processes the world around us all the time, so even our external world, although solid and real, is modified by our perceptions of it constantly, and our external actions that spring from those thoughts.
The control we have access to, is how we respond to what is happening.
We have some control of this, and our internal state can be managed and changed, and we can use simple breathing and relaxation techniques to immediately change how we feel inside.
Here is something to practice by Jon kabat zinn
Practice Journaling.
The process of writing a journal or diary helps us to regularly listen to what’s going on inside. Writing down what we are feeling and thinking is a really important and healthy way of connecting and paying attention to us.
Journaling is a really good way to make regular use of this.
To help us make sense of how we are feeling and also provide some structure to what we are thinking about, writing down our thoughts can be really helpful.
Scientific evidence supports this. The act of writing accesses parts of left brain which is analytical and rational. While the left brain is preoccupied your brain is free to create, intuit and feel. Writing removes mental blocks and allows us to use all of our brain to understand ourselves, and the world around us
Journaling is a really good way to make regular use of this.
Psychologist James Pennebaker, says
‘Writhing about stressful events helps us come to terms with them, acting as a stress management tool, thus reducing the impact of these stressors on our health.’
That sounds a sensible thing to do in this current unusual time.
The same could be said of writing about our positive experiences and working out how we got to them and the way the events were so positive to us. It’s an active process with our own thoughts.
https://www.self.com/story/how-to-start-a-journaling-practice
Practical ways to allow us to control our internal and external environment.
Structure, rhythm and routine
May Sarton wrote ‘a limbo that needs to be patterned from within’, however terrible the storms may be , if ones life has sufficient stable and fruitful structure, one is helped to with stand their devastating aftereffects’….
As the structure of a house, its four walls, its roof, allow it to remain permanent in the eyes of difficult times, maybe structure and routine can help us in our new situations. I’m sure that’s already happening to our lives. New patterns are forming.
Routine in its predictableness can help manage uncertainty.
Reduces stress. We don’t need something else to remember on our list if it happens automatically. So it shortens our list. Routine automates our activities and allows us to get on with other things, gives us the structure to get on with things. We just do them. Just remember to add things slowly to your routine our else this defeats the purpose.
So it stops procrastination, we get on with things.
Cultivate positive habits and prioritise self care. Allows discipline to do the things we need to do, to look after ourselves, from brushing our teeth, to paying our bills, to exercising and getting those endorphins going.
Good Habits - The Stoics of Rome formed this as a pillar of importance. Marcus Aurelius used good habits to enable him to act now and build positive daily actions into his life, every morning even in the midst of camp at the battle field, he would wake up and pen his journal that became Meditations , a book read by millions still today
Churchill every day put aside time to read, to write, paint, and do some dry stone walling in his back garden!
What does Chinese medicine say to help us with this? Routine is inevitable, if you observe the way nature acts. The rhythm of the natural world, acts with the movement of a clock. Morning follows night, cold, follows heat, spring follows Summer….there is a constant flowing of routine in nature. Obviously its not utterly constant and predictable, as the difficulty in predicting the weather shows, but the outline of routine is there simply to be seen. Each phase enables the next. So routine is natural, and our bodies respond and have evolved in that environmental ebb and flow…and ironically those changes aren’t disturbed in the slightest by what is happening in the human societal world at the moment. The rhythm of the natural world just keeps rolling.
So from a Daoist perspective forming habits and routines are inevitable, as sleeping and waking show. Physiologically and behaviourally they are inevitable….and healthy.
Research on benefits of good habits / routines.
Routine for Children
A Study in the journal of abnormal child psychology (‘Family routines moderates the relation between child impulsivity and oppositional defiant disorder symptoms’ Lanza & Drabick, 2010) found family routines help moderate impulsiveness and oppositional symptoms and traits in children. Routines protect and help children feel safer, because they know what to expect.
Creating a great night-time routine can create better sleep patterns, especially in children. Therefore, routines of set dinner times, brushing teeth, wind down time, and set bedtimes are of crucial importance to a child’s sleep pattern. Family routines help restrain impulsiveness and antagonistic symptoms in children. Why? Routine helps to make children feel safe. If they have unpredictability, they don’t know what to expect, and it can create anxiety of the unknown. Routine eliminates the unpredictable.
A study in the Lancet Psychiatry (Lyall & Wise, 2018 Association of disrupted circadian rhythmicity with mood disorders, subjective wellbeing and cognitive function) found people who favour an active daytime routine over a night time routine have a healthier sleeping cycle and consequently have better mental health and emotional regulation. Those with active night-time patterns correlated more with mental health difficulties.
A study ‘A conceptual review of family resilience factors’ by Black & Lobo (Fam Nurs. 2008 Feb;14(1):33-55), extremely pertinent to these times, on family resilience and coping in difficult stressful times, highlights a number of factors that strengthen resilience, and a major one of those is routine.
Take note of our routines
Perhaps write down what routines have developed, make a note of the positive ones and the not so helpful ones, then write two new positive ‘fruitful’ things to add into our routine. Then put them into the spaces where not so helpful ones are. Slowly we build positive structures and routines into our day. I have to say with my children ‘P.E with Joe Wicks has become a new corner stone of the day….without it life just doesn’t quite feel the same. He repeats over and over again why he and we exercise, why we put in the effort even when we might not want to. Its to generate energy, and a positive feeling inside us that comes from activity, and he’s right, and so say all the research studies on the benefits of activity not only physically but mentally too.
The key things to get in our routine
The key things to helping our health, both physical and mental, are looking after the core self care actions. Research just keeps on stating that the most simple cornerstones of life are the most important for building immunity, for building energy and vitality, for reducing chronic illness that restricts our lives, and for adding on healthy lifespan to actively enjoy, and to maintain positive mental health and functioning.
SLEEP ROUTINE
HEALTHY DIET
EXERCISE
‘SPIRIT’
How we work on our social support and sense of purpose, our inner life.
A really nicely balanced way of approaching our day presenterd by Shari Nacson, an American social worker, advising on how to incorporate things into a home school day…but it applies equally to us all. It does look remarkably like Winston Churchill’s day!
Structure:
Meals and sleep routines at the same time(ish) each day.
Appointments with others are respected
DAILY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Do something helpful
Do something creative (includes an. musk, cooking, building. creating.. gardening)
Take care of your body (inclodes hygiene and physical activity}
Take care of your heart & mind (includes talking about feelings, mindfulness activities
O Do something productive (on school days,, this would be learning)
So in this moment lets invest a little time on ourselves by building a strong healthy routine, that just continues when ‘normal’ life resumes. We don’t have to worry about the good stuff because were doing it….its part of our daily routine and habit.
With a little patience and time maybe our sense of environmental mastery will grow too? Lets see.