Mental Health – As Positive Psychology

Psychology is not entirely about studying what can go wrong for people, their pathologies, weaknesses and damage but is also about strengths and virtues at subjective, individual and group levels. Treatments are viewed as fixing the broken but can be about encouraging and nurturing what is best.

Mental health as a Utopian ideal goes back to Aristotle, so is not a new concept. In the last 60 years the view is that Mental Health requires the dual goal of using medication and clinical psychology to remove pathology and educational interventions to enhance above average functioning.

Mental Health and Positive Personality revolves around the perspective we are self organizing, self directed, and adaptive beings. Thus there is a focus on:

• Human Virtues and Character Strengths. These can act as buffers against mental illness. The virtues include Wisdom, Courage, Humanity, Justice, Temperance and Transcendence.
• Subjective Well-being. This refers to what we think and feel about our lives and has cognitive and affective components. It is a scientific term for what most of us call happiness.
• Optimism. Optimism mediates our experience of external events and our interpretation of them. It involves cognitive, emotional, and motivational components.The positive attributional style serves as a treatment for depression and can lead to positive mental states.
• Happiness. Factors such as faith, economic growth and income, and close personal relationships need to be considered.
• Self determination. We all have 3 basic psychological needs – competence, belonging, and autonomy. The satisfaction of these needs gives rise to optimal well being and development.
• Mature defences. Mature functioning requires creative and proactive problem solving and solution application which gives rise to successful and joyful lives.
• Exceptional Performance and Excellence. We all need examples and advice on how to reach richer and more fulfilling lives. Play, creativity and and peak experiences are important in this area. It was Abraham Maslows concept of Self Actualisation that drew attention to  talents, capacities, and potentialities.
• Wisdom. Wisdom involves the cognitive and motivational rules we use to organise knowledge in the pursuit of both individual and collective excellence. It is the best subjective beliefs and laws of life that we have accumulated over the generations. Wisdom is defined as an expert knowledge system that dealing with the practical issues of existence.
• Positive Health
• Insight
• Flow
• Hope
• Interpersonal Skills

It is the goal of positive psychology to help people to enhance their functioning to above average.

Make use of our services:

Mental Health – As Above Normal

Mental Health as Above Normal

Freud dismissed mental health as “an ideal fiction” and the study of normal adaptive behaviour did not begin to be researched until after WWII.
Johoda 1958 suggested that a mentally healthy person was:

• In touch with their own identity and feelings.
• Future orientated and invested in life.
• Be psychologically resistant to stress.
• Be autonomous, perceive reality without distortion, be empathic.
• Able to work, love and play, be efficient in problem solving.

Astronauts have been studied as exemplars of the above normal concept of mental health.

They have been found to:

• Have exemplary work records
• Be competent at loving
• Come from intact happy small town families
• Be married with children
• Be venturesome but not accident prone
• Be able to tolerate close interdependent relationships
• Be able to tolerate extreme isolation
• Be trusting of others
• Be uncomplaining under discomfort
• To strongly experience both positive and negative emotions
• Not to be introspective and seldom dwelled on inner emotions but could describe them if asked
• Be aware of the feelings of others
• Avoid interpersonal difficulties

This description is the same as happy people and has been discussed elsewhere.

Make use of our services:

Normality and Mental Health

Normality and Mental Health

Often when people are talking about being normal they are referring to their Mental Health.
There are a number of different models of mental health:

• As Above Normal
• As Positive Psychology
• As Subjective Well-Being
• As Maturity
• As Social-Emotional Intelligence
• As Resilience

Read More On These Mental Health As Topics:
As Above Normal		As Positive Psychology		As Subjective Well being
As Maturity		As Socio-Emotional Intelligence		As Resilience

Make use of our services:

Normatology

Normatology is the study of normal development and behaviour. It provides the answer to the age old question – what is normal?

There are 5 main Models

The Absence of Pathology Model

The Utopian Model

The Statistical Model

The Systems Model

The Pragmatic Model

The Absence of Pathology Model

The absence of symptoms, signs and lab abnormalities connate normality.
A healthy person is reasonably free of undue pain, discomfort, disability, distress, disadvantage, and other features of disorder.

The Utopian Model

Health is defined as an ideal functioning that is rarely obtained and then only by a few.
Normal or average is therefore pathological in that it is far short of the ideal.
In this respect the analytic model of therapy emphasizes pathology while the humanistic model emphasizes health. Psychoanalysis lacks the language and method to describe healthy functioning.

The Statistical Model

Normal equals the average Level of functioning. Concerns in this model are that the average may be relative to a population that may be dysfunctional.

The Systems Model

Normality is the interplay of systems that interact, operate and fluctuate over time in an adaptive fashion. There are multiple processes nvolved and multiple levels of adaptation that are studied longitudinally.

The Pragmatic Model

Mental disorders are conditions that clinicians treat. Conditions for which people do not seek treatment are not considered pathological and therefore are normal. This is a circular argument and is relative to the degree of complaints and the economic situation of local people and interests of clinicians.

Normality and Mental Health

Often when people are talking about being normal they are referring to their Mental Health.
There are a number of different models of mental health:

• As Above Normal
• As Positive Psychology
• As Maturity
• As Social-Emotional Intelligence
• As Subjective Well-Being
• As Resilience

Rule of Five

Rule of Five

Do five things everyday that will move you toward your goal completion until you reach the goal.


Achieving external Goals may be different from making internal change and there may be a reinforcement schedule that determines the effectiveness of internal change strategies as for some happiness techniques.

ABCs

ABCs
In my work many people experience an event (A – Activating event) and are aware of the outcome
(C – consequences) but give little thought to their own responses (B – beliefs) that may occur before the outcome.

You can blame the event for the lack of outcome or you can change your response to the event until you achieve your desired outcome.

Changing you response means changing your thinking, your communication, the pictures in your head or your behaviours. This can take time as you have to overcome years of conditioned behaviours (Habits).

Read More On This Topic:
ABC Theory		ABC Model		ABCDE Model		Self Defeating Beliefs

Give Up All your Excuses

Give Up All your Excuses

Give up all the victim stories.
Give up all the reasons why you cant.
Give up all the reasons why you haven’t.
Give up blaming all outside circumstances.

You have the power to make it different, but you have chosen not to exercise that power. Why is this? It is not even important. It doesn’t matter. There is only now and from this point you make the choice to act as if you are 100% responsible.

Being responsible means asking yourself questions as to how you made it so.

How did I create that?
What was I thinking then? Now?
What beliefs was I holding?
What other beliefs may be more helpful?
What did I do to get that result?
How did I get the other person to actthat way?
What do I need to do next time to get the result I want?

ABCs
In my work many people experience an event (A – Activating event) and are aware of the outcome
(C – consequences) but give little thought to their own responses (B – beliefs) that may occur before the outcome.

You can blame the event for the lack of outcome or you can change your response to the event until you achieve your desired outcome.

Changing you response means changing your thinking, your communication, the pictures in your head or your behaviours. This can take time as you have to over come years of conditioned behaviours (Habits).

Till next time, have a great day.
Nevin

Friends and Partners

Having Friends and Partners

Having breadth and depth in personal relationships is vital to our mental health and overall happiness.

Supportive co workers, friendly neighbours, confidants and very close friends protect us from sadness, loneliness low self esteem.

Social Capital is all the support, trust and good will we accumulate by way of our relationships and community involvement. It is important to have a strong and varied social network.

Our ability to internalise others is a key skill common to a healthy accomplished and satisfying life. The skill involves decorating your space with pictures of loved and loving people, having active sociable activities in your diary, especially ones that don’t involve alcohol.

Whether we are outgoing or not we need to join groups where we are welcome and valued.

“No Amount of wildlife can makeup for human company”   David Attborough.

Loneliness

Loneliness is natures emotional reminder that we must progress in our relationships in and with our world.

Loneliness represents the absence of intimacy that involves knowing understanding and caring for not only other people but for our homes, work and life skills.

Loneliness could be regarded as signal that we are too detached.

It is better to regard emotions as energy levels that we can chose to channel into activities that help our well being rather than being destructive.

Add sedonna Fuel gage

Managing Loneliness

Engage in a fully involving task.

Walking in the country side for example deepens our relationship with the world.

Walking in the countryside with friends deepens our relationship with them and the world.

Remember that a pleasure such as food or a glass of wine is a fleeting effect, active interest in mental or physical capabilities such as working at something or a good book is satisfying  and can leave a happiness trace that can last for days. The most happiness invoking actions is the love we have for another person or place or vocation and fills our life with meaning. Loneliness can be used to inspire such loves.

The Love of our Friends

Friendship is important for our physical and psychological health, but we often take this for granted and do not pay sufficient attention to it.

Human relationships change, they grow or shrink, as do our emotional, intellectual and personal persuits. Our friends persuits also change and therefore so does our relationships with them.

Close friends view our victories and our failures as their own and will encourage us or pull us into line if we are not doing our best.

“In the company of a true friend we dare to think out loud without the need to edit ourselves”  author unknown.

A good friend will risk our irritability and will make up afterwards.

A good friend will not let you moan on about things, they want to know what you a re going to do about it. They will help us see different perspectives.  (perspective Exercise)

Make you closest friends a priority. Gratitude exercise

Speed Reading

Speed Reading

Speed Reading is an essential skill when you have to master large volumes of information quickly.

By knowing what information you want from a document before you start reading is an important part of the skill. If you only want an outline of the issue that the document discusses, then skim the document quickly extracting only the essential facts. If you need to understand the real detail of the document, then you need to read it slowly enough to fully understand it.

The greatest time savings are gained by learning to skim excessively detailed documents.

Technical Issues

Apart from ignoring irrelevant detail there are other technical improvements you can make to the way you read. This will increase your reading speed.

As you read notice that you are fixing your eyes on one block of words, then moving your eyes to the next block of words, and so on. You  are reading blocks of words at a time, not individual words one-by-one. You will also notice that you do not always go from one block to the next: sometimes you may move back a block if you are unsure about something.

Reading faster involves reading many words in a block and only looking at each block for an instant, then moving on.  This reduces the amount of work your eyes have to do and increases the amount information you can examine in a given amount of time.

Poor readers spend a lot of time on small blocks of words and skip back often. This causes the loss of the flow and structure of the text and limits the overall understanding of the subject. This irregular eye movement makes reading tiring and therefore harder to concentrate and understand the information.

Increasing the number of words read in each block

Skimming is a process of speed reading that involves visually searching the sentences of a page for clues to meaning. Skimming is usually seen more in adults than in children. It is conducted at a higher rate (700 words per minute and above) than normal reading for comprehension (around 200-230 wpm), and therefore results in lower comprehension rates, especially with information-rich reading material.

Another form of skimming involves skipping over text that is less interesting or relevant. This form of reading is not new but is more prevalent due to the ease with which alternative information can be accessed online.

Meta guiding is the visual guiding of the eye using a finger or pointer so the eye to move faster along the length of a passage of text. It can also involve the drawing of invisible shapes on a page of text to broaden the visual span for speed reading. For example, an audience of customers at a speed reading seminar will be instructed to use a finger or pen to make these shapes on a page and told that this will speed up their visual cortex, increase their visual span to take in the whole line. The reduction in subvocalization is supposed to speed up reading. This whole process encourages the eye to skim over the text but reduces comprehension and memory, and leads to missing important details of the text.

Meta Guiding takes a conscious effort. Try to expand the number of words that you read at a time. Practice will help you to read faster. You may find that you can increase the number of words you read by holding the text a little further from your eyes. The more words you read in a block, the faster you can read!

Reduce the length of time spent reading each block.

The minimum amount of time needed to read a block is about 0.25sec. Push yourself to reduce the time you take. You will notice that you get better at picking up information quickly. This is a matter of practice and confidence.

Reduce the number of times you skip back to a previous sentence.
To do this run a pointer along the line as you read. Your finger or a pen will do. Your eyes follow the tip of the pointer making the flow of reading smoother. The speed of this method depends on the speed you move the pointer but just by doing it you can nearly double your reading speed without doing anything else.

Skimming should not be used when complete comprehension of the text is the objective. Skimming is mainly used when researching and getting an overall idea of the text. Where time is limited, skimming or skipping over text can aid comprehension. The main points of a text can be better understood after skimming than after normal reading but there is no difference  in understanding less important information in the text.

Speed reading courses which teach techniques that largely constitute skimming of written text, also result in a lower comprehension rate (below 50% comprehension on standardized comprehension tests).

You Are Responsible

“Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You and You alone are responsible for the quality of your life.

Being successful at anything in life means you have to take 100% responsibility for all your experiences. Everything!

Not an easy task since we have spent most of our lives learning to blame something or someone else.

The questions to ask are:

Am I 100% responsible for my life?
Have I ever blamed anyone for the circumstances in my life?
Have I ever complained about anything?

Taking 100% responsibility means understanding that you are the cause of all your experiences.

This means giving up all blaming and complaining. All results both positive and negative in your life are your responsibility.

“Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.”
Wayne Dyer