3 Approaches to Mental Well-Being

Hello! Welcome to Own Your Power, where you get to be in your power and use your power for the good of all.?

?I welcome attention and emphasis on mental well-being in posts honoring World Mental Health day yesterday.? We now use the term mental health to describe everything from our subjective sense of well-being (peace of mind, well-being, ease, not stress) all the way to classification of conditions that we call mental illness. Here’s an article that speaks to effective interventions for mental illness. I'm going to address the topic of mental well-being in this newsletter.?

The holy grail these days is ease, flow, and mental clarity. Everything we experience in our life is through the filter of our thoughts and emotions, so these are the opportunities we have to maintain mental health.??

There are many matters that you won’t be able to control throughout the day so if you really want to take control of your mental well-being, take charge of your reactions.? There are approaches and actions that will keep you ‘good in you’ even if circumstances outside of you are frustrating or out of your control – even if your Manager doesn’t fully see your value now or if you can’t get your talented team member to fit the culture you want to create, or if it's hard to keep a boundary with your negative family member.?

You want to create a sense of home inside of yourself so that you are ok no matter what is going on outside of you.??

Being ‘in your power’ in this way is the root cause of mental well-being.? It is the ultimate form of self care.??

?Here are 3 approaches that will help you feel more in control of your inner environment in order to have greater confidence and ownership of yourself from a deeper level of self-care.?

1.Transcend your triggers: One of the top 3 things I’m always asked is “How can I not react?!” When you react, you get emotionally hijacked - taken over by an emotion which you rehash the rest of the day (or days).????

Understanding why will help you regain your center. When you 'react', it comes from a 're-activation' of a disempowering story you have about yourself, in which you associate the current experience with a similarly themed difficult experience from your past.This ‘story you tell yourself’ is like kindling, and the current experience that reminds you of it is like a match igniting it. For example, if your name did not appear on an invite to a meeting, and you often felt excluded in important experiences growing up (in your family or at school) you might explain the current work situation as “they are marginalizing me”, or “they don’t value my contributions”.? The current experience is a trigger: a painful reminder of something that’s happened too often in the past that felt out of your control. You attach the current situation to a meaning you’ve been giving to many situations in your life.??

As long as you have this place of powerless that you go to within you, other people’s actions and external circumstances can send you there without your permission or

forewarning.?

This kindling was often developed during difficult or traumatic experiences you had.? (You’re not alone in reacting from a place of trauma, over 50% of Americans have at least one major traumatic event (such as physical or emotional abuse) in their childhood, and over 20% have multiple traumatic incidents.)?

The way to mental well-being is to understand the scenario objectively and contextually, not personally.? “Maybe the person sending the invite wasn’t aware of my current scope or the work that I’ve been doing relevant to this project.? Maybe the person’s manager gave them a list of invitees and they forgot or were too busy to think of who else should be there. Maybe the person is trying to get all the credit (but it has nothing to do with your worthiness).? Don’t give them all the power to determine your mental state.??

Being able to define your worth for yourself is the essence of being in your power and gives you the ability to be in a positive state of self worth no matter how limited or insecure other people act.? By not taking it personally you can approach that person with a neutral tone to walk through why it would be helpful to be at the meeting as opposed to approaching them with a resentful tone (setting them up to be defensive) or being overly deferential (giving them all the power to determine your mental state.) Having a sense of detachment will help you feel less 'at the effect' of other people, and give you greater confidence and power in yourself.?

If you notice the words you say to yourself when you get triggered, you will see?a theme. THIS is the belief you developed about yourself, and it's the root cause of much of your mental unease. It’s the opportunity to untrap yourself from a storyline that has kept you tied to your past..When you value yourself and find a deep sense of self-trust , no one or no thing outside of you will be able to put you into a state of feeling bad about yourself or your future. That’s freedom, and gives you mental clarity and well-being.???

2.Connect with courage and compassion: As human beings we are wired to be social.? When we lack strong social connections, we feel isolated. Connecting with a trusted family member or close friend at work can make all the difference as a source of happiness. Being a role model or mentor for others can give you a sense of purpose that preserves mental well-being.

For many, the emotional part of addictions start because of a lack of safe connection with oneself and others.

People can help us heal beyond what we can do ourselves. Seek out people who make you feel psychologically safe. The feeling of shame especially pulls us away from connecting with others, because it makes us believe we are unworthy of being loved. As Brené Brown teaches, shame cannot survive being spoken and being empathized with. Even a single interaction sharing our sense of shame with someone who is trusted can reverse our shame spiral.

Find people who are trusted and who are able to find calm within themselves. They can be a safe harbor for you, helping shelter you from your emotional storm. They are less likely to judge you because they don’t judge themselves.?

Be mindful of who you surround yourself with – some people are stuck in an outdated perception of you (e.g., family members or long time friends, or people from early in your work career who don’t see you for who you are now) which no longer matches? how you see yourself.? You want to spend time with people who reflect who you are now and who you want to be in the future.? Seek out people who inspire you, bring out more of your talents, and laughter, and boldness.? If you need permission to reduce your time with people who make you feel bad about yourself, here it is.!??

3.Embrace your emotions: You are not at the mercy of your emotions (even though it feels like you are). Mastering your emotions is not taught in school (and often not learned from our parents who didn’t know how either), yet this one skillset will contribute more than any other to your mental well-being. Think of emotion as energy in motion, so what you can do is allow? the energy to keep moving through you and channel it constructively.??

As humans, we have a range of emotional arousal that we can bear, known as a ‘window of tolerance’. But when your emotion gets to a level outside of what we can tolerate, we will feel an urge and/or automatically react with one of the range of 'fight, flight, or freeze' responses to not have to feel these emotions. Fight includes using an aggressive tone or confronting others; ? flight includes avoidance, drinking/using substances/numbing out in front of a screen; freeze includes shutting down or disengaging.? If you had? difficult or traumatic experiences earlier in life, these adaptive, built-in coping strategies will be called upon to protect oneself from the overwhelm of strong emotions such as fear, anger, or embarrassment at the time the situation happened.? When overused can make us feel out of control or divert us from learning how to deal with those emotions in your current life.?

The relationship with yourself is the longest one you’ll ever have. An essential skill for maintaining well-being in your life is ‘doing the work’ of learning to tolerate your emotions, - become unafraid of your physical sensations even when they are momentarily intense, and understand the message they are there to guide you with.? Emotions give you insights into your values – for example, anger signals your values have been violated.??

You can stay good in you by learning the skills of managing your emotions -?to ‘surf the wave’ of them, to move them through your body, or even imagine that there are doors in your mind, in your hands, and in your feet that can open up and let the emotion go.??

I had a client,?an EVP of a company who had direct reports that didn’t carry out their quarterly plans. She would sit at her desk from early in the morning until late in the evening stewing in frustration whenever she interacted with them. She reported feeling exhausted - and it was because she was holding in her anger at them (it takes a lot of energy to NOT feel emotions you have). ? Once she started a daily practice of dance breaks to move the emotion through her she started to feel alive again. This lift in mood helped her carry out strategies to get clarity on how to remove her underperforming team members and get the best out of those who would stay on her team.?

Also,?anger is an adaptive response that helps us stay energized when there is an emotion underneath it that feels more tender - we distance ourselves from it in order to perform at work.? Underneath her anger was a sense of not being seen or valued or sometimes feeling unsafe as a Black woman in a majority environment of white colleagues.?

Part of being in your power is to channel your emotions constructively.?You can set boundaries, you can strategically display emotion to move others to action, you can use the power of your position to create change.??

Maintaining your mental and emotional well-being is fueled by being in your power – knowing how to come back to ‘good in you’ no matter what’s going on around you.?Being in your power is the ultimate form of self care.?

Know yourself by attending with compassion and non-judgemental curiosity the ongoing flow of thoughts and feelings and body sensations within. Being able to make sense of it in the context of an overall forward looking outlook for your life. We can be more effective when we are pulled toward a vision of the future self we want to be, rather than try to overcome a story that you’ve defined yourself as.????

You have more power than you think to maintain your mental well-being and ‘good in you’.?

Sharon Melnick, PhD is the author of the about to be released book In Your Power:React Less, Regain Control, Raise Others, available now for pre-order and arriving on shelves in? November 2022. The book is a guide to staying mentally healthy and overcoming situations in which you don’t feel seen or heard.? It contains an in-depth chapter with specific strategies on how to recover quickly from negative emotions so you don't hold onto them throughout the day as well as how to neutralize other people's negativity so it doesn’t affect you).?

Learn more and pick up a copy for yourself at www.inyourpowerbook.com

?Make sure you never miss an issue by clicking the "Subscribe" button in the upper right corner of the page. For more articles, tips, and insights, connect with me here!?