Happy Monday and welcome to your mental health mini.
Today we have a solo episode with yours truly and we are
talking optimism. Being optimistic, you're almost
tricking your brain into believing you have more control,
you have more autonomy, you have more of an ability to change
your life. In fact, non depressed
individuals tend to overestimate the control they have on their
lives, whereas depressed individuals tend to accurately
estimate their control. This is a delusion working to
your benefit. We've all seen on TikTok, like
in my Telulu era, like what makes you believe that illusion?
Being really optimistic allows you to feel like you have more
control and feel like you have more hope.
And so many people with depression and anxiety feel like
they don't have control. They don't have control over
their moods. They don't have control over
their thoughts. They don't have control over
their behaviors. It's almost like their mind is
running wild and their emotions are running wild without their
consent. And that lack of control is
incredibly distressing and incredibly overwhelming.
And I think understanding how a mindset of optimism, even if you
like artificially introduce and you're like, I'm going to be
optimistic from now on can help counteract that and kind of
being anecdote to those really distressing feelings of being
out of control. There's also something that
happens in the mind of the pessimists and, and people that
have negative moods and people that struggle with their mental
health, which is that when bad things happen, you think it's a
shortcoming of you, You think it's your fault if you do bad on
a test, it's because you're a bad student, It's because you're
stupid, It's because you are not good enough.
The healthy way to interpret that and the optimistic way to
interpret that is that you say I wasn't accurately prepared.
I could have studied more. I wasn't prepared for those
questions on the test. I didn't understand the
material. And you can kind of understand
the difference of like I did something versus I am.
And if you're struggling with yourself esteem and you were
experiencing a lot of shame, you are probably also doing that.
You're attributing these things to yourself and your character
and you as a person rather the environment or behaviors you
have chosen to make your thoughts, your emotions and your
behaviors, they're not you. They are things you experience.
And having that separation and having that cognitive dissonance
from your emotions in your mind can be really helpful,
especially with depression. And I think that is something to
be really aware of and that enforcing yourself into those
self-serving biases and rewiring those thought patterns.
I am to. I did.
This is incredibly powerful for yourself, esteem and your mental
health. So we talked about optimism.
It has a lot of benefits. It makes us feel like we're more
in control. It helps us with the
self-serving bias. It helps us have better moods.
But how do we become optimistic? One way that you can start that
process and start reframing your thought process is beginning to
perceive the world is fundamentally good.
And I've noticed that since I've been in recovery and left
treatment and continue to maintain my mental health, I've
noticed a mindset shift to really having the belief of
what's meant to happen will happen and things work out for
the best. And kind of like lucky girl
syndrome, I really do believe that things will work out for
the best. If they don't work out the way
you want them to, it's because it wasn't meant to be.
It wasn't meant to happen and that you are moving in the right
direction, you are on your journey and things are happening
for a reason and that people are inherently kind and
compassionate and that the world is a good place.
I think having that mindset is not used to be really
pessimistic. What causes people to be
optimistic? It's when they're in situations
that they believe to be positive and that they have a natural
tendency to heal and flourish and improve.
And so if you are approaching your mental health as a
situation where you are going to heal, you are going to feel
better, you are going to improve your ability to regulate your
emotions and cope with things and have healthy relationships,
you become more optimistic. So how can we perceive our
environments as positive and as a container for us to heal
Fluorescent improve, It requires two things.
It requires believing that you are capable of changing your
life and perceiving your life as variable.
You not only have to have the skill set and have the
confidence in yourself that that skill set exists, and that
happens when you continuously build that muscle of changing
your life, but also truly and genuinely believing that the
world and the environment you're living in is improving and
believing that it has the potential to change in a
positive way. If you believe the world is
completely fixed and that no matter what you deed, nothing
will change, you're not able to move forward and you don't have
that belief that you can change your life.
And similarly, when you believe the world is improvable and has
the capacity for positive change, but you don't see
yourself as having the skills to do so, you're at an impasse.
When you have the self efficacy and the confidence in your skill
set and you perceive the world as improvable and with potential
for positive change, that is when you can make changes and
improve your life.