Are you a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of person? Answering this question can offer a lot of insight into how you view life. It’s worth noting, however, that your outlook on life can positively or negatively affect your mental health.
This article will explore how your outlook on life affects your mental health and some tips for making adjustments when necessary.
A Negative Outlook Can Lead to Increased Depression
If you have a poor outlook on life, you are more likely to experience depression. According to the American Psychiatric Association, this is because of rumination, in which you are constantly thinking of negative thoughts to the point where you’re essentially training your brain to look for, and by proxy, expect the worst outcomes that life has to offer.
They go on to say that “When a person who is in a depressed mood ruminates, they are more likely to “remember more negative things that happened to them in the past, they interpret situations in their current lives more negatively, and they are more hopeless about the future.”
A Positive Outlook Can Lead to Better Coping Mechanisms
On the other hand, having a positive outlook can lend to you developing better coping mechanisms in times of stress.
When you’re stressed, you’re not always thinking clearly. Everything may be a 10 on a scale of one to 10, putting your body in a natural fight or flight mode. If the stressors don’t let up and you tend to be a negative thinker, you could experience the symptoms mentioned above: hopelessness, frustration, and depression.
However, when you possess a positive outlook on life, you’re more likely to address the situation and recall times when you’ve overcome hardships in the past. This can make stressful situations seem easier to navigate. Basically, instead of thinking of what could go wrong, as you would with a negative outlook, you’ll instead start wondering “What if everything turns out okay?”
A Negative Outlook Can Make You Less Motivated
If you have a negative outlook that makes you wonder what’s the point of it all, then chances are, you’re not going to be very motivated, are you?
Thinking negatively makes it easy to fall into the trap of hopelessness, which can reduce the motivation you have for everything ranging from hygiene, taking care of yourself physically, spending time with friends, working, maintaining intimate relationships, and achieving goals. The less effort you put into these categories, the more depressed, anxious, and isolated you’re going to become, which will only feed the cycle of negativity you’re trapped in.
A Positive Outlook Can Lead You to Greater Satisfaction With Life
If you feel like the world has something to offer you and likewise, that you have something to offer the world, you’re going to have greater experiences because you’re unafraid to go out there and chase them down.
Simply put, positive thinking leads to increased confidence. As for how this impacts mental health, the greater joy you experience in life, the more endorphins are released, which boosts your mood. It’s a cycle - but a good, healthy cycle that can make you feel more fulfilled.
How to Change Negative Thinking
Though some people may be hardwired to just naturally lean toward the positive, everyone struggles with negative thinking now and again. Thankfully, there are some ways you can combat negative thinking to experience a more positive outlook on life, which will benefit your mental health:
Practice Mindfulness
Instead of engaging with your negative thoughts, the Cleveland Clinic recommends watching them. For example, they recommend that you “Notice your breath or your footsteps for five to 10 seconds. Notice anything that takes your attention away from them. Then, guide yourself back to the breath of your footsteps.”
The goal of an exercise like this is to stop you from engaging with the negative thought and believing it to be true and instead, recognize it for what it is: a thought, not reality. In doing so, you retrain your mind to discern when it’s time to engage in thought and when it’s time to just acknowledge it.
#James Donaldson notes:
Welcome to the “next chapter” of my life… being a voice and an advocate for #mentalhealthawarenessandsuicideprevention, especially pertaining to our younger generation of students and student-athletes.
Getting men to speak up and reach out for help and assistance is one of my passions. Us men need to not suffer in silence or drown our sorrows in alcohol, hang out at bars and strip joints, or get involved with drug use.
Having gone through a recent bout of #depression and #suicidalthoughts myself, I realize now, that I can make a huge difference in the lives of so many by sharing my story, and by sharing various resources I come across as I work in this space. #http://bit.ly/JamesMentalHealthArticle
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#CelebratingYourGiftofLife: From The Verge of Suicide to a Life of Purpose and Joy
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Be Grateful
The practice of gratitude can be incredibly useful in helping challenge negative outlooks to become positive forms of thinking. At the end of the day, regardless of circumstance, we all have something to be grateful for.
Start small. Think of things you’re grateful for in your life, whether it be your dog, a beautiful tree outside your window, a cloudless, sunny day, or your good health. The thing about practicing gratitude is that you don’t need to have this giant list; just start your morning by recognizing your gratitude for a few things that make you smile.
In times of stress, when it feels like the world is crumbling down around you, you’ll be able to still find things to be grateful for. This is a secret in the positive thinker’s toolkit.
Sometimes experiencing trauma or seeing the worst that life has to offer can lead to you developing a negative outlook on life. While that’s understandable, it’s also what’s keeping you from fully embracing life and all the good it has to offer - because it does have goodness to offer - and by practicing these tips, you can start to acknowledge that, too.
https://standingabovethecrowd.com/james-donaldson-on-mental-health-how-your-outlook-on-life-affects-your-mental-health/
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