19 core dimensions of positive mental health

The Top Six Dimensions (Greater than 90% Agreement):

Meaning and purpose: Having clear goals, a sense of direction, and a larger aim in life and/or the feeling that what we do is worthwhile, rewarding, and valuable.

Life satisfaction: The degree to which a person positively evaluates the overall quality of their life as a whole (i.e., how much the person likes the life they lead).

Self-acceptance: Experiencing different aspects of oneself (e.g., one’s body, personality, thoughts, and feelings) in a positive, tolerant, receptive, or non-judgmental way; experiencing positive self-worth.

Connection: Involving a feeling of belonging, mutual caring, love, and closeness to friends, family, and loved ones.

Autonomy: The perception that we have ownership over our behavior and choices, and the ability to express oneself.

Happiness: States that are characterized by moderate-arousal pleasant feelings, such as feeling happy, cheerful, and pleased.

The Remaining 13 Dimensions:

Acceptance: The ability to self-reflect, identify what is within a person’s control, and accept what is outside one’s control.

Achievement: Having done something successfully, using one’s own efforts and skills.

Activities and functioning: Overall satisfaction with our activities and leisure, and our ability to undertake these tasks.

Belonging: The feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences.

Calmness: States characterized by low-arousal pleasant feelings, like serenity and peacefulness.

Competence: Feeling and perceiving oneself as effective and able to overcome challenges and stressors, and achieve desired outcomes.

Development: Experiencing growth and improvement.

Engagement: Having an absorbing experience in which the individual is completely focused on the task at hand or experiencing a state of mindful awareness.

Fun: Experiencing light-hearted pleasure, enjoyment, or amusement; entertainment.

Optimism: Having a positive outlook on life, and positive expectations about the future.

Self-congruence: The perception that our actions and behaviors are compatible with our interests, values, and beliefs.

Sense of safety: The feeling of relative security in one’s daily life.

Vitality: States characterized by high-arousal pleasant feelings, such as feeling energetic and lively.

source

Jung memes

 

ADD and ADHD

"...symptoms of ADHD fluctuated greatly over the years. What surprised them even more were the environmental factors that seemed to play a role in those fluctuations."

Upworthy: Surprising 16-year-long ADHD study reveals opposite of what researchers expected

“We hypothesized that when life demands and responsibilities increased, this might exacerbate people’s ADHD, making it more severe. In fact, it was the opposite. The higher the demands and responsibilities one was experiencing, the milder their ADHD.”

Quotes, graphics, images, memes

 

Comedian who jokes about anxiety on YouTube.

Narcissism

Understanding the narcissism epidemic is important because its long-term consequences are destructive to society. American culture's focus on self-admiration has caused a flight from reality to the land of grandiose fantasy. We have phony rich people (with interest-only mortgages and piles of debt), phony beauty (with plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures), phony athletes (with performance-enhancing drugs), phony celebrities (via reality TV and YouTube), phony genius students (with grade inflation), a phony national economy (with $ll trillion of government debt), phony feelings of being special among children (with parenting and education focused on self-esteem), and phony friends (with the social networking explosion). All this fantasy might feel good, but unfortunately, reality always wins. The mortgage meltdown and the resulting financial crisis are just one demonstration of how inflated desires eventually crash to earth.

Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic 

 

Helpful links, quotes and graphics

How to boost 4 happy chemicals

Novel quote

“When I was young, I resisted thinking about my childhood, or my character, for that matter. Perhaps that's not surprising. My therapist once told me that all traumatized children, and the adults they become, tend to focus exclusively on the outside world. A kind of hypervigilance, I suppose. We look outward, not inward-scanning the world for danger signs—is it safe or not? We grow up so terrified of incurring anger, for instance, or contempt, that now, as adults, if we glimpse a stifled yawn while talking to someone, a look of boredom or irritation in their eyes, we feel a horrible, frightening disintegration inside-like a frayed fabric being ripped apart—and swiftly redouble our efforts to entertain and please.“



P. 60 The Fury by Alex Michaelides. There is more, that is interesting, but that is enough of a quote.

Self compassion

 

Kristin Neff (sorry I covered 3 letters) says self esteem obsession can have some downsides, which compassion sidestep. I haven’t read a self help book in a while. This came out in 2011. Friend mentioned it, so I’m trying it. Resonates with me so far.

"We can't be moved by our own pain if we don't even acknowledge that it exists in the first place."

She feels self compassion isn't self pity or self indulgent. It's about activating and not passivity.

You can test your self compassion.

Here are my average results:

Mattering

I think a lot of psychological research is proving the obvious but here's another one from the New York Times: Want to Believe in Yourself? ‘Mattering’ Is Key.

And if you need a gift copy to read, you matter, blog reader, I'll send you one. Post your email address in the comments, and I'll send it and delete your comment so nobody knows your email address.

Acting in your own best interest

My daughter doesn't like to be told what to do, and there are internal forces that amplify that idea in her head. An independent streak is good, and American. But listening to good suggestions even though your psychology tells you not to, can be overridden by the idea of acting in your own best interest.

I'm like that too, the idea has to make sense to me before I will do it, but sometimes I don't consider ideas because I didn't think of it. It's a flaw I'm trying to push past. Pushing past flaws that I own is an important growth mode. Owning the change in the fight for maturity before senility. 

Sometimes we don't like the choice so we make the wrong choice based on psychological reactivity. 

Sometimes the environment pushes us to make the wrong choice.

Act in your own best interest is a good mantra, a good coping statement, a good way of being that attempts to filter out distracting information. In the age of information filtering out irrelevant data is essential. 

 

Being too much

I always think of Zelig. He copies everyone, and needs therapy to find his true authentic self. He was told he was too reserved, and needed to express himself. So he's had therapy and the psychologist asks him how the day is. He expresses himself and he disagrees with the psychologist, and they get into a fight. The trick in life is how much to be out, and express in your public self. There's a meme of Kafka, he says he wore his true face to a costume party. 

I'm reading a wonderful profile of Lisa Yuskavage in the New Yorker and this is how it opens: 

"Thirty years ago, when Lisa Yuskavage and Matvey Levenstein were young painters trying to establish themselves in the East Village, they got a message on their answering machine. An acquaintance who had invited the couple to a party wanted to let them know that people felt Yuskavage was “too much,” and that, on second thought, they’d rather she didn’t come."

The truth is people don't have to like the unpleasant parts of you. People like you in spite of them. Often times asshole stars think the world will love everything about then, a tragic mistake.

You need to be positive, sweet and compassionate, even if that's a contortion, because other people have enough of the other inside. True genius is positive, not negative.

It's OK to go through things, to have a bad day a bad week, month and year, even decades. Everything is OK but you can't get away from the fact that being difficult around others pushes you away, and you want to draw people closer so they can accept all of you, the good and the bad. Or maybe you want to push people away. 

Beautiful women and men don't want all the attention they get, just the best selection of it. Famous people only want what they want, not all that other nonsense. Rich people want the perks of being rich, without the nonsense. Elon Musk doesn't want you to know where he's flying even if he's one of the reasons the world is going to pot, rich people with luxury jets, flying back and forth from California to Texas between his companies. We don't like that but that's part of his contribution to the world: global warming. 

Trying to be more loving and kind to others in your actions and ways of being is the underlying hope of self development. Stop being such an asshole. How does one feel authentic and real and protected and not really difficult to others. It's also OK to want to be alone and isolated, but that doesn't work for most people. 

I woke up today with one of the local people ranting on the street. I recognize that rant. Maybe you could go to the park and face the highway instead of being around houses. 

When someone tells you you need psychotherapy, they're saying you're difficult, being too much. You don't understand there's another person there, and you're just thought vomiting on them.

It's OK for Yuskavage to be that way in her paintings: “My work has a very unpleasant edge, and I’m aware of that,” Yuskavage told an interviewer who visited her first studio, a shared space on East Second Street. “From looking at advertising and being in the world and listening to men comment about women, listening to my dad comment about women,” she continued, “I know a lot about how to degrade a woman.” (op cit)

The wants to interrupt the male gaze. Doing horrible things like pouring blood on a fur coat is the whole point of some protests, you can't protest nicely all the time. Not everything is a protest, and you have to really target these things.

"What has remained constant in her career is an extraordinary way with color, a penchant for scenarios that defy interpretation, and a fascination with rendering a particular kind of naked lady." (op cit)

“Why have you made this outrageous, hypersexualized . . . white nude female figure the sort of centerpiece of your visual language?”

“Because,” Yuskavage shot back, “that’s the history of art.” (op cit)

One of her favorite paintings is The Garden of Earthly Delights. An amazing work that resides in Madrid Spain. Take a gander at it, it's too large to upload for Blogger's taste. 

10/1/23. Thinking about this post. I think people can be superficial and only want positives, it's a kind of materialisticness. People who befriend people with problems are often pitying, they think they're heroes doing for others, and that might be just as offensive and avoiding problematic people, but they at least are there. Maybe we should think virtue talk is wrong, that you can only be friends with those who have virtue, not vice. Maybe we just accept people in the good and bad. Maybe we don't just skim the good off others. Maybe true friendship is when it's hard in the mire of problems.

 

No equipment exercise

 

 

 

Deprivation schema

 [POEM] by Caitlin Colon, from The Surrender Theory

Mental health note

She-Hulk talks about Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the Hulk prefers science, but it's got meditation in it.

Wong in She-Hulk evokes Quan Yin when he is struggling.

The show ends with group therapy sessions.

The novel The Topeka School by Ben Lerner has a kind of Menninger Clinic in Topeka Kansas.