Happiness and mindset
Your level of happiness can broadly be determined by three categories of your life; Health, wealth and mental wellbeing. Of course, these are all tightly interlinked facets of life and all three need to be well maintained and well balanced to meet the overall satisfaction of one’s life.
In this particular post, I’m going to talk through key improvements that one could make to their mindset, that can help boost mental wellbeing.
Matters of Mindset
The key improvements relating to mental wellbeing mentioned above are fairly simple concepts that I’ve come across. Having been more conscious about them whilst I go about my day to day life. I’ve found myself remaining calmer, less frustrated and more content with everyday living. I’ve organised these concepts into what I call the 3 Matters of Mindset.
1. Matter of Perspective
As humans we always find ourselves wanting more; whether it be getting that flashier car, fancier house or that next promotion up at work. This drive to want more is in our nature and always pushes us to strive to improve and achieve. However, these desires can sometimes be a real hindrance to our ability to enjoy and appreciate the here and now. When you’re next reflecting on your life it’s worth thinking about what you have and how fortunate you are. The beauty of this type of reflection is that you can almost always be grateful for the position you find yourself in regardless of how good or bad a situation is.
Example
Here’s an example of where changes in perspective help the person in question shift to a more appreciative mindset.
Scenario:
An ambitious employee is frustrated that he’s not been able to achieve the promotion he’s been working towards for the past two years. His frustration heightens when he discovers that other employees in his workplace have been promoted and are earning more than him even though they aren’t as deserved.
The perspective that helps:
On reflection, he thinks back to when he landed the role that he’s currently in, and how ecstatic he was when he was offered the job. He also thinks about how much he enjoys working in his position and the fact he’s been earning a good living despite not being promoted. He’s been able to live a comfortable life enriched with occasional luxuries, something that many aren’t fortunate enough to say they’re able to enjoy.
This reflection helps the man put things into perspective and come away with the view that he will continue to work hard but won’t let the fact that he hasn’t been promoted get the better of him. After all, he’s still in a very fortunate position and should be grateful for that.
Keeping things in perspective
What we can learn from the Matter of Perspective is that there is always somebody who is in a less fortunate position, and it’s that perspective that can liberate you to appreciate your own life in ways you may not have been able to - Remember that!
2. Matter of Losing Control
One of our basic human needs is a sense of control, to know that we have a choice and that our actions make a tangible difference to any given outcome. Of course, this is valid in many instances, however, there is a tendency for individuals to fall into a false perception that their actions/provisions invariably determine a particular result.
When the desired result doesn’t materialise even when steps have been taken to ensure the opposite, there is a natural propensity to feel upset, frustrated or angry.
To overcome this illusion of control, we must accept that many things are just completely outside our control. The very best that any one person can do is take the relevant steps to help the probability of an outcome and accept the lack of certainty and control.
Control your actions and thoughts
The key message from the Matter of Losing Control is that you as a human being cannot control much at all. There are so many different parameters in play, and you cannot possibly control the behaviours of others and external outcomes.
The two things that you can control are your actions, which can potentially influence the probability of an outcome, and also how you react when things don’t quite go the way you would have wanted.
3. Matter of Looking Ahead
One common trap that many fall into is the constant rumination of unfortunate events in the past. Whether that be a bad decision, a toxic relationship or a failure in a particular endeavour.
As great as it is to look back and examine the past to understand what went wrong, this exercise can easily become a habit that can lead to spending too much time dwelling on the past, which ultimately leads to distress and unhappiness.
Looking back isn’t a bad thing
Reflecting on past events can be very powerful. It enables you to think about mistakes you may have made or things that were out of your control that led to something not quite occurring as you’d hoped. These are insights you can add to your toolkit, given you’re able to extract learnings from them to improve your future self.
So the next time you’re kicking yourself about performing poorly on a job interview, don’t allow yourself to focus on how bad it went. Instead, think about what actions you could have done to enable you to stack the deck in your favour for the future.
Inspect the past, don’t dwell on it
Thinking about the past is healthy, it enables us to learn and improve ourselves where things didn’t go so well and also helps reinforce behaviours that have served us positively. However, the constant revisiting of unintended past outcomes is something that can leave us in a bad state of mind and can make us a gloomy person to be around.
This is why the key message from the Matter of Looking Ahead is to focus on potential learnings from negative experiences of the past and to put some real thought into the application of the lessons learnt for the future.
TLDR
Matter of Perspective - There’s always somebody less fortunate than yourself. So whatever your situation, be grateful for what you do have.
Matter of Losing Control - You have very little control over external factors in your life. The only thing you can do is try your best to take steps to increase the probability of a particular outcome, and to react in a positive manner whatever happens.
Matter of Looking Ahead - People can spend a lifetime thinking about how bad their past was. Don’t fall into this trap, inspect the past and look ahead into the future and see how learnings from your past experiences can set you up for great future experiences.
Thanks for reading!