Mental wellbeing and resilience

Transcript

Welcome to part four.

In this section we’re going to look at mental well-being and resilience. We’re going to look at the factors that can impact on our mental well-being. We’re going to look at, how do we cope with difficult and challenging situations. And we’re going to look at resilience building, which protects us from overwhelm.

To begin we’re looking at our mental well-being. Our mental well-being is dynamic. It changes from moment-to-moment time-to-time, constantly moving, constantly evolving, constantly changing. And with good mental well-being we’re able to feel relatively confident in ourselves and have positive self-esteem. We’re able to feel and express a range of emotions. We’re able to build and maintain good relationships with others. We’re able to feel and be engaged with the world around us. We’re able to live and work productively. We’re able to cope with the stresses of daily life. And we’re able to adapt and manage in times of change and uncertainty as well.

The World Health Organisation defines good mental health and well-being as really a state where everyone can realize their own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of daily life, can work productively and fruitfully and are able to make a contribution to his or her community.

And now think about what can effect or is affecting your well-being. We’re all different. It’s all going to be different, the answer is going to be different for each one of us. What affects one person’s mental well-being won’t necessarily affect the next person in the same way.

We all have times when we have lower levels of mental well-being, where we may find it difficult to cope or may find it difficult in times of stress or may feel stressed. Factors in the past or present can sometimes make us more vulnerable to periods of low mental well-being or periods where we don’t feel that we’re able to cope as well as maybe other times in life. Common life events that affect our mental well-being include bereavement or loss, loneliness, relationship problems, issues at home issues at work, worry about money. The list can go on and on and it’s different for everybody.

Then looking after our mental health how do we do this. What’s the best way to do it. How can we increase our mental health. How can we have our mental health as healthy as possible. Connecting with others is a great way to do it. Connecting with family, connecting with friends, connecting with local groups, local community groups. Volunteering, counseling, being in support groups, connecting with others online. Talk about the way you feel. Tell people what helps for you. Spot your early warning signs. Know your warning signs, know your own warning signs. Keeping a mood diary. Keeping a mood diary in general or keeping a mood diary when you feel that maybe a difficult time is coming on or a difficult time is hitting or you’re in the middle of a difficult time. Doing practices that build your self-esteem. Trying out mindfulness. Do something that you enjoy. Do something that you feel love for. Do something that you feel passion for. Do something that you just like to do just in that one moment, no pressure. It doesn’t have to be something that’s going to make you feel better on a longer term basis. It’s just something that’s going to help you to feel better in that particular moment if at all possible for you. Whether that’s connecting with somebody else or just doing  something that you’d enjoy to do for yourself. Trying out relaxation techniques whether that’s listening to something on YouTube, listening to music, going for a walk, doing some yoga, doing some meditation, having a massage. Whatever it is that helps you to relax. It could be just sitting out in nature, just surrounding yourself with nature. Or sitting in a garden, or sitting on a balcony looking at nature, or looking at pictures of nature. Looking back at old photographs.

It’s different for everybody. Look to learn something new, if that’s what you’d like to do and you have the time to do it as well and it’s something that you feel joy for and something that you feel passion for.

And now just taking a moment to go to the first exercise in your workbook for part 4. This is an exercise that’s looking at your own self-care and it’s just really a daily check-in for your own self-care. If you’d like to pause the video to complete this exercise, the first exercise.

And welcome back. And that exercise that you’ve just completed is really just a fantastic way to check in for a few moments each day how am I feeling mentally, how am I feeling emotionally, how am I feeling physically, how am I feeling about my connection to everything else that’s around me, everything else that exists in my experience. And really just taking a few moments to feel into that if you can. You can do this exercise for a long time, or you can do it for just a few moments each day. But, it’s really just about you checking in with you, to see how am I doing. It’s part of self-care, it’s part of self-love.

And now moving over to the second exercise that’s in your workbook for part four. And this exercise is really just about writing down ten ways that you feel are beneficial to you to support your own mental well-being from suggestions that we’ve talked about in this part of the course and another part of the course as well. What are ten things that you believe you could do that will support your own health and your well-being, your mental well-being. Just to take a few moments to pause the video to take some time to complete that now.

Welcome back. Just to look at building resilience and what is resilience and why do we need resilience. Why do we need the resilience battery topped up and to have it fully charged. We’re just going to look at that now. Looking at resilience then. Building resilience helps to protect us against situations that may be overwhelming to us. It helps us to maintain balance in our lives during difficult or stressful times. And it can also help to protect us from the development of some mental health challenges and difficulties as well.

How do we build our resilience. There’s a number of different ways that we can do this and really what we’re looking to see is this resilience is a battery. We have this resilience battery and this battery needs to be as fully charged as possible. We need to have it plugged in and charging on a regular basis and we need to make sure that it’s always charged up as much as possible. And that’s what we’re really trying to do here. It’s just to see, is my battery low or is my battery high and if it’s low what can I do to charge it up.

To charge our resilience battery up there’s a number of things that we can do. We can build up our positivity. The more positive that we can be, the more resilient we can be when negative things happen to us in life. We can’t stop the negative things happening to us, but we can support the reaction that we have to these negative things happening to us. Staying positive means staying energized.

Having a live to learn attitude, where we leverage challenges as opportunities to grow and opportunities to develop and opportunities to learn more. The more we do this, the more we’re charging our resilience battery up. Using question thinking. Which is it more expansive. Where we use open type of questions to see what else can open for us. What else is possible for us. What else is possible for us in our experience. The type of questions that we can use are: what is useful here? what are my available choices? how could this get better? what else is possible here for me? Allowing this to open up the energy of lots of possibilities, of lots of opportunities, so that we can see different paths and maybe not just one path. And again this is charging our resilience battery up.

Opening our heart. Having a gratitude journal for a practice of 30 days or else a lifelong practice. Even just taking five minutes to start our day with a gratitude practice. Gratitude is one sure and quick way to lift our vibration and to lift us to a feeling of positivity. It’s one of the quickest ways that we can instill this feeling of positivity into ourselves.

Taking care of ourselves, having a regular routine of healthy self-care habits. We’re not taught this really growing up a lot of the time, just that self-care is so important. And having a good self-care routine is really important. And what does self-care mean to us. And what should be in our self-care routine. To look at our physical, our mental and our emotional well-being. What does self-care mean for our spiritual well-being. What’s does self-care mean for our connection with all that, is with everything that is.

Hang on to humour. Laughter can be the best medicine and a great medicine. You know it’s not an age-old phrase of laughter is the best medicine. And it’s just having ourselves exposed to experiences where laughter can and is possible. And even doing and you know there’s a lot of laughter practices where you can just fake it ‘til you make it and even if you start with laughter where you don’t feel like laughing it ends up we start we loosen up and we start to laugh at ourselves for even being silly and laughter just naturally comes in then. And it helps us to lighten up. Perhaps our whole energy and physical physicality lighten up as well.

Studies show that a primary factor in having strong resilience is having strong and caring relationships within your network. It doesn’t have to be lot and lots and lots of relationships. You may have a small network. You may have a large network. It’s whatever works and feels right for you. But having one or two or a few relationships there, that are strong and caring and supportive of you is key to this resilience battery being charged up. Having relationships that create love and trust, provided my role models, that offer encouragement and reassurance help to bolster our resilience.

Why is resilience important. Several factors are associated with resilience. And these are the capacity to make realistic plans and to be able to carry them out. To have a positive view of yourself. To have confidence in your strengths and your abilities. To have good skills and communication and problem-solving. Having the capacity to manage our strong feelings and strongly impulses that may come through. And all of these are factors that we can develop in ourselves. It’s totally possible for us to build up strong resilience for ourselves.

And then how do we maintain resilience even when we’re dealing with challenging behaviours from others, that are projected maybe towards us sometimes as well. It’s really being aware of our own stress signals. When am I feeling stressed by the behaviours that are being displayed to me from somebody else. What are the stress management tools that I’ve learned, that I have in place or that I know that I can bring into place to support me to lower my stress response. What are my resilience supports. Who is my support network. Who are the supports that I have in place who can help me if my resilience is lowered, if my stress response is raised, to support me to help me to raise my resilience higher when challenging behaviours are in front of me.

We’re going to look at now an exercise in resilience, just to really to have a check-in to see where our resilience is. This is the last exercise in part 4. To just pause the video and to take a few moments to complete the resilience questionnaire.

Welcome back. In part 4 we’ve looked at how do we look after our mental well-being. How do we cope with difficult and stressful situations. What tools do we have to support us in coping with difficult and stressful situations. And what is resilience. And how do we build our own resilience, how do we keep our resilience battery charged up to support us in times of overwhelm, in times of anxiety. How do we have strong resilience in place as a protective mechanism to support us when times may be harder. All of these play a part in feeding into our overall general well-being and our general health.