There are thousands of explanations for mental health, but none of them is absolutely correct.
The definition I want to give here is: mental health is a “flexible and flexible” psychological ability that can help you live a more real and complete life. Maybe you will ask what is “flexible and flexible”. We will answer this question later. Let’s take a look at what is mentally unhealthy first. If a continuous spectrum is used to express the degree of mental health, the healthiest end is “flexible and elastic”, then the least unhealthy end is “pathological rigidity”.
Let me give two examples first:
There is a person named Xiao A. No matter what others say to him, his reaction is always to raise his right hand, put his left hand on his waist, and shout “Long live the motherland” three times. This is the most extreme rigidity, dealing with all situations in one way, resulting in Xiao A being unable to communicate with people at all and work and live normally. The other person is Xiao B. Every time he goes home, he has to stand downstairs and count the windows. The whole building has a total of 362 windows. If the number is correct, he can go home. If he counts wrong, he has to start again, so he often stands next to his house for two hours and can’t go home. This is a kind of compulsive behaviour, which obviously has a certain rigidity, but Xiao B can live normally at other times except for counting windows, so his degree of rigidity is much lower than Xiao A.
Maybe you will think that these people are all sick, and I won’t be like this. But along this continuous genealogy, from the unhealthy end to the healthy end, you may find yourself at a certain point in the middle, and in some situations there are also some rigid and inflexible ideas or behaviours.
For example, if there is severe procrastination, the more important the work is, the more indefinitely delayed; for example, if you usually perform well in the small exam, you will lose your performance as soon as you get into the big exam; for example, every time you are stuffed, you will be angry, although you know it is unnecessary.
It can be seen that the psychological state of “flexible and flexible” refers to the possibility of choosing different coping strategies according to different scenarios and making different choices in the same situation. Therefore, a flexible and flexible mental state can help you change your life from “single-choice” to “multi-choice”, just like a multi-line game, which increases countless possibilities and allows you to experience and experience life more abundantly.
First, let’s take a look at the operation mode of a sound mind. When there is an external stimulus, people usually go through these steps from receiving the stimulus to taking action:
Being able to do the above four steps, congratulations, you have a psychological mechanism of “resilient mind”. Among these four steps, what is easier to realise and observe is the last two steps “cognition and action”, while the first two steps of “recognition and accommodation” often operate unconsciously, which can be called the “inner black box”.
If we can’t see what’s in the black box, we don’t even know what’s going on inside us, so we deal with it blindly and act, and “flexible and flexible” or “multiple choice” has become a kind of extravagant hope.
The most common problem is often the step of “inclusion”. If you accept failure, there will be an “emotional explosion”, which will become the culprit of stifling flexibility.
As long as emotions are still within a perceptible range, we will have time to slowly detect and reflect. However, once the table explodes, in order to deal with those uncomfortable feelings, we have to adopt some automated habitual strategies, and these are all operated at the subconscious level, that is, “you don’t really know what you are doing”, and the result can only be left to fate.
Strategies to deal with emotional explosions can often be divided into two categories: “hot pot ants” and “buried ostries”.
Suppose there is such an event:
There is a couple. Husband M is an executive of a multinational enterprise. His career is very successful, and his wife X is an ordinary housewife. One day, M went to work but accidentally left his mobile phone at home. X found out and was about to find a way to notify M. At this time, he saw a new WeChat reminder flashing on the screen: “Honey, I’m here, the old place, Room 301.”
If X is a hot pot ant type, she may be completely shocked, suspicious, jealous, angry, sad and other emotions in an instant, and then countless ideas appear in her mind:
“He really has something to do…”
“Isn’t it disgusting that I’m old…”
“At that time, I should have resolutely done the skin. There were not so many folds on my face, so it wouldn’t be like this…”
“How can he do this to me? How much I have paid for this family for my children, and I have given up my career…”
“I want revenge. I’
Driven by these ideas, X may go to the bank to transfer property within a day, then go to M’s company to make a scene, and then call his parents-in-law to cry. Whether the matter of M’s cheating is true or not, X has become “a bloody case caused by cheating”. Therefore, the hot pot ant type often overreacts when the mood explodes. Every day, it lives like singing a big play, which makes himself and the people around him collapse.
If X is a buried ostrich type
She may have two types of reactions:
The first kind, “My husband did not cheat, and this WeChat sent the wrong person.” – This is a denial, directly denying the facts from the conscious level.
The second, “My husband is probably cheating, but I don’t seem to have any feelings. It’s okay if I don’t want it.” – This is isolation/depression. At the consciousness level, I can admit the facts, but avoid emotional experience.
Based on this mentality, X may not do anything at the factual level, nor will it directly communicate with M, but the more you look at M in other aspects, the more unpleasant it may be, looking for faults and quarrelling and so on.
Although the buried ostrich looks calm and won’t make any big trouble, because their real emotions have not been dealt with, they will emerge through other outlets sooner or later. For example, it is prone to somatisation symptoms, some inexplicable emotional outbreaks, or other strange phenomena.
If you want to have a “flexible and flexible” healthy psychological state and make life a wonderful trip with multiple choices and threads, you must first open the inner black box and see the truth clearly before you can make a reasonable choice.
