Mental Health Blog, Day 2: Embracing positivity

Mr Rogers: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world."

Some people will watch the news and see the disaster, others might focus on the heroes – We each have a subtle choice in the way we perceive the world, whether we see the good, or the bad. This perspective can determine the way we see the world. When someone is depressed, they sometimes see the world, or life as 'all bad'. This is a fallacy and a mistake…

The fact is ‘good and bad’ are just subjective constructs and perspectives, and don’t exist outside of the human mind for starters. However, being humans, our minds matter, and feeling as though ‘life is good’ really matters! I think the truth lies here - Ying Yang: There will always be both good and bad in the world, and in your life. Life/The world is everything; It’s good, bad, beautiful, ugly… It’s never perfectly good, or 100% awful. There is always some darkness in the light and light in the darkness. Happy music, sad music, happy art, sad art – It’s all necessary to a full range of human emotions, which is also necessary to live a full human life.

So being human, we naturally want to experience happiness as much as possible, we seek not only to survive, but to flourish. Yet our lives are a mixture of good and bad, and always will be. How can it be possible to be happy through a dark time? When dark times come, which they do for most people, it isn't always possible to be happy. It's not possible to be happy your whole life if bad things happen to you, sometimes multiple times. We cannot expect to be happy straight after going through a trauma like grief, but we can expect to heal and grow in time, it’s in our nature to heal. The brain is an organ, part of the physical body, but we are the captains/pilots, and we must give an order to our minds to heal. Our conscious experience is held within our body, as it is part of our body, and the body can heal with the right medicine.

One key to healing is to look for the light, to be positive, so that you can find your way out of your dark times. If you're lost in darkness, your best hope is to light a torch, and with depression and grief, the torch is hope and optimism. So look for the light in the darkness…Stay positive if you can, because it makes life easier. It won’t fix all the problems and make everything perfect, but it will change the way you see the day, the way people respond to you, and the way you respond to things. So even when times are bad, especially then, stay positive and hopeful that things will improve, as they often do. It's okay to fall down, but keep getting back up, it's the only way forward.

So ‘if you‘re going through hell, you might as well keep going’…Whether that’s grief, self-hate, severe depression, awful news, health problems, chronic pain… Keep going… ‘Success isn’t final and failure isn’t fatal, it’s the courage to continue that counts’. Keep going… ‘some of the best days of your life are still to come’, make them happen.

"Happiness is a choice – not a result. Nothing will make you happy until you choose to be happy. No person will make you happy unless you decide to be happy. Your happiness will not come to you. It can only come from you." “Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.” “How you look at it is pretty much how you’ll see it.”

The power of thought and taking a positive perspective: I’ve found some truth in the idea that when you ‘Change The Way You Look At Things, The Things You Look At Change’. By taking a positive perspective, we can make things seem better, and in doing so, things often get better, because our attitude is good. If I decide life is rubbish, it will feel that way, and become so. If I decide life is good, and that I’m feeling better, it will feel more that way. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

‘Instead of saying ‘I’m broken’, replace that with ‘I’m healing’, this kind of thinking moves towards emotional healing and growth. There’s no such thing as a bad day, unless you decide it is so, then it will become that way. Same too with self image, if your mind thinks you are ugly, you will feel ugly. If you stare yourself straight in the face and make a decision that you like the way you look, you like yourself, and not just for exterior appearance which is hugely overrated, but for the awesome person you are, this is a good start to feeling better about oneself.

Something I’ve learnt is not to be happy all the time. I felt like I bought into the idea that we have the potential to be happy every day, but I know now that this is impossible, a range of human emotions is okay and healthy. Happiness is fleeting as all emotions should be, yet adverts, self-help gurus, religious speakers, and such, will often try to sell happiness as something you can have 24/7 with the right techniques. We evolved to have a range of emotions and to express them all from time to time – We are fully fledged humans. It’s unnatural to be happy all the time. So many great songs and artworks are ‘sad’… It’s okay to feel sad sometimes. The problem occurs when we start feeling sad all the time… We are then blocking out our other important emotions like happiness that we need back. We can strive for a healthy balance.

“Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it". Of course if we are ‘depressed’, it’s not easy to simply ‘get better’. Sadness and happiness are emotions, they are the result of thoughts. You cannot simply turn on an emotion like happiness, you have to have the right thoughts, that activate the emotion. Depression isn’t an emotion as such, it’s more like a world outlook that is drenched in negativity, and negatively biased thought processes, which causes sadness at every turn. In order to cause happiness, we therefore need to change our world outlook.

So we can focus on altering thoughts, rather than emotions. Thoughts can produce emotions. So this is why I’m saying ‘look for the helpers’, see the light in the darkness, have hope for better days, stay positive… These are thoughts to flood into your mind, in order to reprogram it into seeing more good, light, and positivity. It's really out there if you look. To some extent, you can decide to be happy. Cognitive framing – ‘I like my life, I like myself’… You can sometimes make your own reality, but we must convince our inner judges that life is good, and that we are worthy of our own love. Make a decision, a personal contract and declaration with yourself, that you are going to heal, you are going to love yourself again, and you are going to feel happiness in your life once more. This is always going to be hard, but I will speak of one way to help with this tomorrow in Day 3: Self-love & Compassion.

Thanks for reading, I just want to say that these posts are not a guaranteed cure for all people, but just my opinion on what can help. I hope you have read something you found interesting and I hope you have a great day 😊Alex.

Norway Quest Travel Blog, Day 2:

We had a nice lie-in and ate breakfast outside in the sun, before exploring the city of Bergen which is surrounded by mountains and fjords. We visited Bryggen; the old heritage site with colourful wooden plank buildings. It was raining heavily, so we took cover in a quirky little café. Amy appreciated the Moomins there. We then played with two cats outside, and admired some cool graffiti and statues. Went to a bar that had photos of Norwegian singer Aurora (linked below) when she visited, but we got kicked out for not buying anything. A beer was 109 Norwegian Krone (NOK) which is about £10 so we drank quite a lot of tea instead :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWE9LDIuA0M