How would you handle potential mental health challenges?
Personal crises could sour your emotional and mental health. Is there a positive approach you could adopt to handle any mental health challenge you may have?

Skyrocketing Mental Health Challenges

Globally, we are in troubled and troubling times. Personal crises, mental health challenges, and emotionally stressful scenariois are becoming everyday recipe—and they are escalating. These situations make heavy demands on the mental health of most people across all climes. Mental health challenges continue to compound and bewilder. Sadly, the increasing propensity of more and more people losing confidence in mental health solutions is worrisome.

What could you do at your own personal level? How could you prepare yourself to handle potential mental health challenges? If you are already faced with any mental health challenge, what could you do handle or improve your sitiation?

Be Proactive with Your Mental Health Situation

In any situation of mental health challenge, it is proper and fitting to seek, get, and use professional help, and to stay within the regime provided by relevant mental health specialists. We at BetterPoise.Com fully support such an approach.

It is also helpful to understand that personal crises, mental health challenges, and emotionally stressful situations are realities of life. They are better handled as phases in one's life.

Some may result from things you could not control, and in fact, it could well be that most really come from what you couldn't control. Barring a few cases, much of the crises would pass away with time. Some would, because circumstances might have changed, and some would need to be handled with expert help, social support, and other personal actions on your part.

And this is where a positive outlook, perspective or approach comes in. You don't want to worsen a mental challenge by being negative or by focusing on 'the gloom and doom'. Being prepared is the key, and it starts with your attitude.

A major challenge would be to be ready before such mental health challenges or personal crises happen. For, no matter how we may feel about it, nobody is immune from mental health challenges or personal and emotional crises.

Practical Steps Based on a Positive, Empowering Outlook

You could prepare, by taking the following steps, among others.

Take A Closer Look at How You Define Personal Success

Serious threats to what we hold dear and what defines our success could trigger personal, mental or emotional crises.

When personal success is defined too narrowly, particularly in quantifiable ways, for example, in terms of physical possessions and material gains, threats to such items (or stuff) could lead to mental health challenges. One reason being that such a definition is rather limiting. Defining your personal success to encompass much more than tangible things (or stuff) would enhance your outlook on life and promote your mental health.

A broader definition of personal success would include having intangible values and attributes which promote goodwill and benevolent outcomes—e.g., being a better, more capable, and more valuable person.

Examine Your Core Values

Core values are ingrained in our habits and our outlook on life. They influence to a large degree the relationships we keep and how we define the quality of life.

Examine your core values. Are they such that advance wholesome living and could help sustain physical, emotional, and mental health in the long run? You could judge if this could be so by tracking and finding out how such values or aspects of your core values have affected people you know or other people you learn about.

Understand the root of the core values you hold,—prove them for their long-run effects on your life. Hold to values that are not ruinous to your life, to the well-being of significant people in your life and the general well-being of the larger society.

You don't want to worsen a mental health challenge by being negative or by focusing on 'the gloom and doom'. Being prepared is the key, and it starts with your attitude.

The Company You Keep Matters!

The company you keep would influence your core values. It is possible that while growing up, or if you are still a minor, you might not have thought about this, but your associates' core values would rub off on you,—particularly if you are not alert or discerning in choosing whom you associate with or who you choose as close associates.

You would not be choosing associates based on temporary thrills, fads, and media optics. You would be doing your emotional and mental well-being much good by associating with people whose values in life are reinforcing of beneficence and wholseome relationships,—and that are not self-defeating or ruinous in the long run.

Understand that Self-Growth Involves Readiness to Suffer Some Losses

Many people live as if they were still toddlers. They are not grown up mentally and emotionally.

But growing up, and being a grown-up person, means that we are willing and ready to suffer some losses, and that we have developed the mental and emotional acuity to accept and deal with losses. To promote your mental health, be willing and ready to suffer some loss of possessions,—but be proactive enough to prepare a plan of action to obviate any such losses.

<p>Be ready before mental health challenges or personal crises happen to you.</p>

Make Yourself More Able to Solve Personal Problems

Develop more valuable competencies and make yourself more capable to solve problems, particularly your personal problems—and to better handle greater life's challenges.

This would come with practice, but a positive attitude to embrace change, opportunities, and challenges to make you more capable would be healthy to your self-worth.

Practice Emotional Distancing

Learning to not get emotionally charged when things are not going well in your social space would help you handle much of the mental challenges life throws at you.

Taking a social and emotional distance would include, having a breather and not accepting the first thoughts of gloom and doom that would cross your mind. Rather, try to be a trouble shooter—look for root causes not symptoms, track effects or consequencies to specific causes, explore practical solutions and include imaginative ones, seek advice and help from those more experienced in handling the kind of challenges you are facing. Just refuse to get sucked in and refuse to be overwhelmed by the first sign of mental health challenge—refuse to make yourself helpless.

Such an approach would help you build a buffer between yourself and emotionally charged situtations,—particularly when other people are escalating such a situation. Not all personal and emotional challenges are life-threatening, or would lead to mental crises, if you learn to take a social and emotional distance from them—seek to understand them and resource solutions to them.

Accentuate the Positive in Life and Stay Vital

This is an integral part of the last tip. Rather than focusing on the negative things in your life, accentuate the positive.

Try to find what is good about events in your life—even if it is about noticing how things could have been worse. Stay physically vital and fit. Make the most of good nutrition and principles of healthy living.

Know When to Seek Help

Don't linger long before seeking help. For example, when in doubt or when things start getting you worried, seek help. And when you have the help, use it and stay positive.

While taking practical and positive steps when you face a personal crisis or mental health challenge, hold this thought and outlook: This, too, shall pass!