This TED talk from Guy Winch sheds a spotlight on mental health. Guy asks the question why is it not held in the same regard as physical health. From an early age we are taught about personal hygiene and healthy habits to look after our bodies. But similar lessons for emotional resilience and mental health aren’t.
Impacts of our emotional wellbeing can come from many places.
Loneliness
Is quite subjective in that it is a feeling. Whether you feel disconnected from people and events around you. It can cause deep psychological hurt that distorts reality and scrambles our thinking. The depths of loneliness makes it even harder for us to reach out and ask for help as we don’t believe people are thinking about us as much as they are.
Failure
One single failure can convince us that we can’t succeed. As human beings, once we are convinced of something, it then becomes incredibly difficult to change our minds. We all have these little things that have happened in the past that pre-condition how we may react when faced with challenges or frustrations.
Rejection
Rejection can be extremely painful. We start to think of all our imperfections. Those little stories we start telling ourselves of why we aren’t good enough, smart enough or whatever it may be. This lowers our self-esteem which makes us even more prone to stress and anxiety. Ultimately making the hurt feel deeper and last longer.
Rumination
Is the chewing over of something in your mind. Those endless replays that go on and on of something bad that has happened. Or something that you could have done better. It’s a cycle that can be very damaging as the spiral of negative thoughts can result in not so nice outcomes.
What to do?
To address each of these, Guy encourages us to:
- Pay attention to the emotional pain
- Stop the emotional bleeding
- Protect your self esteem
- Battle negative thinking
He gives some insight, from his own personal experiences, into what actions can be taken.
Guy highlights that it’s only around 100 years ago people started practising personal hygiene as we know it today, and life expectancy sky rocketed in the following decades. Imagine what could happen if we focused just as much on our mental wellbeing.
Watch this 17-minute TED Talk and ask yourself the question, how can I improve my own mental health and help others do the same?
Want to watch even more TED Talks we have shared. Check them all out here.
