You’d think it would be simple. There are healthy mindsets and unhealthy mindsets. The healthy ones allow you to live your life successfully, while the unhealthy ones damage it. At their worst, unhealthy mindsets can lead to mental illness.
If that’s the case, all you need to do is establish a healthy mindset and everything else will follow. Better grades. Better job. Better relationships. If only it was that easy! Instead, achieving a positive mindset tends to require a lot of work – work that’s particularly difficult when your mental health is already poor.
Mindset has everything to do with the way you think. It’s about attitudes, ideas and opinions as well as how you interact with other people and the rest of the world. Much of it can be established in early life based on our childhood experiences and relationships, which can make it very difficult to dig your way out of those old ways of thinking to establish something new.
It can be done, however. At its best, you can develop what’s known as a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. A growth mindset takes the attitude that there’s always room to grow and improve. Whatever challenges you face in life, you can learn new ways to deal with them. It’s like training in the gym to build muscles, but the muscle in question is your brain.
A growth mindset may help you develop the skills you need to deal with problems, both external ones and internal ones. You can let go of negative emotions and influences like the fear of failure, which can be paralyzing and exacerbate other low feelings. Other people become an opportunity to build new relationships and receive useful feedback, reducing isolation.
None of these things are easy. It involves a lot of introspection and self-awareness. You need to watch every thought; if it’s not helpful, redirect it. Sometimes you might need some kind of therapist to guide your process. If you have a diagnosable illness, you may also need medication to manage the symptoms before you can even start to work on long-term solutions like a broader mindset change.
You can’t always control how you feel, but you can control how you react. No one can feel good all the time, but working on your mindset allows you to deal with negative emotions when they happen.
