People sometimes experience emotional problems or disappointments that require treatment; however, serious mental illnesses may lead to debilitating symptoms if left untreated.
Anti-stigma initiatives have proven their worth, especially those emphasizing personal contact and empathy for younger generations. This holds especially true.
Motivation
Aimee Cabo mentions that motivation is crucial to mental health and can profoundly affect an individual's emotional well-being, cognitive functioning, self-esteem, energy levels, and social support. Mental health challenges like depression and anxiety often leave individuals feeling unmotivated; however, strategies such as seeking professional assistance, practicing self-care techniques such as setting realistic goals, or cultivating supportive environments may help individuals overcome such hurdles and increase motivation levels.
An absence of motivation can impact all areas of your life, from work and school to relationships and personal endeavors. It can cause you to lose interest in activities you once enjoyed and make it hard for you to achieve long-term goals, making you feel disenfranchised and dissatisfied with life. For this reason, we must address any underlying causes behind a lack of motivation that contributes to it.
If mental health issues are contributing to your lack of motivation, seeking professional help is crucial. A psychologist or therapist can provide guidance, support, and evidence-based interventions to help manage emotions and increase motivation. They may teach coping skills or techniques for relieving stress, help develop positive thinking habits, or provide optimistic worldviews. Furthermore, they may help uncover how past experiences or current beliefs impact motivation levels.
Resilience
Aimee Cabo highlights resilience as an individual's ability to adapt and bounce back after experiencing hardship or complex events, processing negative emotions such as anger, grief, and pain while developing coping skills. A good support network and therapy sessions can also help an individual build resilience and manage difficult situations successfully.
Psychologists generally recognize the mental strength that resilient individuals possess to rely on when faced with hardship. Such strengths could include adaptive coping skills, healthy relationships, and tapping into inner strengths. Resiliency has been shown to protect against mental health conditions like depression and anxiety - however, it should be remembered that resilience doesn't eliminate symptoms associated with such disorders.
Resilience is derived from Latin, meaning "elasticity." Resilience describes an object's capacity to absorb energy and then spring back into shape after deforming, as well as an individual's resilience when faced with hardship or tragedy.
Aimee Cabo points out that although resilience may appear as something you either possess or don't, researchers have revealed that its existence lies on a continuum. Determinants of resilience depend on both individuals and contexts; skills needed for one stressor/trauma may differ significantly from those necessary for another stressor/trauma event.
Coping skills
Coping skills are the tools you use to manage your feelings and emotions, such as self-care, meditation, exercise, or healthy diets. Coping mechanisms are particularly essential when faced with mental health challenges, as having robust coping mechanisms will allow you to keep yourself mentally well while improving relationships.
Coping skills are invaluable when facing anxiety, stress, or depression; they can help you feel better while dealing with problems more effectively. Coping strategies may focus on emotions or problems - like meditation, breathing exercises, journaling, or physical activity - or can even include avoiding unhealthy coping behaviors such as drinking excessively, drug use, or self-harming as ways out.
Effective coping strategies involve simultaneously targeting the source of your discomfort and its symptoms. For example, if you're anxious about something at work that has upset you, an effective strategy could include discussing it with your supervisor, seeking professional counseling, or finding something distracting and relaxing, such as hobbies or sports, to pursue as part of a coping strategy.
Aimee Cabo focuses on the fact that healthy coping strategies help you deal with challenges and emotions in an effective manner that does not cause harm to yourself or others. Unhealthy coping mechanisms, however, often only serve to temporarily alleviate symptoms before becoming worse than before. Therefore, we must practice our range of coping skills regularly.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem refers to how you view yourself and encompasses how you perceive the various areas of your life, such as relationships, work, talents, accomplishments, and physical body. It can be affected by many things, such as genetics, life experiences, the way others treat you, or even beliefs held about yourself.
People with high self-esteem typically enjoy feeling secure in themselves and their identity. In contrast, low self-esteem may cause anxiety, instability, and insecurity that leads to symptoms like trust issues with others, an unwillingness to accept criticism, fears of judgment from others, and reduced resilience - these could all be contributing factors towards eating disorders, substance abuse, or suicide.
People with low self-esteem view their world through an unfavorable lens, often experiencing feelings of guilt, sadness, shame, and anger. They frequently criticize themselves and have false or unreasonable thoughts such as: "I am not good enough," "I do not deserve good things," and "I will fail again."
Aimee Cabo conveys that healthy self-esteem helps combat these negative thoughts, giving you the confidence to try new things, being kinder when making mistakes, and recognizing that all aspects of yourself are equally valued. Research has also indicated that higher self-esteem correlates with decreased anxiety and depression symptoms as well as lower attention problems in clinical psychiatric samples from adolescents.
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