What is Positive Mental Health and Characteristics of a Mentally Healthy Person?
Positive mental health refers to a state of mental health where you are free from negative, intrusive, and burdening thoughts. It is a state of mind where you don’t feel pressurized or tied up. It results in you feeling good about yourself as well as your surroundings.
Each one of us goes through various situations every day, meets and converses with new people, and deals with them. Sometimes, we deal with them in a much better way, and sometimes, in a bad way.
E.g., Imagine you work very hard for a test and still get lower grades. In this situation, you either accept your failure in achieving good grades and make yourself comfortable with the idea of working harder, or you deal with it rashly and get stressed about how even after working so hard, you got a low grade and keep criticizing yourself for a long time.
The situation was the same in both cases, but how you choose to deal with it decides the impact on your mental health. We need to understand that accepting the situation and how we performed in that situation is very important for our mental health and positive mental health is only achievable when we accept things as they are.
10 Characteristics of a Mentally Healthy Person are as follows:-
1. You feel good about yourself:
Mentally healthy people tend to feel good about themselves. Self-love is very important to them. No one is perfect and everyone has their own set of flaws, but this does not mean that because of those shortcomings, they start feeling bad about themselves or start hating themselves. When a person is mentally healthy, he/she accepts that however they are, they are amazing and understand that everyone is different and has some good qualities and some bad ones. A Harvard study suggests that Self-acceptance also improves your emotional well-being.
2. You work very efficiently:
Good mental health not only motivates your mind and body to work more, but also increases work efficiency. Mentally being in a healthy place helps individuals with fresh and happy thoughts which results in working more freely and efficiently.
3. You voluntarily want to do things:
When your mental health is not upright, any and every task seems immensely burdensome. Our day-to-day activities are affected. Bad mental health results in avoiding working on things, even those that you love doing. You feel like you are being forced to do things. On the other hand, people who are mentally in a healthy space, voluntarily want to do many things and are motivated to work.
4. You feel optimistic:
When you are mentally healthy, you feel very optimistic about yourself and your surroundings. You regard yourself as a capable person and have a positive outlook toward others as well.
Things might not always go your way. It is okay to feel low and scared of the future. In this dilemma, we become very negative and start doubting ourselves. Mentally healthy people understand that they may not succeed in every situation, and failures are bound to happen. The important part to notice here is that they hold on to their optimism towards themselves and what they can achieve.
5. You are not scared of alone time:
Mentally healthy people are not scared of spending time with themselves. They know that spending time with themselves is as important as spending time with others. Spending time alone helps us gain clarity about ourselves and allows us to understand ourselves in a much better way. When we are alone, we get to know about our likes, dislikes, and interests. We get the chance to understand ourselves which helps us to understand others.
6. You don't feel guilty for staying idle:
Mentally healthy people understand work-life balance very well. They know when to work comparatively less, when to work very hard, when to take breaks, and when to go for a long vacation. Staying idle does not make them feel unproductive or useless. They know how to get charged up and how to relax.
7. Your thoughts are very organized and clear:
Good mental health results in clear and organized thoughts. Human beings tend to think all the time. There are hundreds and thousands of thoughts that pass through us every day. For most of us, it gets very difficult to organize our running thoughts and have clarity in them. Though we try to maintain a balance, it just becomes impossible to not think about several things at the same time.
Mentally healthy people have clarity in their thoughts. They know how to regulate and control most of their thoughts. They also know how to deal with negative thoughts. Controlling 100% of your thoughts is inevitable, but they know how to balance them and not get too worked up. The clarity of thoughts helps them to manage their day-to-day life very well.
8. You are aware of your strengths as well as weaknesses:
One of the main reasons why mentally healthy people are in that condition is because they acknowledge who they are. They respect what they can do and what they cannot, or are unable to do. They know their strengths and weaknesses because they accepted their failures just like their successes. It is okay to be bad at certain things and what we need to understand is that our strengths, as well as our weaknesses, make us the person we are.
9. You accept criticisms and disappointments very well:
When a person’s mental health is in a good state, they accept not only the positives that come their way but also the negatives. Life is full of disappointments and criticisms. Individuals who are mentally unhealthy tend to succumb to those disappointments and keep surfing on the edge. We know that disappointments and criticisms are important in life but still don’t react to them equally. Mentally healthy people are in that mental condition because they have been accepting their disappointments and criticism. They accept their negatives, just as their positives.
10. You recognize boundaries:
Many a time, we as individuals aren’t aware of our own as well as others’ boundaries. This hampers various kinds of relationships that we have with others. Sometimes, we cross and overdo things or remain way back from what is expected from us. People who are mentally strong and healthy, recognize boundaries very well. They respect others’ boundaries. They know when to distance themselves from someone and when to keep continuing to be in touch.
All the above characteristics do not imply that mentally healthy people do not face stress or anxiety or various difficulties in their day-to-day life. Every person faces them, but the difference lies in how they deal with such situations. The state of a person’s mental health depends on how they react to easy as well as difficult situations.
Remember that there will be obstacles in the way of achieving positive mental health, but it is not impossible. You can do it!
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