What Does Great Mental Health Look Like?

“I think it’s relevant that mental health is often seen in purely negative terms, ie the ‘typical’ person has no mental health issues and then it’s all downhill from there.”

-Anonymous Slate Star Codex commenter

Nobody really talks about great mental health, which is strange. I consider myself “in shape” physically, but I’m nowhere near as fit as a high-level college athlete, let alone a professional. If you want to run a 20-minute 5k or squat four hundred pounds, there are tons of resources to get you there. But what if you’re mentally “in shape,” reasonably content with life, and yet you want to go further? Resources here are fewer and farther between - it’s generally assumed that if you have good mental health and want to work on yourself, what you want is not greater happiness or contentment, but greater productivity. This article seeks to provide a blueprint on what excellent mental health might look like so we can strive to improve further.

Before we begin, I want to add some disclaimers. If you currently struggle with mental health and feel guilty about it, this article may do you more harm than good. If you’re receiving treatment for a mental health issue, you should do what your care provider tells you. I am not a psychologist or a counselor, and this article is not a substitution for therapy.

With that settled, let’s take a look at our blueprint.

Happiness Set Point

The first, and in my opinion most important, aspect of mental health is your happiness set point. This is the level of happiness we’re naturally drawn back to over time when nothing disrupts it. When you’re happy or sad, you eventually go back to ‘normal,’ and this normal is your happiness set point. Increasing this is so important because it’s your base state, the one you’re in most of the time, unless things are going really well or really poorly for an extended period.

So how do we increase this? The bad news is, your happiness set point is partially genetic. Science isn’t completely sure about how much, but estimates vary from 33% to 65%. The good news is, that still leaves a decent amount of room for individual improvement. Studies on how effective altering your own happiness set point can be are difficult to conduct, since it takes time, it’s difficult, and you can’t measure people’s compliance very well. There’s no way to objectively test how often someone acted to change a bad thought pattern, or how sincerely they took a gratitude exercise.

Anecdotally, however, this can definitely have significant long-term effects for some people. I was a miserable teenager until I decided to take deliberate steps to change my thought patterns, and Alicorn of Less Wrong managed to raise her set point as well. Both these interventions have held up over a decade later. We both used different methods, with her focusing more on environmental manipulation and me focusing more on mental processes, which indicates that happiness is an individual thing, and the best technique for you is likely to be one of a large variety of things. Self-experimentation is key.

That said, here are some things you can try:

Environment: Learn the environmental cues that affect your happiness. Then minimize exposure to the things that reduce your happiness, and maximize the availability of things that increase them. If dim lighting makes you feel worse, for example, switch to brighter lights.

Thought patterns: Learn to recognize negative patterns of thought, and replace them with countering positive ones. An intrusive pattern I had as a teenager was, “Life is terrible, and it’s only going to get worse from here.” I told myself that every time I thought that, I would deliberately think “Life is good, and it’s only going to get better from here.” There are better ways to do this as an adult without trying to convince yourself to believe something you don’t actually believe. Nowadays, if I feel bothered by something in my life, I remind myself how good life is compared to a hundred years ago, and I feel better almost immediately.

Another of my favorite thought patterns is this: “Almost anything that happens to me is going to have tradeoffs - there will be good things and bad things. In that case, I choose to focus on the good things.” For instance, I’m a contractor, and I recently had a project fall through at the last minute, meaning I wasn’t going to be working the next week. Rather than dwell on the loss of income, I chose to focus on the positives and enjoy the extra vacation time!

Gratitude: Thought patterns were very popular back when I encountered this problem in the late 2000’s. Practicing gratitude seems to be the more popular modern strategy. Practicing gratitude involves either taking time out of your day or responding to cues in the environment, then deliberately appreciating the things you have that you often take for granted, like clean water, plenty of food, friends and family, and so on.

Stability

What if we have a good happiness set point? Well, then it’s important to maintain it, which is where our second item comes in - stability. Stability represents how closely your mood resembles your happiness set point from day to day. While instability can present itself in both directions, we’re naturally more concerned with happiness being flung downwards than being flung upwards. People with high stability are the people who shrug off small obstacles and don’t let things bother them for long.

What determines this? One component is definitely the amount of slack you have, in time, energy, and money. If you have an emergency fund, you can absorb financial setbacks more easily. If you schedule yourself for less than your maximum capacity, you have surge capacity in case a problem arises, giving you the time and energy to promptly fix it. It is important to remember that not everyone has the luxury of building this slack into their lives, but if you do have that opportunity, don’t squander it! A good rule of thumb for me is that I try to operate at less than 90% of my total capacity. Not only does this make life more enjoyable and less stressful, I even find that I actually end up more productive in the long-term that way. Not only does this slack let me respond promptly to emergencies, it also lets me identify and jump on new opportunities, which can be immensely valuable over time - certainly more valuable than an extra 10% of what I’m currently doing. This also requires you to have some self-knowledge and self-compassion. You need to know what your current capacity is, and not beat yourself up even if that level is lower than you’d like. You can always try to improve this capacity over time. Unfortunately, I don’t yet know how to reliably do this. My capacity to be productive has definitely increased over time, but I’m not sure exactly why. Conscientiousness increases with age, so it’s definitely not an isolated phenomenon.

The other component is how you react emotionally. Slack (or lack thereof) determines how hard you get hit, while your reaction is your ability to weather the blow. I find the Stoic philosophy to be very useful for stability. The Stoics tell us that we can’t control whether bad things happen to us or not, but we can control our reaction. I find both these things comforting - small annoyances are a normal and natural part of life, but I can choose to let them bother me or not.

Resilience

But what about big things? What about major problems, like losing a job, a relationship, or a loved one? That’s where the final item comes into play - resilience. Happiness is your default state. Stability is how hard it is to knock you out of that state. Resilience is what to do when you inevitably do get knocked out of that state, because it happens to everyone. Nobody is infinitely stable, and everybody gets knocked down.

I don’t have a lot of advice on this last one, but I suspect that seeking help from friends and loved ones (and professionals, if that’s not enough) is key. Happiness and stability are both largely individual pursuits, but resilience is much easier when you have a support network around you. This is also a long-term sustainable solution. While small shocks happen all the time, big shocks are relatively rare, so it’s perfectly reasonable to ask your support network for help every time one happens.

Thus, those are our keys to great mental health, and the things we should strive for. People with high levels of mental health, the mental equivalents of athletes, are people who have a high happiness set point, are difficult to knock out of that default state, and manage to recover quickly when big shocks do temporarily knock them out of it. The more often you’re in an emotional state, the more important it is to your overall mental health - improving your default state even a little does a lot of good.

I’m less confident in this post than I am in my previous article, so I’d love to know what people think. Have I missed a key component to good mental health? What are your tips for improving these three? Let me know in the comments!