The Foundations of Mental Health

“The brain is a physical system that, like a muscle, gets stronger the more you exercise it. So make taking in the good a regular part of your life” – Rick Hansen, Ph.D.[i]

Four factors make up the foundations of mental health – happiness, insight, practice, and resolve. Cultivating these four factors vastly improves our life experience. We steadily increase our ability to regain emotional equilibrium when life throws us out of balance. We possess an overall mindset of positivity and optimism that allows us to achieve our goals. We are authentic in our communication.

Happiness: The feeling of happiness is an important aspect of mental health. We generate neuropathways of happiness by noticing positive experiences throughout the day. Having noticed a positive experience, we linger with the corresponding feelings of pleasure, delight, love, satisfaction, joy, etc. Through this practice, we make a habit of installing happiness into our mind and body.

Insight: Our feelings are the result of cause and effect coupled with choice. Along with choice, our mind is made up of various components, much like an engine. By understanding how the parts of our emotional engine interact we relate to our feelings with skill and mastery. Insight – with regard to self-regulation – is the process of understanding why we feel what we feel and how our emotional engine works.

Practice: Change requires time; time to learn and time to embody insights and behavior. A practice mindset emphasizes bringing value to each stage of the journey. We are not in a race nor are we judging our progress. Letting go of outcomes and focusing on the happiness we experience makes learning and applying new skills joyful and sustainable.

Resolve: It’s easy to talk ourselves out of change, even when we believe that change is for the better. We know what to do but for some reason we can’t find the motivation to do it. Resolve means that we keep going in a spirit of exploration. We remember that love points the way to happiness and happiness is the key to success. We take ownership for our journey of well-being because it is in our healthy self-interest to do so.

At any given moment we have the power to make a choice. This power is the only thing that we have complete control over. The question we need to ask ourselves is if our next action is going to make things better or worse. We can choose to install neuropathways of happiness by focusing on what we like. Conversely, we can install pathways of suffering by perseverating on what we want, but don’t have. The pathway to happiness is one of taking notice of the good and leaning into it. The pathway of suffering is one of clinging to imagined good that is not within our current experience. This path is the way of lack. The good news is that by using the four factors of mental health we can train ourselves to thrive more than cope. We can love more than fear. We can like more than lack.

[i] Hanson, R.      (2013) Hardwiring Happiness: The new brain science of contentment, calm, and happiness. (p. 67) Random House. New York, NY. 

How to use the Enlighten Up Your Day Video Book

Enlighten Up Your Day teaches you to resolve stress, define your path, and live with greater authenticity. We developed this program to be used over time. Enlighten Up Your Day is not a study assignment or a task to be accomplished. We want you to take your time to explore the teachings and practices within. Remember that knowledge and understanding are different. You can read the chapter workbook and have knowledge of the material. But it’s not until you’ve taken time to put the concepts into practice and experienced the positive results that you gain understanding.

Begin each chapter by watching the videos and reading the chapter overview in the workbook. Stop there. Take the next few days to let the information settle in your mind. Once you’ve had a chance to reflect go back and rewatch the exercise video. Then read and apply the chapter exercises. Every exercise is intended to be practiced in your daily life. You may not be finished working with one exercise before you begin the next, that’s fine. It is by practicing the exercises over time that you gain skill and insight.

In each chapter you’ll find a mindfulness meditation. The value of mindfulness is that it increases your ability to step back and notice otherwise automatic patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. By doing so you gain in your capacity to recognize and change unhelpful patterns as they arise. Read the mindfulness exercise in the workbook and then rewatch the mindfulness video.

We designed Enlighten Up Your Day so that one chapter would build upon the next. Chapter One, The Engine of Emotion, is an overview of the entire program. The chapters that follow provide a more in-depth look at each of the components of the emotional engine. It is a comprehensive examination of how your feelings work and ways to relate to them. Nonetheless, it’s up to you to find a method of learning that feels good for you. You can start at Chapter One and work sequentially or you can skip ahead. The choice is yours.

Enlighten Up Your Day is an informational therapeutic resource and is not intended to take the place of psychiatric services. If you or someone you know is experiencing a psychiatric emergency call local law enforcement or go to your nearest emergency room.