LIFE ABOVE ZERO | Divya Toshniwal |

You are not ILL, but are you WELL?

Let's plot our mental health on a number scale. Where the negative side is illness, zero is the so-called "normal" and the positive side is wellness.

An aggregate view of community and family well-being may be seen in statistics on such things as divorce, single-parent families, poor families, unwed mothers, abused children, serious crimes and suicide. This forms the "misery index". They give us information about how many people are suffering from significant problems that diminish the quality of their life. But this is an incomplete approach that only examines the presence or absence of negative functioning, and fails to take into account the presence of strengths and positive functioning.  Decreasing misery index is an important goal to reach to that zero from the negative but to rise above that zero the index should consider variables like positive emotional experiences, life satisfaction, motivational level and things that are above the normal.

When we start a business the whole and sole purpose of it is to make a profit. There we do not consider being on zero as normal. And here when it is the matter of our whole life how can we consider being on zero as normal?

People in our country are still not open enough to talk about mental health. We emphasize fitness, health, and well-being but only the physical aspects of it and not the psychological aspects. Talking about the psychological well being is still not considered important. But psychological wellness is much more than just the absence of psychological illness.

Little steps are what it takes to bring about progressive change.

Self-Care

Self-care begins with self-awareness. To know yourself and understanding yourself is the first step towards psychological wellness. One should be aware of their strengths and weakness. Self-care is giving yourself enough time to do stuff that makes you happy, that relaxes you when you are stressed and help you develop as a person. Treat yourself with kindness and respect, and avoid self-criticism. Make time for your hobbies and favorite projects, or broaden your horizons. FIRST LOVE YOURSELF. It makes you more efficient and happy.

Motivation

The process of initiating action is technically called ‘motivation’.Believe in yourself and in your dreams and take action to fulfill them. The goals that we set for ourselves is what gets us going. Sure there are ups and downs but always remember that a straight line means you are dead. So never give up on your dreams.

Positive Relationships

We never opt to but most of us land up with some stressful relations in our lives that we cannot break from. Breaking from the relations may not be possible for some of us, but we can surely break from the negative thoughts that relation is bringing to us. If someone is coming to you bitching about a third person and you want to stay out of that negativity just say them straight that you do not want this conversation, and if you cannot do so just turn the topic around to something that you are interested in. Slowly they would realize and stop talking negative around you. Another thing that we can do is surround ourselves with positive relations. People who can help you with being a better person and live a better life. It is important to have good relations in life and that is what the next subtopic is. Negative relations tax us on our energy and hence lowering our wellness scale.

Empathy

We all live in our own version of reality. The reality that is limited by our senses, our temperament, and our own experiences. It is the only reality that we will ever truly know. But it is crucial to our personal development, our relations and to the society itself that we make the effort to try to experience other people's reality as well. This is done through empathy. Simply stated empathy is an active attempt to understand another person's perspective, their emotions and in that sense their reality. We are social animals and our ability to communicate and understand each other's emotional state is the key to maintaining our relationships.

A lot more things contribute to our life in order to bring it above zero but as I said earlier we need to take one step at a time to bring about change. Always remember: If you change nothing, nothing will change.

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Divya