What is Mental Health?

What is Mental Health?
by Lucrezia Mangione

Clarity. Resilience. Proactive choice. Intellectual stimulation. Curiosity. Peace of mind. Bouncing back. A healthy outlook.

Mental health is thinking and acting in ways that are congruent with your values and what’s meaningful to you. It’s the balanced experience of living life with a mind that is curious, open and clear thinking. It’s an attitude that enables you to manage and cope with changes, stressors and the activity of a complex modern life.

Your thoughts influence everything you do. They generate your actions. How you behave in the world is a result of your thinking. Thoughts are intimately connected to how you feel. Think a good thought, you’ll feel good. Think a bad thought, you’ll feel bad.

What is mental well being? Mental well being involves taking responsibility:
• Your mind is your own. Only you can take care of it well
• Do what needs doing to promote your peace of mind
• Grow new habits for pain and stress reduction that increase health
• Experience the richness of your body mind connection

Mental well being is a centered, focused presence of being present, moving through moments with a sense of peace and space. This helps you experience more mental wellness.

Mental wellness is the goal. It’s part of a wellness continuum. It’s taking a step here, a step there along this continuum. Small steps create big effects.

Daily you can feel stretched, strained and stressed. Many things take up your attention. All-important and, at times, all-burdening. You’re aware of them because you care. Soon you’re lost in traffic: mind traffic.

External data:
• Earthquake in Haiti.
• People thirsty, hungry and suffering.
• My daughter needs new shoes.
• My friend isn’t sleeping well.
• My mate is depressed.
• My neighbor’s is dying.
• My mother has Alzheimer’s.

Internal data:
• I’m not where I want to be.
• I’m not prepared for this morning’s meeting.
• The fridge is empty.
• What’s the point of anything?
• I need to catch up on emails.
• Emotional eating.
• I haven’t exercised. I need too.
• Guilt.

Overwhelm. During these full times mind traffic can get the best of you.

It saps you. But only if you let it.

The highway for all this traffic is you. You get stuck in the mind traffic, thinking your locked into a traffic jam of data.

But you’re not. You’re in the driver’s seat. Lift into another perspective. Begin by returning home. The home inside of you – your heart. Without returning to a balance point, how can you possibly balance the data? You can’t. You get lost. I get lost. We all get lost.

Return to balance. Return to your heart. Return home to your driver’s seat.

Now that you have a clearer definition of what mental health is, explore and experience more mental well-being and mental wellness.

Take a moment. And shift. Reclaim your calm using this stress relief technique for pain and stress reduction.

Shifting My Mind: A Bioenergy Exercise

1. Take a moment to breathe. Use your focus and place it upon your breath. Breathe normally.

2. Follow your breath into your chest, your heart space where good memories, events and places are stored. Think a good thought. Remember a happy memory. Something that made you feel good.

3. Let that good feeling move through you. Let nothing else matter but that feeling. Continue to breathe. Allow that little bit of good feeling to grow with every breath.

4. Feel yourself shift back to the center of your heart. Continue to breath the good feeling.

5. Welcome home.

Cultivate your mental health. Return to your heart and re-discover what has meaning for you. Mental health is a healthy mind that’s thinking, feeling and acting in alignment with what is meaningful for you.

Lucrezia Mangione works with heart-led helping professionals, healers, caregivers, and highly sensitive people who care. Care for yourself, harness inner power and change pain to insight, healing and proactive solutions that cultivate health & well being. To learn more explore her website and sign up for an ezine subscription at http://www.HandcraftedHealth.net/newsletter.