Do you feel helplessness? Do you want to be more effective? Do you want to get good mind health? Are you having finance problems?
Up until now you have been letting your mind do what it wants, and that is not effectiveness.
Getting mind healthy starts with changing what you are doing now.
Your mind and most of human knowledge up until now has been focused on doing one thing which is always helping you survive. However in morden times, it does not do this very well. As the environment has changed with improvements in quality of life, some of the old threats are no longer an issue, but you mind or brain has not yet adapted.
Plum: Your mind almost always magnify the bad. That in turn makes you feel worse.
After a while of going through this misery, you gradually start doing nothing even if the things that caused you to be in that situation have greatly changed.
This is called learned helplessness. The mother of helplessness is pessimism. If you are pessimistic you are at risk of helplessness.
Learned helplessness is a phenomenon that psychologists the world over recognise, which was discovered between 1964 and 1965 by Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Bruce Overmeier.
Unfortunately the practice of medicine in its efforts to help you, has focused most of its energy on helping reduce misery rather than prop you up. There are no happy medicines. In fact if you look at medicines like antidepressants. The very name itself tells you to an extent what the medicine tries to do, (which does help a lot of people by the way), but they are designed to try and get you to what is essentially an not depression (whatever that is!!).
But this is not enough as bulking you up is better as it also protects you. Some people have begun to understand this and promote prevention. Easy to see this with examples like smoking. Because most people agree that amongst other causes the habit is a cause of cancer. As such instead of trying to give people cancer drugs after the disease has struck, a lot of effort is put into prevention with things like smoking ban, increasing the price and so on. This is prevention.
In other words, they build your system up by you not starting from a weak position where your system is already poisoned by smoking. The same concept is applied hear at plum brains with mind health. The idea is to build you up not just to reduce your suffering.
This starts by knowing that helplessness is a problem for you mind
Plum: Optimism is the opposite of helplessness and this can be learned. Teaching people to realistically challenge their pessimistic explanatory style and to learn optimistic explanatory skills reduces anxiety and depression and increases resilience.