Mental Health

• When it comes to mental health, our society approaches it like we did with physical health 50 years ago. We only think about it when something goes wrong.
• We benefit from approaching mental health like we invest in anything else in our lives ([[finances]], [[relationships]], careers, [[Fitness|physical health]], etc), where one builds wealth in this area by continuous, conscious investment.
• Be [[Mindfulness|grateful]] for all the people and things you have. Accept you’re not in full control of your destiny. Success depends on luck. Luck is a function of surface area. More experiences generate more serendipity.
• Lots of little good things is the path to happiness. You want frequent boosts not rare big stuff.
• Maintain strong social ties. Social [[relationships]] boost happiness. Sharing amazing experiences with those closest to you is as good as it gets.
• Be around nature. Have some houseplants as they improve mood.
• If you have trouble reading internal signals, try debugging yourself.
  • Retrace your path to actions: Examine your behavior and identify the feeling. Ask yourself what story are you telling yourself that causes those emotions. Then, examine the facts and adjust the story to impact your emotions.

Aversion

Aversion is any sort of mental mechanism that causes us to be less likely to engage in a particular (mental as well as physical) activity, or to do so only with pain, displeasure, or discomfort. Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem (ugh Fields) you might have.

Aversions can be conscious or unconscious, reasoned or felt, verbal or visceral, and they can range anywhere from a slight tinge of antipathy to outright phobias.

There are many reasons folks feel helplessly blankness about understanding a given topic, including:

1. Simple habit. You are not used to thinking about it; and so you just automatically don’t.
2. Desire to avoid initial blunders that will force you to emotionally confront potential incompetence (as with my fear of writing fiction).
3. Avoidance of social conflict, or of status-claims; if your boss/friends/whoever will be upset by your disagreement, it may be more comfortable to “not understand” the domain.

If you’d like to reduce your learned blankness, try to notice areas you care about, that you have been treating as blank defaults. Then, seed some thoughts in that area: set a timer, and write as many questions as you can about that topic before it beeps.

Aversions are [[Problem Solving|decomposable problems]]. Break it down into smaller pieces so that you can think about them separately one at a time and solve them.