Last week was Mental Health Awareness Week in England, so today I’d like to take the opportunity to write about mental health a bit.

Have you noticed that often our mental health can be negatively impacted by just a few people or a few events? Even though, in reality, the number of people who love us and care for us is much greater than those who dislike or resent us, and the number of good events in our lives each day usually outweighs the number of bad ones.

Why do most people overlook the good things or the many good people in their lives and instead focus excessively on the bad things or the few negative individuals, to the point that it harms our mental health?

If we were to explain this from a psychological and economic perspective, the main reasons for such behavior are:


1. Marginal utility of good vs. marginal utility of bad: Similar to the happiness we derive from eating delicious food, the joy from the first bite is not the same as the joy from the fortieth bite. When we have many good people around us every day, the value of happiness we gain from “consuming” one more unit of goodness or a good person diminishes (which is the concept of diminishing marginal utility). Conversely, the negative utility from “consuming” bad things or bad people, which are already few in our lives, has a significant impact on our happiness.


2. However, the concept of marginal utility alone is not enough to explain why we give so much weight to the few bad things and negative people in our lives. We need to incorporate psychological theories.


The first theory is loss aversion — people tend to dislike losing more than they like gaining. Therefore, anything that has a negative impact on us tends to be weighted more heavily than the weight we give to the good things or good people in our lives, often by a factor of two.


The second theory is impact bias — because negative events in our lives occur infrequently, they tend to stand out compared to the good events that happen more often. It’s similar to how most people over the age of 30 can vividly remember where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001, but they may not recall where they were or what they were doing on August 11 of the same year. This is because negative events are rare, making it more likely for us to think about them or visualize them clearly compared to the many good events and good people in our lives.

Moreover, since most people experience more good things than bad, our expectations for good occurrences are much higher than our expectations for bad occurrences, which can lead to greater disappointment when bad things happen in our lives.


3. So what can we do to reduce the disproportionate effect of negative events on our mental health?


One is to practice gratitude exercises — which involves writing down or listing the good things and good people we have in our lives. Writing this down can help us see clearly, rather than just counting the good things and good people in our heads, which may lead to inaccuracies. We should feel thankful for the many good things and good people in our lives rather than feeling bad about the negative things and negative people.


Two is to change our mindset by telling ourselves that the things that happen occur because we are brave enough to make them happen. If the negative events arise from our courage to do something unpopular or from being our authentic selves, we should take pride in our bravery to be ourselves, even if the outcome is not good and may cause others to be angry or dislike us.


And my final piece of advice before I head to work is to remind ourselves that we don’t know what the long-term impact of the negative events or negative people will be. Often, the negative experiences we encounter in life can lead to positive outcomes in the future that we never anticipated. Think of life as a marathon, not a sprint, and experiences are what you gain when you don’t get what you want. This perspective can help us view the negative events and negative people in our lives through a new lens.

Take care of your mental health before taking care of the mental health of those around you.

Thanks for the information from thaipublica.org