Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks a psychiatrist
and I make mental health education videos.
Today, I'm talking about seven positive psychological traits
that research shows improves your mental
and physical wellbeing.
Number one is resilience.
Resilience is the ability to persevere through
or bounce back from adversity.
Being resilient doesn't mean that you aren't set back
from the adversity
or that the adversity wasn't harming to you.
Resilience means that no matter what the circumstances
or consequences that you suffered,
you're able to recover from it
and adapt to whatever changes the hardship created.
You can move on, in other words.
Number two is optimism.
Optimism is the degree to which you expect good outcomes.
Even if the outcome is ultimately not what you wished for,
the next time around you maintain hope
that you will still have a good outcome this time.
What does this really look like?
This is not the same as toxic positivity.
I talked about that in a previous video
that I will have linked to this one.
Toxic positivity is when you dismiss negative emotions
and replace them with false reassurances.
You're trying to stuff down any and all negative emotions.
With optimism, you can experience negative emotions
while also having hope for a positive outcome.
Here's an example.
I lose my job because my company downsized
and I'm crushed because I love the job.
And I just spent a bunch of money on a vacation
and house repairs.
Now I'm scared that I may go bankrupt
if I don't find another job really soon.
With COVID and supply chain issues,
the hiring market in my field is pretty bad.
I don't think there's a ton of jobs for what I do.
Now, I feel awful, but I can also remain hopeful
that I will find something despite the odds.
I can also start to think of other things that I can do
if I can't find something in my field.
I'm planning ahead just in case.
If I did not have much optimism,
I could already start anticipating how I will lose my home
and how I'll never find another job like this one
and I'll be miserable.
If I were toxically positive,
I wouldn't acknowledge that I'm upset or and even angry
that the company didn't think I was valuable enough
to hold on to me.
Instead I would say, it's okay, this was meant to be.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,
and because of these factors
I'm happy and content in my current circumstances.
When really I'm not. That's just what I'm telling myself.
So optimism is actually more balanced than it may seem.
Number three is personal mastery.
This is having confidence in your ability
to handle your life stresses or problems.
It's the belief that I've got this
even if you don't know how you've got it.
You believe that you can get there somehow.
I've talked in a previous video
about dependent personality disorder.
People with dependent tendencies
lack this self confidence on a deep level.
They need people or institutions to support them
through even the most basic tasks or responsibilities.
So they very much lack a sense of personal mastery.
Number four is coping self-efficacy.
This is related to personal mastery
but it's your confidence in yourself
that you can activate useful coping mechanisms
when the time comes
to navigate through difficult situations.
It's not like you need to know
exactly how to solve a problem before it happens
or have all these tools at the ready.
This trait is your belief
that you can pull from your internal resources
when you need to.
So you can think of personal mastery
as having a sense of independence and control
and efficacy as believing you have the competence
to tackle challenges.
Number five is social engagement.
This is a measure of how connected you are to others,
the quality and closeness of those relationships,
how much time you spend with them,
and how much pleasure you derived from them.
This last point is important.
You can be a tag along with someone
who is more social than you and hate every minute of it.
And if left to yourself,
you would spend most of your time in solo activities.
If that's the case,
going through the motions of being social
may confer some small benefit
just because you're interacting with others.
But if the experience is not really desirable
and not satisfying for you,
then this trait isn't something that positively impacts
your wellness.
Number six is spirituality and religiosity.
Spirituality is your personal beliefs
that go beyond physical or material things.
Examples of these kinds of thoughts
are believing in a higher power,
contemplating the meaning of life,
or believing in a higher level of conscious awareness.
Spirituality is personal and singular.
It's about you.
Whereas religiosity is how your beliefs interact
with an organization or a group.
With religiosity comes social connection.
Both of these traits are associated with greater wellbeing.
The last trait, number seven, is wisdom.
Wisdom has several features.
Some of which are being able to make decisions,
gaining insight from new information
acknowledging and tolerating uncertainty,
tolerating different value systems,
and being open to new experiences.
This sounds a little like maturity
and there is some overlap
but maturity is psychological development
that happens over time with life exposure,
like a ripening fruit.
But wisdom is the skill of applying knowledge
gained from experiences to make sound decisions
that produce good outcomes.
These psychological traits are not all or nothing.
They're more on a spectrum
of where you have strong features of them or not so many.
Some of these traits are inherited
and some are learned from your environment
and some are both.
Regardless of how you get them
and how much of them you have, they are changeable.
And there are things you can do
to boost the ones that are not strong for you.
What I'm talking about is based on concepts
from positive psychology, which is a branch of psychology
that developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s
by psychologists, Martin Seligman,
who also is known for developing
the concept of learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness is where you feel powerless
as the result of repeated failures, oppression or trauma.
Sounds like a good topic for another video.
Are you up for it?
But for today, the point is positive psychology came about
as a way to change the focus of mental health
from analyzing and fixing pathology
to promoting a broader concept of mental wellbeing.
Psychiatry is slowly adopting a similar stance
by offering interventions
that focus on strengthening the individual
so that you can live a happier, healthier life
in the setting of having an illness.
We use the phrase wellness within the illness.
There are many interventions
under the umbrella of positive psychology,
some of which overlap with approaches
like cognitive behavior therapy.
One big umbrella intervention
is identifying and maximizing your strengths.
I'll talk more about that in future videos.
But just to give you something chew on for now,
here are two quick exercises
to improve your mental wellbeing.
One is listing three good things each day.
This is an offshoot of gratitude journaling.
It's not quite the same because you're not focused
on what makes you feel thankful.
Instead it's simpler than that.
Just recognizing three good things that happen to you.
The second exercise is listing three funny things each day.
These don't have to be things that made you laugh out loud.
These can be something that happened to you
that made you smile or laugh inside your head
or found amusing.
Even if your amusement only lasted a couple of seconds.
Even if you think you are so annoyed with life
and haven't found anything funny in two years,
I'll bet if you lower the bar for what's funny
and look at what amused you or made you feel uplifted,
I'll bet you'll notice that with this exercise,
you'll find more things amusing.
You may even start laughing out loud at things.
Why would this happen?
It's not because you magically transform
from a curmudgeon to a jokester.
This exercise has aspects of mindfulness
that make you become more aware
of your inner mental experience.
Putting yourself into a self-aware state,
even if it's only for 10 minutes
to reflect on your day in a neutral way
opens your mind to have more positive experiences.
It's like priming the pump.
If you keep looking for the humor, you'll find it.
And once you start finding it, it keeps flowing.
If you don't believe me, curmudgeon,
I challenge you to see if you can go one day
without finding at least one thing amusing.
It can even be something that someone else's expense.
It's okay.
If you saw someone trip and lose their pants
or accidentally fart in public,
low brow humor is okay because you still found it amusing.
If you're isolated and have no interactions to observe
watch TikTok, not mine, 'cause I'm not funny.
You can also watch this video for more on toxic positivity
and stay tuned for more on positive interventions
that promote wellbeing.
Thanks for watching, see you next time.