BEING A HAPPY SENIOR
took a lot of effort!

PREVIOUS: Disorders #2a

SITE:  7  vitamin supplements that improve mental health

1. NORMAL (Healthy – cont.)

REVIEW: tools that improve Mental Health
• Value yourself     • Take care of your body (food, rest, exercise, sleep…)
• Learn how to deal with stress     • Quiet your mind  • Practice gratitude
• Surround yourself with good (healthy) people
• Set realistic goals   • Look for ways to change routines (travel, learn….)
• Express kindness to some else (but NOT at your one expense!)
• Practice saying NO!   • Get help when you need it!    (MORE ideas….)

NOTE: ACoAs can achieve a large portions of mental health by getting the right help & consistency using all the tools available to us, throughout our life!

DEFENSES
Our coping mechanisms develop organically in response to frustrating, difficult & painful situations / experiences. They function like a human firewall, a psychological immune system needed to defend against hurtful & abusive relationships, while hopefully allowing healthy / nurturing relationships to pass the protective walls. (Posts: Boundaries .… weak, rigid, healthy)

At their best: Defenses are important to know about because they strongly influence how easily people can form & maintain healthy relationships, while being able to reject unhealthy relationships. Knowing when to be defensive & when not to be – is key for health.
We need them to keep us safe from people who mess with us, but also need to be able to relax & let the wall open up, to keep the capacity for innocence, availability & healthy connections. (Posts: Trust …. over. under, healthy)

At worst: Defenses are harmful & debilitating when they turn into psychological armor solidified into stone or iron, not allowing trust & spontaneous interactions with positive PPT (people, places, things) in our life.

 MATURE Defenses (Healthy)
• Altruism = You derive true pleasure from helping other people—and if you couldn’t, you’d get depressed
• Anticipation = When you know you’ll be faced with a challenging situation, you try to plan ahead so you won’t be overwhelmed
• Distraction = When something upsetting may happen or has already happened, consciously deciding to put off distressing thoughts (which add anxiety) by temporarily focusing your attention on something less threatening

• Humor (not humiliating, mean, sarcastic….) = You try to see the funny side of situations, even when they’re stressful or potentially upsetting
• Identification (healthy version) = When in new or scary situation, you temporarily use characteristics of an admired/respected person you don’t automatically/naturally have (EXP from the Enneagram:  Picking up positive characteristics of the Number at the end of your Type’s “Security Point” arrow) 
• Introjection (healthy version) = When you acknowledge a missing skill or trait you value – you can absorb inputs from the environment & make them a part of yourself
• Sublimation = when you’re feeling anxious, you do something constructive such as cooking or woodworking
• Suppression – If you’re bothered by something or someone, you keep the lid on your feelings if letting them show would interfere with your goals.

HERITABILITY (the likelihood of inheriting a trait) is a population-wide statistic which assesses the proportion of variation in the population one can attribute to heritable genetic variation.
— If heritability is 1.0, all of the variation is genetic – offspring are just a linear combination of their parents
— If heritability is ~0.0, then there’s basically no correlation between parents & offspring. While it’s a population-wide statistic, it can be informative on an individual level. EXP: the heritability of height is ~0.90 in the Western world. (More….)
See Survey CHART  re. Genetic influence on human psychological Traits – which can give a rough sense of the “pull” that biological inheritance will have on an individual. Biology may not be destiny, but it is definitely probability.