Building Healthy Mental Habits for Better Well-Being
When we think about changing our habits, we’re likely to focus on popular resolutions like exercising more, eating healthier, cutting down on alcohol, reducing time spent on social media and screen time, or curbing spending. These are all incredibly worthwhile pursuits, but if you’re looking to mix it up this new year, there’s something else that’s just as worthwhile and impactful for your well-being: changing your mental habits.
What Are Mental Habits and Why Do They Matter?
Have you ever noticed that some thoughts seem to come up repeatedly and that you often wind up in the same loops and spirals? There’s a habitual, repetitive nature to our thinking. We fall easily into mental habits – automatic patterns of thinking that are triggered by specific cues, which often operate outside of our awareness and control. Many of us, for example, might notice our mood shift or act on impulse without realizing that it’s because the situation we’re in is triggering an emotionally charged line of thought.
That’s why our mental habits matter: they play a big role in shaping our emotional landscape and drive much of our behaviour. Mental habits affect the way we experience our realities and can sometimes even mould what those realities are. They affect whether and how we achieve our goals, manage our relationships, and navigate our workplaces. They also affect our mental health, contributing to things like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, substance use, and insomnia.
Our mental habits even affect our physical health, indirectly – through the lifestyle habits we do or don’t adopt – and directly, through our neurochemistry. If we zoom in at the most basic level, our thoughts are the result of electrical impulses and the release of chemicals in our brains. In turn, they can impact the kinds of chemicals released in our bodies. For example, research suggests how we think can impact things like our stress response, our immune functioning, our experience of physical pain, and even how rapidly our cells age. As one researcher put it, “Our cells are listening to our thoughts.” (Ekman et al., 2021; paraphrasing Blackburn & Epel, 2017)
Unhelpful Mental Habits
If our cells are “listening” to our thoughts, most of what they’re hearing is repetitive and negative. Research suggests that, as a species, we have an inherent negativity bias: our brains are wired to notice, pay attention, remember, and respond to negative information more than positive information. There’s a good reason for this: negative information has a higher survival value. In our evolutionary history, our ability to notice and respond to threats in our environments kept us alive. The caveman scanning for danger on the horizon or vigilantly monitoring his social standing was less likely to get eaten or kicked out of the group and left to fend for himself than the caveman smelling the roses and following his bliss. In our quest for survival, our brains have also had to be very efficient and process survival-related information quickly, often sacrificing the accuracy that comes from more effortful, slow, careful deliberation. We’ve developed mental shortcuts to conserve mental resources and facilitate rapid processing, many of which tend to be biased toward the negative. While these shortcuts have helped us survive, they don’t do us too many favours if we want to thrive.
Examples of some unhelpful mental habits (often referred to as unhelpful thinking styles) that can be accurate but more often than not reflect mental shortcuts based on incomplete or biased information include:
Catastrophizing: Expecting the worst to happen or viewing something as worse than it might be. E.g., Assuming someone doesn’t like you because they seem distracted or don’t seem happy to see you.
All-or-nothing thinking: Seeing things as all one way or another rather than recognizing the nuance and gray area that often exists. E.g., Seeing yourself as a failure if you don’t have your diet, exercise, and career all perfectly in order.
Filtering: Dismissing or ignoring some information (usually positive or neutral) and focusing only on other information (usually negative). E.g., Only remembering negative feedback on your work and discounting or ignoring any positive feedback.
Personalizing: Taking things personally – taking full responsibility or blame for things that may not have been within your control. E.g., Assuming your partner’s bad mood is because of something you did when in reality, they didn’t sleep well.
Emotional reasoning: Assuming that how you feel completely reflects reality. E.g., Feeling anxious and assuming it’s because something imminently and objectively dangerous is happening.
Tips for Building Healthy Mental Habits
If you notice any of these unhelpful mental habits in yourself or find yourself falling into that negativity bias, there are many ways to tackle it. You can, for example, work on becoming aware of your automatic negative thoughts, identifying what triggers them, challenging or reframing them in more helpful ways; and cultivating helpful, healthy mental habits.
Here are a few of my favourite healthy mental habits that you can try out for yourself:
Widen your field of view. Whenever you find yourself in a loop or spiral of self-defeating or negative thoughts, imagine you’re a camera and widen your field of view. Ask yourself, “Am I seeing all there is to see here? Is there information that I’m ignoring? Is there another way to look at this?”
Take a many-handed approach. Try to build flexibility into your thinking by remembering that different perspectives can co-exist without cancelling each other out. Imagine holding those different perspectives in many hands. I like this one because it takes into account that our mental habits tend to be triggered automatically – a negative or unhelpful thought may pop up before we can catch it. Instead of arguing with yourself, directing blood, sweat, and tears towards stopping that process, or trying to “get rid” of that thought, you can just hold an alternative thought in another hand. For example, if you tend to catastrophize, it can be helpful to imagine holding the worst-case scenario (“What if it all goes terribly wrong?”) in one hand, a neutral scenario in another (“What if it ends up just kind of manageably okay?”) and the best-case scenario (“What if it all goes wonderfully right?”) in another.
Shift your attention. An important idea in cognitive psychology is that attention directs perception – meaning, what we pay attention to will inform our thoughts. Think of your attention as an important, reality-shaping resource and deploy it accordingly. When you’re stuck in a negative loop, shift your attention towards something that disrupts that loop, distracts and redirects you, or brings you back into the present moment. For example, instead of focusing on whatever is keeping you in a negative thought spiral, get out of your head and into your body by focusing on a breathing exercise, getting outside, or doing a brief burst of physical exercise.
Notice the positive. Along similar lines, go out of your way to notice the positive in your day-to-day. Negative information tends to jump out at us because of how our brains are wired. To counterbalance that, do some rewiring: make a point of looking around every day and finding things to be grateful for or to feel optimistic or hopeful about.
Savour the positive. When you notice those positives – the sun on your face, a warm hug, good feedback, a great meal – don’t just give them a quick once-over: savour. The negatives are sticky; they don’t need help staying in our minds. The positives, however, sometimes do. So, when you feel happy, peaceful, or hopeful, take a few minutes to really sit with it and deepen that feeling. Keep the positive thoughts looping and cycling, notice the physical sensations you’re having, and imagine stamping the situation into your brain or framing it and putting it up on a mental wall somewhere where it will be readily visible in darker times.
Mental habits develop through consistent repetition, and more positively-oriented (or less negatively-oriented) thinking patterns often require more work because they tend not to be our default. Rewiring our brains to create healthier mental habits will take effort, time, and patience. Give yourself grace and stick with it; things will look different this time next year.
If you need support addressing mental habits or unhelpful thinking styles, don’t hesitate to reach out. Our therapists are trained in various therapeutic approaches, including cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based therapy, which have shown to be effective in helping people change their thinking styles and their relationship with their thoughts.
Article used with permission from MindBeacon.