Personal Skills for the Mind

Looking after your mind is every bit as important as looking after your body in terms of maintaining your overall health.

A growing body of studies suggests, too, that many of the same things are important for physical and mental health. These factors include sleep, diet and exercise.

But there is more to keeping your mind healthy than simply eating well and exercising. Increasingly, the suggestion is emerging that some form of self-reflection or meditation can be extremely helpful in maintaining a healthy balance in your mind.

The ‘placebo effect’ is the well-documented phenomenon that people can recover from illness simply because they think they are being treated with an effective drug.

It is perhaps the best known example of the mind affecting physical health. But there are many more, and you can learn more in our pages on:

Did you know that how you think can affect whether or not you achieve success?

Research at Stanford University suggests that the crucial aspect is whether or not you think that you can change. This is known as ‘mindset’, and there is more in our page on The Importance of Mindset.

Like the previous section, this section focuses on harnessing the power of your mind.

This section, however, addresses particular skills that require you to use your mind, rather than overall approaches to change or improvement.

However much you may look after your body, sometimes you become ill.

You catch colds, or even develop more serious illnesses. The same goes for your mind.

Some people are more prone to mental illness than others, but nobody is immune.

Considerable effort has recently been put into reducing the perceived stigma of mental illness, but many people still find it difficult to acknowledge that they are having problems.

Anxiety should not be confused with status anxiety, which is perhaps more a feeling of missing out, or that others are better, or are doing better, than you.

Our page on Managing Status Anxiety provides advice on how to manage this.

There are also other conditions that affect your mind—or at least, your brain, and particularly how you perceive the world and process information. You can find out more about specific learning difficulties in our pages on Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and Dyscalculia. You may also be interested in our pages on Understanding Autism Spectrum Disorder and Understanding Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

One issue that is often associated with mental health problems is loneliness. It is not clear whether being lonely may lead to mental health problems, or if mental illness is very isolating—or both. However, overcoming loneliness can be an important first step to avoiding mental health problems. There is more about how to do this in our page on Loneliness.