Mental wellbeing

High mental wellbeing is among the main life goals for many. People who have not actively thought about their goals too, when questioned, tend to mention that one of the most important things in life is to be happy. Mental wellbeing is thus a goal that many of us consciously have while others may also harbour the same wish but not yet be aware that they do. A large proportion of each of these two groups tend to use ‘happiness’ and ‘mental wellbeing’ interchangeably.

Although many people place ‘improving mental wellbeing’ high in their priorities, rather a small number say that they actively work on it. What are the reasons for the mismatch here? Maybe we don’t know what to do to improve our level of happiness. Or we may not have the means to detect small gains through our efforts. Even more likely, though, is that we think that our level of happiness is due to fate and not something we can deliberately change.

One big difficulty in trying to make things better is that we may not know what to aim for. Even if can solve that problem, we may not know the correct steps to achieve the desired change. In this maze there are a few small things that may be useful to recognize or pursue. First, that gains are not achieved only by serious effort. Second, that we are not very good at identifying the things that improve our wellbeing most powerfully and should learn to dodge trudging blindly along doing useless things. Third, that we should give as much attention to seeking the methods that work. A crucial component of successful strategies is that they give us a means to assess whether we are on track. We have to keep monitoring from the start whether we are on a wrong track. Let’s take up each of these in order, next.