People with good mental health tend to have a variety of effective coping skills for dealing with life's difficulties. As noted, life can be hard. When it is, what you do about it has a major impact on your future mental health. How well you cope can get you started on the road to recovery or throw you into a tailspin that will eventually lead you to even greater difficulties. In mental as well as fiscal fitness, the rich tend to get richer while the poor only get poorer. 

The poor (those with inadequate, over-used or ineffective coping skills) respond to painful or anxiety-provoking situations with a variety of tactics. There are too many of these to include a complete list here but some of the better-known ones include:

• shutting down
• avoiding
• chemical or behavioral addictions
• rationalizing
• perfectionism, over-assumption of responsibility and people-pleasing

The psychologically rich (those who were born with or have developed a talent for coping with life's pain in highly adaptive ways) are more likely to use the following skills to meet life's challenges:

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Few guideposts in life can serve your mental health as well as following your own values. This is harder than it sounds because most people just assume that they do follow their moral compass, even when all evidence is to the contrary.

Spiritual teacher Carolyn Myss has said that if you want to know what's really important to someone, take a look at their calendar and their checkbook. Those are pretty good yardsticks, so take a minute to look at your own activities and where you invest your financial and emotional resources and ask yourself if they truly reflect your highest values.

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Neither is paying off your credit cards or having a big nest egg. Those things are nice, but they are not the meaning of life.

People pursue material goals of all kinds believing, hoping, that once these goals are achieved, then they can be happy. In the 1960's, psychiatrist Eric Berne wrote about this tendency to tear through life, measuring our progress by what we can mark off our to-do list. Berne called this phenomenon "Waiting for Santa Claus," because it had that quality of a gradual build-up of anticipation followed by a short-lived period of celebration and enjoyment, followed by a sinking feeling of disappointment as the world returns to whatever normal is, followed by the creation of a new event to anticipate (next Christmas?).

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There's this wonderful poem about six blind men looking at an elephant that clearly illustrates how our perspectives guide our conclusions. Our cognitions can get fused to the external world so that we can't tell the two apart. This phenomenon is called cognitive fusion, and the blind men in the poem have it in spades. According to the poem, one of the men touches the elephant's side and proclaims that elephants are like walls, another touches the tail and decides elephants are like ropes, and so on.

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For a long time I didn't work out because I lacked the motivation to get up and start moving around. In spite of watching that needle on the scale creep up and up and up over the years, in spite of the news flashes I read about the health risks associated with belly fat and those associated with a sedentary lifestyle, when it came to working out I just didn't feel like it. I wasn't motivated, so I didn't do it.

Lack of motivation is a common complaint in the therapy office so I had had the opportunity to watch lots of other people struggle with it, too. It was like we were all waiting for this feeling to come and settle over us, this feeling of motivation, some sort of combination of energy and desire that would finally move us effortlessly toward our goals.

If only.

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Emory University is exploring how the regular practice of compassion meditation can help students reduce anxiety and depression and become less reactive to averse situations. They're finding that the benefits of the practice are strongly correlated with the amount of time that students spend on this activity. Low practice; low effect. More practice; more effect. It's a lot like exercise in that way.

You don't have to be a student to benefit from practicing compassion meditation. That's just the population available to Emory as research subjects. Anyone can build a buffer against the stresses of the world by beginning to engage in this simple practice on a regular basis.

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Training your mind to stay focused on the things you appreciate is one mental health practice that has been proven to lead to increased happiness. Although happiness is not perfectly synonymous with mental health, the mind that nurtures an attitude of peace and gratitude is better able to maintain its health than one that chews on life's hardships and inequities.

Mindfulness tells us that the activity in the mind can be observed dispassionately. We can notice our thoughts without engaging them, or believing that they are real. To some extent, we can live in the world instead of in our minds. In other ways, what is in our minds influences our moods, creates and closes off options, shows us how to proceed and what to avoid. We can watch the mind, as we would a river flowing past with a life of its own but we can also choose to channel its course.

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In China, women used to bind their feet to keep them from growing because small feet were thought to be attractive and symbolic of women's femininity, frailty and dependence on men. The tiny little childlike feet that resulted from this practice barely worked well enough to support women throughout their lifetimes. They may have been cute and petite during a woman's teenage years, but by the time she reached her full adulthood, they were painful stubs, unable to bear the weight of an adult human.

We all adopt habits and attitudes in our childhoods that served us very well as children, but that can't support our lives as adults. We all learned behaviors that gave us our best chance of getting what we wanted from the world, the world that was pretty much comprised of and controlled by our parents or caregivers when we were small.

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Whenever you experience problems in relationships or in life, it's easy to assign blame to the other person or to factors outside of your control. After all, we see things through our own lenses, right? So it's really difficult to see things from the perspective of another person who may be in conflict with us.

Of course, it may be the other person's fault, or the fault of factors outside of your control, or nobody's fault. However, good mental health practice says that there is a huge value in identifying your own contribution to the problem, even if that contribution is a very small part.
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When I worked in addictions, we used to tell our clients that addiction was a chronic, relapsing disease. I think just about anything we do regularly can be thought of as chronic, even if it's not a disease. It's a rut. It's a habit. It's you know...well...chronic.

For a lot of years, I was in the rut of not taking care of my body. Then, I made a commitment to myself to change that and I did. For awhile.
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