Understanding Mental Health: A Framework For Your Wellbeing
Protecting your wellbeing starts with knowing its parts
“Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.” — Mason Cooley
How did you feel when you woke up this morning? Hopefully, you slept well and woke up feeling refreshed and ready for the day ahead.
Or maybe you hit snooze a couple of times, then stumbled up with little chance to scan your thoughts and to check how you were feeling.
It’s likely you follow a similar routine each morning — a degree of autopilot for the day ahead. Shower, coffee, phone and go might be a familiar morning drill.
If that’s so, you might not have had a moment to consider the things you’d need for a good day, or to visualise what a good day would look like … for you, and to give a little thought to the things that are personally important.
For many, this is often the case. Besides, what is the roadmap for a good day, rather than just another day? With so much of our time spent responding to daily events … emails, meetings, the needs and demands of colleagues and friends, etc. days can quickly pass with little attention paid to their personal meaning and impact. Like clinging to the tail of a galloping horse, just hanging on is a win in itself.
It’s here that a framework for good mental health deserves a spotlight. After all, without properly understanding emotional wellbeing, we’re less equipped to nurture and safeguard it effectively.
So, this article will introduce a deeply powerful framework for understanding your mental health; an empowering idea applicable to how you support yourself, your colleagues, friends, family, business success … in fact, pretty much everything you do.
If that sounds good, let’s get started.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Just before jumping in, it might help to briefly consider why the topic of mental-health is climbing the agenda.
A recent YouTube suggestion nudged my attention to a clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the epic 1968 science-fiction film predicting a future world full of technology — and the possibilities this might represent, with all those bright, graphical screens carrying out significant tasks and computers driving it all. Whilst we’re awaiting routine, luxurious space travel, it’s perhaps unsurprising that such a projection seemed conceivable at the time.
How so?
Ancient Tools In A Modern World
In 1990, estimates suggested that a greater change had taken place to our environment and social order in the prior thirty years (1960- 1990) than the preceding 300 years (N.B. And this was before the incredible impact of mainstream internet access). Such a calculation sounds fiddly to compile — agreed, but it’s fair to say that we’re all becoming more aware of how the world is changing.
And it’s here that we bump into a kind of paradox: We’re tasked with navigating snowballing change with increasingly complex choices. Meanwhile, the various attributes that underpin individual, family and wider social wellbeing (the things that help us to deal with stuff) e.g. close networks of support, work assurance, eco-stability, etc. appear to be in decline. In other words, the pace of change is accelerating and so are the uncertainties. For many, this is taking a toll. Human evolution takes tens of thousands of years to develop — adapting to keep up represents an endless race, with pit stops for reflection often few and far between. The impact? Conditions like stress, anxiety, depression, and addiction, etc. and all of their associated symptoms are finding new gaps to pop out of the woodwork.
Okay, that’s a soapbox explanation for mental health's increasing prominence, so where to do we go from here in making tangible improvements?
To answer this issue, let’s start with a basic question:
What is a human?
Understanding Needs — The Essentials
“The desire for human wellbeing is the minimum, not the maximum, duty of humanity.” — Idries Shah
It’s a law of all living organisms that, to survive, they must take nourishment from their environment in order to continually maintain and rebuild themselves.
Like all animals, we know that we have physical needs — for food, water, warmth, and shelter — which must be sufficiently met to enable us to survive and thrive. However, decades of health and social research have revealed, for instance, that fulfilling a range of emotional needs is also vital, if we are to stay in good health and feel content in our lives (the concept of innate needs was popularised by pioneering figures such as Adler and Maslow — heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy?).
Human Givens
The term ‘human givens’ (*first coined in 1997) refers to our fundamental physical and emotional needs; along with the innate resources we each possess in order to help us fulfill them. These needs and resources are a form of accrued knowledge that has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and is common to us all, whatever our cultural background.
The human givens model views our emotional needs as overlapping and interdependent i.e. they all need to be met, in balance, at all times. This is a departure from the hierarchy concept developed by Maslow (in later years, Maslow himself began to lose faith in the theory).
Let’s start by taking a look at what these emotional needs are. We’ll then move on to the innate resources that enable us to get these needs met.
Our Needs:
Security: A sense of safety and security; safe territory; an environment in which people can live without experiencing excessive fear so that they can develop healthily.
Autonomy and control: A sense of self-rule and control over what happens around and to us.
Status: A sense of status — in that we feel accepted and valued in the various social groups we belong to.
Privacy: Time and space enough to reflect on and consolidate our experiences.
Attention: Receiving attention from others, but also giving it; a form of the essential nutrition that fuels the development of each individual, family, and culture.
Connection to the wider community: Interaction with a larger group of people and a sense of being part of, and having a role within the group.
Intimacy: Emotional connection to other people — characterised by friendship, love, intimacy, and fun.
Competence and achievement: A sense of our own competence and achievements, that we have what it takes to meet life’s demands.
Meaning and purpose: Being stretched, aiming for meaningful goals, having a sense of a higher calling or serving others creates meaning and purpose.
So here we’ve outlined the basic emotional needs we each need to have met for good mental health (below, you’ll find an Emotional Needs Audit to assess yourself), but there’s an individual element to all of this too.
We all try to get our needs met in one way or another — one person may acquire a sense of status and achievement through their role at work, whilst someone else might dedicate themselves to tending a garden in pursuit of fulfilling similar needs.
The concept of balance is also important when aiming to get these needs met. For instance, consider privacy. We each need quiet time to ponder and reflect; yet too much time spent alone might encourage unhealthy introspection, leading to a lack of connection to others. Likewise, we all require a degree of status in life, but too much status can distort people’s self-perception — consider the tyrannical boss who fails to acknowledge his colleagues’ efforts and struggles …
We all need safety and security, and yet sometimes we need to take a risk — too much predictability can strangle us. Ever felt a longing for the fizz of excitement that accompanies an unexpected party invite, or just something cool and unforeseen happening?
Psychologist Dorothy Rowe talks about one fundamental human need that sums up all the rest. This is the need to preserve and validate our identity — our sense of self. In Rowe’s view, an individual’s greatest fear is to feel annihilated as a person. Yet when our physical and emotional needs are sufficiently met, our sense of self is validated. We will feel mentally stable and well.
… And Our Innate Resources
In its ingenuity, nature has provided each of us with a ‘guidance system’. Enabling us to interact with the environment and meet our emotional needs, this system includes:
• Memory: The ability to develop complex long-term memory, which enables people to add to their innate (instinctive) knowledge and learn
• Rapport: The ability to build rapport, empathise and connect with other others
• Imagination: The resourcefulness to focus attention away from the emotions and problem solve more creatively and objectively (a ‘reality simulator’)
•Instincts and emotions: A set of basic responses and ‘propulsion’ for behaviours
• A rational mind: A conscious, logical set of thought processes that can check out emotions, question, analyse and plan
• A metaphorical mind: The ability to ‘know’, to understand the world unconsciously through metaphorical pattern matching (‘this thing is like that thing’)
• An observing self: That part of us which can step back, be more objective and recognise itself as a unique centre of awareness apart from intellect, emotion, and conditioning
• A dreaming brain: Rest and recharging that preserves the integrity of our genetic inheritance every night by metaphorically defusing emotionally arousing expectations not acted out during the previous day
A Formula For Wellbeing
This model of emotional needs and innate resources outlines an essential part of what it means to be human. That’s to say, what we need in order to be mentally healthy (emotional needs) and nature’s ingenious guidance system that helps us to get those needs met (innate resources). These are the ‘human givens’. With the basic elements of our needs and our resources presented like this, a framework for good mental health emerges.
• If our needs are being sufficiently met in balance, we will experience good emotional health — we won’t suffer mental distress.
• When our needs are not well met, we struggle with emotional difficulties and consequently, can suffer mental, as well as stress-induced, physical illness.
• The way we use our innate resources to meet our needs determines our physical and emotional health, both individually and also within our family, work, cultural and global contexts.
Our Needs In Context
We all respond to events in different ways and attribute meaning to the things that happen in a manner unique to us. And so, we experience our needs as being met (or not) according to the meaning that we attribute to these events, not just according to what happens.
For instance, you’ve probably heard of (or know) someone who feels financially insecure despite having far more money than most of us would reasonably need. Yet it isn’t the amount of money one has that determines whether one feels rich or poor, it’s that person’s belief about how much money they need. And if, for instance, that person’s sense of status, or competence is closely tied to their financial worth, the amount they accrue is often irrelevant — of greater importance might be that it’s at least as much (or more) than their peers!
So What Does This All Mean For The Workplace?
If an optimised organisation is your goal, not to overstate it — everything. As eminent psychologist Joe Griffin explains, “Organisations are living social organisms; if their needs are met, they will thrive.”
Likewise, an organisation (i.e. people) that doesn’t have its needs met will be limited in its ability to adjust and adapt to its environment. The upshot? Forward-thinking leaders and managers have a vital responsibility — investing attention in creating the conditions that enable employees to make a decent return on personal investment.
Nate Boaz (Senior Managing Director for Talent Strategy and Leadership Development, Accenture) sums it up well:
“The war for talent is over. The employee won. They demand from us the same level of choice and service as they do as consumers. Millennials are less interested in pensions and other benefits like equity or stock options. They value choice, autonomy, growth, and purpose.”
The impetus to nurture emotionally healthy organisations is backed by a growing and compelling evidence-base. In years gone by, companies often considered mental-health provision as a tick box exercise in social responsibility — akin to a feel-good bolt-on. However, the returns on investment for businesses that foster mentally healthy workspaces provide a striking financial case. For instance, measures indicate that mental health-related presenteeism (attending work whilst ill, thus performing poorly) costs employers up to three times the expense of mental health-related absence. So the time to act is now.
We’ll take a look at how to apply the framework and principles with your colleagues and workplace in a follow-up article. Meantime, please feel free to use the Emotional Needs Audit below — I hope your results might offer some interesting insights into where things are for you right now.
Call To Action
For more about developing human management skills, supporting your colleagues for peak alignment — and to hopefully make an invaluable contribution to young people along the way (proceeds will support the development of a children’s mental health project), please visit: https://opentogrowth.de
