Thriving Mind

How to cultivate a good life

Jenny Brockis

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780730383673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Discover the amazing science for reclaiming your humanity and being happy!

We all feel it sometimes— all of us, we really do. Tired, hopeless, stretched too thin, a little scared about the future, a sense that something important is missing. Modern life is unbelievably stressful, and it comes at us from all sides. But there's also an upside to the modern world: in our age of better information, technology, nutrition, and healthcare, we're using our smarts to develop a science that can help us feel happier and more connected to our lives—and it really does work.

In Thriving Mind, Dr. Jenny Brockis draws on deep research and 30+ years of helping people solve persistent and serious problems to provide science-based strategies for overcoming them—as well as the habits to help avoid them in the future. Walking you through common issues such as loneliness, stress, relationship breakdown, loss of social connection, and mental health issues, Dr. Brockis shows that there are practical ways to alleviate or even banish these difficulties—and to reclaim a sense of meaning and vitality you might not have felt in years.

• Discover how happiness works and how to engage your full spectrum of emotions and mindfulness to achieve it
• Harness your natural biology (it's worked for thousands of years!) for better energy, resilience, and mood
• Connect with your superpower of social and enrich your relationships with compassion, respect, and courage
• Take full control of your life by giving up on counterproductive short-term solutions and the blame game

Whatever your worries, it's important to remember you're not alone, and that by using the tools and strategies outlined here, you can take real scientific steps toward reclaiming your humanity—and start doing the things today that will bring a brighter tomorrow.

Part I
Disruption

Embracing opportunities to change

Somewhere, somehow there came a tipping point where despite all our cleverness and desire to forge a bright shiny future we forgot something important. The one thing that enables us to bring our best selves to everything we do. The one thing that helps us successfully navigate life’s ups and downs. The thing that best prepares us for ‘what’s next?’

That one precious thing? That we are human; fallible, vulnerable and, as Professor Dan Ariely likes to remind us, ‘predictably irrational’.

Because being human brings responsibility:

• to take care of ourselves, and to maintain good physical health and mental wellbeing in order to think well, make good decisions, learn effectively and feel happy
• to nurture the relationships that bind us to one another as communities, stronger bonds creating greater cohesion, collaboration and trust
• to take care of the planet and our environment
• to embrace activities that engage our curiosity and stretch our imagination, promoting greater creativity and innovation. Where would we be without music and dance, the arts and the inspiration nature provides?

In part I of the book I unpack some of the elements that have contributed to the rising tide of anxiety, depression, overwhelm and loneliness that are leading to greater unhappiness, poorer health and rising dissatisfaction at work.

If you are in that place where you too are worried about what the future might bring and want to be best prepared to move forward with confidence and some element of certainty, stepping back to examine where we have veered off course provides a starting point for recovery and restoration.

1
Don’t panic, but dinner is burning in the oven

When caught up in our too‐busy bubble we become blind to how it happened and too time‐poor to fix it.

J.B.

Imagine waking up every morning feeling refreshed, energised and excited for the day ahead, enjoying that quiet sense of satisfaction that all’s well with the world. You’re happy, healthy and thriving in your work and life.

How wonderful. But what if your reality looks a little different? Like last Tuesday.

You oversleep, so you don’t have time to pick up a coffee on the way to work. Some rude jerk cuts you off in the traffic and you get into the office to face an angry colleague who blames you for some document that didn’t get sent to the right person. You’ve got 10 reminders on your phone telling you you’re late for the monthly staff meeting, and you’ve just noticed that in your haste to get out of the door you blindly picked up a pair of shoes that seemed to match … but not in colour.

All this along with the usual daily barrage of emails, phone calls, meetings, more meetings and a couple of extra meetings before you can get onto your real work. And always the undercurrent of economic uncertainty, worrying about your job security and chronic work overload. There’s no time to scratch yourself let alone take a toilet break or have lunch, and you’re feeling more than a little frazzled.

It’s been said work is good for us but when did it become acceptable, expected even, that it’s okay to dedicate your life, like a sacrificial lamb, on the high altar of work, forgoing all that makes you feel truly fulfilled and happy? How is it that in this time of golden opportunity and possibility, when we are witnessing so much positive change — from new digital technologies to advances in health care, healthy food and education — that it seems nigh on impossible to carve out enough time and energy to engage with all the multiple facets of your life that make you feel complete?

Why are so many people experiencing such high levels of stress that it’s impacting their health and wellbeing? Rising levels of mental health issues and burnout are a massive problem in almost every workplace.

The new norm of constant, fast and radical change has resulted in an alarming increase in maladaptive behaviours and thinking patterns. Much of the time we’re over‐worrying and overthinking, pushing harder all the time to get everything done against a backdrop of chronic fatigue. Little wonder we sometimes get it wrong and end up feeling overstretched, worried and exhausted to the extent that our physical health and mental wellbeing are put at risk and the threat of burnout looms large.

Too tired to care

When overthinking becomes the norm, worrying about making a mistake, meeting deadlines, sorting out relationship conflicts and differences of opinion can weigh you down. When you’re time poor, trying to clear the backlog of so many competing thoughts leads you to feeling under continual pressure. No wonder you’re tired and stressed.

If you’ve abandoned self‐care — because who’s got time for that? — can you remember a different time when you used to get to the gym regularly, always caught up with your friends on a Friday night, and felt in control of your life and destiny?

It can be frustrating if you want your life to be different, better, and maybe you don’t like the person you’ve become: tetchy, irritable and sometimes a little unkind. You may hear yourself saying things in the heat of the moment that are horrid, uncalled for and deeply wounding. Even if it wasn’t your intent, you know just how damaging this can be to your relationships.

You know you’re better than this, and capable of so much more. But for now you’re too busy papering over the cracks, hoping others, including your boss, won’t notice.

And what if you are the boss? Are others giving you that sideways glance, wondering why you’re not delivering on the potential they previously saw in you? Were they mistaken in their estimation of and trust in you?

Most destructive is the nagging seed of self‐doubt, knowing that staying on this hamster wheel without knowing how to get off means perpetuating and nurturing this monster of our own making, leading us to an uncertain and unhappy future.

It’s time to take a step back to examine what got us here and what can be done to rectify the situation. Because it doesn’t have to be like this.

The solution lies in recognising what’s been getting in our way and knowing what to do about it, while understanding we’ll find no one‐size‐fits‐all answer. The big issues include:

• lack of mental wellbeing. We’ve lost sight of what makes us happy.
• overwork, stress and burnout. We’re not managing our wellbeing.
• a sense of disconnect and loneliness. We’re losing real human connection.

Let’s take a look at each of these issues in turn.

Lack of mental wellbeing

Your mental wellbeing is what allows you to work to the best of your ability, to cope well with the normal stresses of everyday life, to feel productive and useful, knowing you are contributing towards something bigger than yourself. It’s what makes you happy. Which is why in this increasingly complex and demanding world taking good care of your mental wellbeing matters. It keeps you safe from falling foul of mental distress and the risk of developing a mood disorder such as anxiety or depression.

How you show up each day depends on a variety of factors: how well you slept, how much you have on your mind and what’s worrying you (did you remember to take the washing out of the machine to dry last night, because you wanted to wear a particular shirt today?). Juggling all these sorts of concerns on your mental to‐do list is normal and something you do every day. But this is about recognising when the warning light is flashing on your mental dashboard to indicate you’ve reached your limit, and we all have a limit.

Avoiding the saf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Disruption
• Part II: Happiness
• Part III: Thriving
• Part IV: Human
• Conclusion: The times are a‐changin’, and so can you
• A note from Jenny
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement