On December 5th of this year, the city of Reno in Nevada approved an initiative to provide free mental health services to 200K residents. The first of its kind across the United States, a teletherapy service is intended to save lives and provide emotional support for individuals affected by COVID and its related economic impacts. Mental Health Therapists will administer therapies to provide nonjudgemental guidance to people that would otherwise falter.
Having spent over 2 years traveling and spending my workweeks in Reno looking after a client engagement, I have personally seen how economics and opportunity have influenced the rise and subsequent fall of the living conditions for locals. By mid-2017, Reno attracted investment, gentrification, and an upswing in dining, tourism, and entertainment. Since then, the disruption of COVID and subsequent drop in travel and discretionary spending have decimated economic growth and it seems psychological well being also.
As evidenced by the Reno example, Mental Health is in large part affected by how people cope with factors outside of their control e.g. such as economics. By far, the most important factor toward maintaining a strong mental sense of well-being and resilience to distress and conditions outside of a persons control is self-esteem.
To organize the details of this post, I invested time cross-referencing my personal experience elevating my personal self-esteem via the SELF-CARE methodology defined on this site against “The Psychology of Self Esteem” by Nathaniel Brendan, published in 2000. Following are my first hand notes, and his scholarly observations for your benefit.
A mentally healthy person is said to have the capacity for growth and a high tolerance for stress. In my personal experience, the ability to handle stress and endure uncertainty, discomfort, and risks follows a degree of self-trust that result from overcoming adversity and thereby increasing self-esteem as a byproduct of successful effort.
Throughout my career, the degree of accountability and expectations that I inherited increased with ambition and demands for higher compensation. It is increasingly difficult to handle challenges with a low or inconsistent self-concept (self-image + self-esteem) because discipline does not follow a fearful or victim mindset. Succeeding through trial and error increases your confidence and self-esteem, but can also place you in a position to take on more.
The correlation between mental health and high self-esteem is more than significant. The health of the mind can be measured overall by a person’s ability to function as they feel they should. This is not a measure of intelligence, but instead, your ability to reason and regulate actions despite the odds being against you. As your self-esteem rises, your capacity to handle stress improves accordingly. An unstable or compromised mind under such circumstances does not function.
Furthermore, there is a strong correlation between motivation, behavior, love, and high-quality relationships with higher self-esteem. Self-esteem is a factor that serves as a form of self-appraisal and it can also serve as a form of motivation, as suggested in the post on what is your why. Your behavior, and your capability to overcome is based on effort, for example as the outcome of your SELF-CARE appraisal.
Brendan elaborates on the faculty of reason as being the chief characteristic that enables a person to overcome emotional paralysis. Reason requires cognition (discovering what things are, attributes and properties) and evaluation (how things relate to you, what should be sought as a matter of value).
In following the process of SELF-CARE, you exercise reason by acknowledging the emotions and experiences that your values regulate. Your values are based on acquired beliefs that are programmed into you by way of your conscious thoughts and experiences. Beliefs, personal interpretation of experiences and external influences impart values to you and when violated or validated, regulate emotions. Conscious thoughts function as the gateway to emotions. Patterns in experience can also trigger emotions by way of association. In any case, SELF-CARE is a way of understanding how emotions impact you by going back to the source of all of this, your mind and its functions.
Your values regulate emotions that occur as experiences in response to events. With SELF-CARE as your guide, you exercise Presence of Mind, evaluating your emotional state in response to your experience with rationality as your guide. As a cumulative subconscious belief about your worthiness and your ability to handle the challenges that life presents, your self-esteem is your guide as to whether or not your process of thinking is in-line with reality. You can feel this to the extent that you are self-aware. SELF-CARE serves this purpose specifically and identifies the effort required to operate at your best in light of this awareness and taking action through effort.
To the extent that you have adopted irrational appraisals for yourself, you can become self-destructive or practice self-destructive habits and in doing so, delude yourself into psychological fraud: the belief that you are in control. The way out is to shift your way of thinking from passive to active, using the effort to pull or push you forward. Putting a plan in place and working through the difficult situations empower you as a person and increase your sense of self-worth.
Personal efficacy and self Worth come from discipline, not through delusion or coping methods. Your ability to reason and make conscious decisions are the determinants of your functionality. If you do not accept this, you will feel anxious, dysfunctional, and will not operate up to your potential and suffer.
In choosing not to act, you forfeit the right to high self-esteem. Growth often comes follows learning from a painful loss. As mentioned in an earlier article on the subject of the Master Formula of Success a process can always be changed along with goals, but your dedication and effort to be applied are certainly under your control.
No single factor can influence your life for the better than self-esteem, while poor self-esteem is your indication that you need to change your relationship to reality and that your willingness to understand yourself and your situation has been led astray by fear and surrendering control.
It is argued by Brendan in the aforementioned book that your quality of life and well-being depends upon your ability to be in touch with reality and this constitutes a lifelong pursuit. This principle requires a person to monitor their thoughts and attitudes that are adopted in response to those thoughts. How a person evaluates themself as a result of internal evaluation and external effort develops self-esteem as a product of how you live.