The Mental You - Curbing the Bad

Whenever one mentions mental health, what comes to mind is mostly the bad stuff. So this is what we shall focus in this post but hopefully, I can put a positive spin on it. Rather than seeing it as just gloom and doom with no chance of getting out of the pit, we can view it as improvement needed. We will take small steps to tackle the change one step at a time.

Start with Small Steps

In my previous post on improving our diet, I talked about starting off with just changing the breakfast loaf from white to wholewheat or adding an apple a day. Then as we feel that we can change more stuff after seeing the small improvement, we make another small change and so on. For mental health, we shall attempt to do the same and make it into a project that is specific and attainable.

Preventive Action - Take a short Pause

Before going into problem solving, perhaps a more important task is preventing the issue from happening in the first place. I suspect that many of us have been in that place where we make the comment, "How I wish I did not do that...." Impulsive behavior is not easy to handle, especially since it may be related to our personality. We do it at the spur of the moment, when we are driving and someone cuts into our lane, when we are talking and someone suddenly interrupts us, when we are focusing on an activity and a person suddenly disrupts our concentration. It get worse if we have been thru a long day and our brains are just roasted.

Frankly, there is no good way to go about doing this except to acknowledge that these disruptions exist and is perfectly normal. Start with admitting that these things will happen, and the person doing it to us is doing it unintentionally and bears no malice to anybody. One way is to take a deep breath and perhaps count 1 to 10 before making any sudden moves. Sounds simple but taking action is another thing. Just need to remember that the few seconds pause will help make difference between "just another normal day" and something that we will regret for the rest of our lives.

Next post: a major contributors to the bad - Stress

Time Management or is it really Project Management?

We have been told since young by others that in order to do something well, we need to have good time management. As one who leads projects for a living who knows a thing or two about this, I will say that time management is a fallacy. Purely speaking, time management (just like managing people) refers to managing time in which we control time, i.e. we can accelerate it (to make it go faster), slow it down, or to stop time. We can do this with a lot of things but we cannot manage time - it continues to chug along, whether we like it or not. If you were to ask me the time and my answer is, say 9:00am, that time is already gone because it is 9:01am when you continue with what you are doing. Time is like a freight train or a subway that we can only latch on to and hope we can do things within the allotted time. Ask the student who needs to submit the paper at 11:59pm Sunday night or the employee who need to submit the report Mon morning 9:00am. In truth, what ...

The Mental You - Reducing Stress part 2

Just like there are always 2 sides to each story (the good and the bad), we can tackle issues in 2 ways - either head on or perhaps we can do something opposite altogether. The previous post is primarily concerned on how to overcome stress by reducing it. Another way is to focus on something totally unrelated to stress. So, rather than looking at fixing the bad, we focus on the good such that there is little room for the bad. Let's work on this together... Positive Thinking What do you see if you turn on the news, or start looking at social media? More often than not, aside from the beautiful people and cute cats, the news is mostly gloom and doom. There are wars and rumors of wars, climate change due to global warming causing floods, and other disasters, earthquakes at various parts of the world. So, it's no uncommon for us to no longer see the world in rose-tinted glasses but glasses with murky lenses. And yet, to reduce stress, this is the one thing we must do - to think ...

Parenting

How did you do it? This question has been asked by many of my friends and colleagues when they found out about my children. We had initially thought that what we went through is typical. But as we talked to more and more people, it is only then we realized that the journey is not so common after all. Singapore has been ranked amongst the top countries in the world by PISA, short for the Program for International Student Assessment that is under the OECD umbrella. In some years, it is actually ranked number 1. In other words, to be able to get through the Singapore education system is difficult enough as it is. The Journey to College By the grace of God, both my kids did well in the system by being selected into the Gifted Education Program (GEP) - for the top 1% of students - and then getting into Raffles Institution (supposedly the number 1 school in Singapore), and achieving straight As in the Singapore-GCE Cambridge "A" levels, and then receiving offers from a few o...

Paving the Wei

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