Hongkongers! Do you consider yourselves to be happy? If you take a look at the research data the Hong Kong of 2022 is in fact not a city which enjoys good psychological health. A long-term piece of research compiling statistics on the mental health situation of Hongkongers in the years 2003 and 2020 has found that the rate of Hongkongers suffering from depression or similar conditions in 2020 or from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder has increased by more than ten-fold in comparison to 2003. It could be said that the overall mental health situation is not ideal. Given this situation, how can we go about finding happiness as well as our own psychological health? Have we unwittingly become indifferent, allowing ourselves to let go and drop all pursuits so that only amusement is left? Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described a person who pursues such a life as “The Couch Man” Which means a man who passes his days lying on a couch in idle amusement. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, this attitude is clearly despised. He also thought that such an attitude would not necessarily bring us psychological health. The three facets I would like to talk about today are: Growth Mindset, not resigning to your fate living in the present with mindfulness, and looking for a sense of meaning. I will talk to you about how we can help ourselves to establish our psychological health in the kind of situation we find ourselves in. If you’re watching this channel for the first time then hello, I am your host, Peter. On Five-minute Psychology, we share psychological knowledge in the hopes that psychology can become part of the intellectual equipment of Hongkongers bringing us greater ability and wisdom in order to respond to the questions posed by work, society and life. If you wish to study psychology to enhance your psychological calibre remember to like, subscribe to, and share our channel. Let’s go right to today’s topic: three factors to help establish your psychological health. The first is Growth Mindset, not resigning to your fate. This idea of Growth Mindset comes from the psychologist Carol Dweck who suggested that there are two main mindsets that people have. The first of these is a Growth Mindset. This means that we believe in our abilities and that everything we achieved is acquired through unrelenting effort. The opposite to this is a Fixed Mindset. This refers to the belief that our abilities and achievements are determined at the time of birth by your genes and family background. If for example you take a look at on-line discussion groups you will see many views of this Fixed Mindset. What for the most part is the problem with a Fixed Mindset? A Fixed Mindset tends create self-fulfilling prophecies. The reason why you don’t try new things is because you think there is no point in doing so. If you don’t try new things, you won’t make any progress. To some degree, your Fixed Mindset will become even more fixed. Several years ago, the spirit of being like water was very popular. It makes quite a lot of sense, really. Human beings are, by nature, very flexible creatures, like water but if we think that we are inflexible then we could make ourselves become rigid. Conversely, when we have a Growth Mindset this doesn’t mean that we will have unrealistic expectations but that we will push ourselves to our limits to get the most out of life. I think that life much of the time is like playing poker. Some people get dealt a better hand than you have in terms of family background, how they look and intelligence. ctually, these are all factors that predict pretty good achievements over a lifetime. However, good poker players do not put too much emphasis on getting a strong combination of cards every time but play as well as they can regardless of what cards they hold. This is a Growth Mindset. You might ask: what can we do increase our Growth Mindset? Here’s one method: next time when you conclude that you are not the kind of person to do a certain thing — for example, when you need to do artistic things you might instinctively think that you are no artist — then ask yourself a question: “Have I reached this conclusion after really trying to do something artistic?” You will find that much of the time you are setting limits for yourself. This is the unwillingness to resign ourselves to fate that a Growth Mindset gives us. To some degree, there is a very strong relationship between this mindset and mental health. Of course, you will discover that even though you can understand it intellectually it is very hard to put into practice. Much of the time, our very powerful self-doubts and negative moods will rob us of motivation no matter what we do. At this point, I would like to tell about a second method for establishing psychological health: mindfulness. There are many definitions of this word and different groups will have their own way of explaining what mindfulness is but, on the whole, it is an attitude which deliberately makes use of our attention to notice the present moment and to accept it. How can mindfulness manage our negative thought-patterns and moods? Take this as an example: when you start a new job you may well feel a lot of doubts about yourself. For instance, you might say to yourself: “I’m not the right person for this. I’ve always been a failure.” You will find that thoughts such as these pop into your mind. But when you practise mindfulness you try and take a step back to observe these thoughts. You begin to say to yourself: Okay, I notice that I am feeling useless but I make the choice not to act in accordance with these thoughts. As a result, you obtain an intellectual freedom. Of course, it’s hard to give you a full understanding of the essence of mindfulness in just a few words because to some degree mindfulness is not simply a matter of intellect — it is a skill that you need to experience personally. TreeholeHK has prepared a series of free materials and courses about mindfulness If you are interested, you can go to the description box for details in order to understand this attitude to life called mindfulness. We have spoken about Growth Mindset and not resigning to fate. We have also discussed mindfulness — living in the present to help us accept reality. You may, however, have a question. Okay, I understand the mindset as well as what mindfulness is but it is still very hard work to make any changes because human beings are inert by nature, being resistant to change. This explains the importance of some kind of search for meaning. People who have done a course at TreeholeHK or friends of mine frequently say to me that they can’t find their own meaning or that they feel quite meaningless. Actually, we could try stepping back to reflect for a moment on this issue. It seems as if all of us think that meaning is important. What, however, is the meaning of meaning? Why do we need some meaning? There was a psychologist called Viktor Frankl. He gave a clear answer to this question. Let me first say something about this psychologist’s background. He was in fact a Jewish psychologist who lived during the Second World War. Because of his ethnic background, he was seized by the German army and put in a concentration camp. While in the concentration camp, he never forgot his calling as a psychologist providing a little psychological therapy for his fellow prisoners. He found that the people most likely to endure life in the camp were not the strongest or the most intelligent but those who felt their life had meaning and something to search for Why is meaning so important? If you make a comparison purely between pleasure and pain committing suicide may be a rather wise move in a concentration camp because every day you are faced with endless suffering and basically you have no way of knowing whether you can ever get out. The only motivation that would enable you to go on is to have something to look forward to. You probably think that our environment cannot be compared to that of a concentration camp. Although Hongkongers face many challenges there is still a certain distance, I believe, from the situation in a concentration camp. Is this sense of meaning still applicable, then? I believe it is. Because, if you think about it for a moment, in this normal life we still experience pains, large and small. Then, there is stress at work. And no matter how fortunate you are you still have to face birth, aging, sickness and death. As we undergo this painful human life we need to give ourselves a reason for putting up with the pain otherwise, it is easy to give up one’s goals and lay them down. I don’t think too many people would disagree with the idea that meaning is important but the crucial thing is how to go about finding meaning for oneself. It’s hard to know what your meaning is just by watching a video because my life is not the same as yours. However, there are some exercises that I think can help you in general. Try to imagine yourself in five years’ time. What would your ideal life be like, if everything went just as you wanted it to? When to some degree you can map out the kind of person you would like to become this can bring you a certain degree of looking forward to the future. This is a sense of meaning, where you have something to search for. In other words, psychological health has many facets. It is not simply about keeping away from stress and you will gain psychological health We may even ask ourselves why we can’t become the kind of person who can bear stress. A fairly good model for psychological health is perhaps one in which you can train yourself to tolerate greater stress and for the sake of certain things which are genuinely meaningful to demonstrate your ability to put up with the stress. This model of psychological health is more relevant to Hongkongers. Finally, I would like to share with you some lines of poetry that I like very much. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I don’t think I need to say much about “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”. There are many things we cannot change in our actual environment but much of the time, the spirit we yearn for is to be able to do our utmost to make the best use of our energies and abilities and to change our present circumstances and break out of our fate. You will find that it is actually very hard to differentiate between two things: what is reality and what is the status quo? Which things are actually written into your fate? If you can’t shake something even a fraction, no matter how hard you try or through your best efforts, you will find a way to change It's hard to differentiate between the two mainly because that is a form of wisdom by itself. These are my views about establishing good psychological health in Hong Kong. I hope this video has given Hongkongers some new things to think about and some new directions. This is what we at TreeholeHK hope to achieve. Thank you for your time today. We hope you enjoyed this video. See you next time!
