What is Mental Wellbeing? 7 Important Questions To Know

If WellBeing is a Body, then Mental WellBeing is the Brain.
If WellBeing is a Vehicle, then Mental WellBeing is the Engine
Bottom line, it's ESSENTIAL

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What is the definition of Mental WellBeing?

World Health Organization (WHO) defines it as:

a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. ⁽¹⁾

My definition to Mental WellBeing is:

Wellbeing is the state of having mental activities that are functioning towards the greater good of the individual and others, are immune to activities that lead to damage to oneself or others, and are adaptable
WELLBEING TOOLKITS

Mental Wellbeing Criteria:

As you can see from these 2 definitions and others if you looked it up, there are common criteria for the Mental Wellbeing:

1- It’s a state:

So, for the most part, assessing your mental wellbeing is going to be subjective, and luckily, it’s you to do the judgement

2- Activities:

It’s an active process, so if you’re alive then you’re using your mental activities. The key is to have those activities work for the benefit of you and others. Not the other way around.

3- Adaptable:

Having an adaptable feature in your operating system to adapt and adjust to viruses or other threats that are penetrating the system, is key for having a solid mental wellbeing

What is the difference between mental health and mental wellbeing?

Mental Health is the absence of Mental illness, while Mental Wellbeing is the upgrade of Mental Health. To understand this more, let’s check the Wellbeing Spectrum

The Wellbeing Spectrum

There are 4 different levels to your life in terms “WellBeing” which are ill-being, abnormal, normal, and wellbeing

Normal: Mental Health

Let’s start with Normal to better understand this. Normal here translates to having good mental health. This is you having no mental health disorders like phobia, or anxiety or depression

Abnormal: Mental Illness

This is when you have a mental health disorder or disease. This is when you have anxiety or depression and start your treatment

Illbeing: Mental Illbeing

This is the worsening of your abnormal stage. This is where you start thinking or doing more damage than what’s your mental health disorder is causing.

This is where someone is being treated for depression, but he starts thinking suicidal thoughts or attempting ones where they couldn’t be expected with his depression level and treatment

Wellbeing: Mental Wellbeing

This is the upgrade of the normal stage. This is where you add immunity and adaptability to your mental health.

Having good mental health is or should be your normal, and when you add more tools like immunity to negative thoughts, and adaptability to the constant change in your life, that’s mental wellbeing.

To make this more tangible and understood by you, let’s use the windows example.

Normal stage would be to installing windows in your devise. So normally you should have a functioning operating system (mental health) for your device (body)

Abnormal when it crashes down because of a virus from visiting a suspicious website. When you scan it and delete it, it goes to normal stage again

Illbeing is when you keep visiting suspicious websites and downloading unauthorized programs that could lead eventually to disruption of your operating system

Wellbeing is when you add more protective tools to your system after installing, so you add a strong antivirus software, add or schedule a weekly scan, add security filter or blockage to fishy websites or results, etc.

Even if you have those tools in place, if you still visit those infected websites, you’ll find yourself going down the spectrum from wellbeing to normal by having less effective functionality (decrease in loading speed), then to abnormal by having few crashes, then to illbeing by having complete system failure.

What are the Mental Wellbeing tools?

Having the right tools is how you improve your mental wellbeing, and below are the tools we’ll cover in detail later, so make sure to stay tuned.

Mindset:

Okay, if Mental Wellbeing is the windows of your body, then Mindset is the codes that make windows work in a specific way

That’s why having the right programming to your Mindset is key in living in the Wellbeing side of the spectrum

Productivity

Productivity is the key habit you need to build in your life. It’s the tool that helps you get things done efficiently and effectively. So it’s the key one to have to be able to build the other habits.

That’s why I specialize or dedicate special attention to productivity as a habit

Learning

We said it. Change is the constant thing in life, and one of the key solutions to adapt to change is to learn how to do so.

Stress Management

If there’s a change, then there will be STRESS. Obviously, the good stress won’t be an issue. The focus will be to the negative stress that has a negative impact on our life and can causes us to be on the illbeing side of the spectrum

That’s why we’ll learn some tools to use to identify, and manage stress the right way

Why is mental wellbeing important?

Again, one of the important questions to ask Yourself. Why should mental wellbeing be a priority to you?

And as I did before, instead of listing the benefits of having a good mental wellbeing here, I’ll leave it for you to answer that for yourself.

See, if I’m coaching you, I’ll make sure you understand the definition of Mental Wellbeing, the Wellbeing spectrum, and the main tools in this toolkit, and I’ll ask you this:

What do you think you’ll benefit if you worked on your mental wellbeing this month?

Start typing some benefits here and it’ll be emailed to you

Who should learn about mental wellbeing and improve it?

Same as what we said in the “What is Wellbeing” article, it’s EVERYONE. The only difference here is that Mental Wellbeing is mostly done at the individual level. You can check that by looking at the tool.

With 99% confidence, you are the responsible person to program your mindset. You’re responsible of creating your own productive system and having all the needed tools to get things done right. You’re the responsible person to learn how to adapt and overcome challenges.

The remaining 1% in my opinion is for authorities (parents, employers, schools, governments) to minimize the stressors as much as possible to minimize the stress levels within their community.

How to assess and measure your mental wellbeing?

For the overall Mental Wellbeing, you assess yourself with the following question:

On a scale from 0-10, 0 being low, and 10 being highest, how would you rank your mental wellbeing today?

You answer this question today, come up with corrective actions, implement them and track in a week or a month and answer the same question again.

On the level of mental wellbeing tools, you can assess yourself both “objectively” and “subjectively”.

Example: assessing productivity can be objectively for having the tools or not, and can be subjectively for assessing your feeling about time management skills.

What should I do Next to improve my Mental Wellbeing?

You can follow the same next actions mentioned in the “What is Wellbeing?” article but for Mental Wellbeing.

1- Create a goal in your system to improve your mental wellbeing

1.1- To improve my mental wellbeing by 1% in 2021

2- Create project(s) in your system that you can implement

2.2- Create a productivity system

2.3- Read and Apply 3 books in 2021

3- Identify next action(s) that you can do today

3.3- Purchase the Getting Things Done book

3.4- 3.3- Purchase the Mindset book

3.5- Apply for the productivity training program

4- Visit our WellBeing Toolkits Community:

Ask a question, suggest an idea, ask for support, give support, or simply initiate a conversation

5- Check the recommended books page for good reading

Conclusion

Mental wellbeing is the head of the wellbeing body, or the engine to the wellbeing vehicle, so it’s an important dimension to start working on
Mental wellbeing is the highest level in the Wellbeing Spectrum followed by Mental health, then Mental illness, then Mental illbeing
Main tools are mindset, productivity, learning, and stress management
There is a bi-directional or 2-way relationship between Mental wellbeing and the rest of the wellbeing dimensions
Mental wellbeing is for all individuals to consider, work on, and maintain
It can be assessed both subjectively and objectively

References

“Mental Health: Strengthening Our Response”. Who.Int, 2021, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response. Accessed 31 Mar 2021.