Children's Mental Health - Our Innate Superpower

The Island • August 25, 2020

 This is a guest blog post written by Mariella O'Brien


What is mental health?

I am a Mental Wellbeing coach and mentor and in the months before lockdown I visited primary schools around York and Leeds delivering Mental Health workshops as part of the My Mental Health Rocks campaign. The first question I asked the children was “What is mental health?”. Immediately the negative connotations of these two words came spilling out. “It’s when somebody is always sad”, or “It means that you are somehow broken” and so on …


I am passionate about clearing up this misunderstanding and changing the perception of mental health in society especially amongst the younger generation. In reality our mental health just like our physical health is our superpower, it is part of our innate wellbeing, it is how we built!


It's our Super Power!

During my workshops I help the children understand mental health as consisting of 5 superpowers or systems. These are our natural wisdom, resilience, confidence, creativity and calm. These superpowers are something we are all born with, we all have the same amount of, we can always rely on. They can’t ever be broken or taken away from us, we can always rely on them.


Let me share with you what each of these superpowers are and help clear some misconceptions.


Wisdom

Wisdom is our inner guidance, intuition or gut feeling that keeps us on the right track. It is not something we acquire with experience and age, it is our birthright. We have the same wisdom within us that we can see in nature. Let’s take for example an acorn - how does it know to grow into an oak tree? How does a seed know how to grow into a particular kind of flower? How does our body know to heal a cut on our finger? Wisdom is our own in-built navigation system.


Resilience

Resilience is our innate capacity to bounce back from difficult situations. It’s the force within us that helps a toddler get back up on their feet when learning to walk. Resilience is what keeps us moving forward, no matter what we experience. It is on autopilot, always working for us behind the scenes. We often hear that we need to build resilience in young people, when in fact we only ever need to help teach them to trust the innate resilience they already have.


Creativity

Creativity is our natural ability to express ourselves and creatively deal with any bumps in the road that we might face. We often grow up believing that we are not creative because we are not very good at drawing or crafting or acting, where as the opposite is true - we are creating our experience of life 100% of the time through our thoughts. Creativity is built into our system. It is our innate ability to have fresh thoughts and ideas.


Calm

Our Calm superpower / system is our natural ability to be content and relaxed. It supports us to self-regulate and move from one mood to another. Imagine a pebble thrown into a still lake, the impact from the rock creates ripples in the water. If you observe the ripples for a while you will notice how they gradually disappear and the water surface returns to stillness. There is nothing for us to do to return back to our state of calm, it is built into us, it happens naturally.


Confidence

Confidence is our natural ability to try things out knowing we are always ok no matter what the outcome. Our confidence allows us to give things a go. Even if you think you are not a confident person have a think about areas where you already display confidence. You are confident when you talk to your family and friends, when you practice your favourite hobby or if football is your thing, when you kick a ball around.


So, I hear you ask, if we have these innate superpowers that are a permanent and rock-solid part of us, why do we sometimes feel like we are not supported by them? In fact we sometimes feel the complete opposite of resilient, calm and confident. We sometimes feel disconnected from our mental health because it gets covered up by our thoughts. Our thoughts create our feelings and our experience of any situation, 100% of the time. We create our own experience of life! How empowering is that!


This might sound crazy or confronting but just get curious and play with it. Remember for example, last time you were stuck in traffic how frustrated that ‘made you’. But you can probably also think of a time when you were stuck in traffic and enjoyed singing along to your favourite tune or radio station. Same situation, different experience. So it can’t be the traffic causing you to feel a certain way, it’s you thinking about it in that moment that creates your experience of the situation. That is liberating as we no longer have to see ourselves as a victim of circumstances or external events.


Naturally our experience fluctuates as our thoughts are transient, they come and go at a rate of 70 000 to 100 000 per day (both conscious and subconscious)! It is very normal to experience a full range of emotions. The key is not to fear, judge or try to change them - they come and go by themselves. It's all a natural part of the human design, we don’t get to be stuck in the same state of mind all the time, we have the innate capacity for a fresh thought in every single moment. Knowing this means there is less for us to do. If you find yourself in a low mood, there is no need to fix or change it. Remember moods are created by thoughts and thoughts come and go - its part of our human design.


I will leave you with a link to an online workshop myself and my colleagues from the My Mental Health Rocks Campaign recorded last term for primary school children during lockdown. I hope you find it useful: https://youtu.be/lnVmPCv0yzI

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