5 Factors That Inhibit Mental Growth

We humans sometimes seek spiritual guidance so that we can make our lives more enjoyable and smoother so that our lives are not filled with mere questioning and suffering.

This search for spirituality is directly related to another problem that fills the receptions of psychologists: the need to feel satisfied with oneself, to feel peace and well-being about who we are in this world. All human beings long for this kind of psychological well-being.

The search for psychological well-being and spirituality

We should meditate on a few psychological pieces of advice related to spirituality and psychological well-being. The roots of this advice go beyond the beliefs or religious ideas of our ancestors, but they have also been confirmed by scientific psychology.

Mental and psychological well-being is not something completely random that a person can achieve completely without effort or participation. Achieving such a functional level requires effort, determination and dedication.

For this reason, the search for mental and psychological well-being requires commitment. We need to be fully committed to that process, as this is the only way we can really find what we are looking for.

In this article, we discuss five factors that can completely destroy psychological and mental well-being.

1. Jealousy

We often see a difference between “healthy envy” and “negative envy”. But if we look at the explanations of both of these, we will find that they do not differ much from each other.

It is normal for us to feel momentary jealousy when we encounter something. There is no need to steal another’s personality from this feeling and the person does not wish the other person evil. But if this momentary feeling lengthens and intensifies over time, it may eventually include the above-mentioned aspects as well…

Jealousy causes us to feel inadequate, bitter, or sometimes even aggressive. Envying another means acknowledging our own loss and fulfilling our own importance.

2. Self-comparison with other people

Comparing ourselves to other people is a piece of our childhood. Competing helps us achieve success. On the other hand, this in turn causes us to strive for “normality” based on societal criteria and expectations.

Unfortunately, we are not told often enough or convincingly enough that each of us is a unique individual with his abilities, character traits, and circumstances.

We often compare ourselves to the people we think are in a better situation than we are, and we don’t pay attention to ourselves. This increases our sense of frustration.

As a result, when we compare ourselves to others, we distance ourselves from our own reality. This creates false myths and sometimes also causes a deep sense of failure. Proven, this again opens the door to envy. Naturally, however, we never wanted to feel this feeling.

However, if we want some kind of role model or example for our lives, we must always keep our own values ​​in mind and create an example that fits those values. It must be adaptable to our own life situations, and it must be realistically achievable.

3. Constant Judging of Yourself and Your Own Life

Constant Criticism of oneself and other people leads to bitterness and neuroticism. Because of that, we may begin to judge other people, and this is usually done by people who are frustrated with their own lives.

We should strive to live without analyzing everything. Life is not a mathematical formula that we must solve, but rather a continuum of experiences and emotions.

4. Idealization

Idealization of people and situations is very common. We often do it either in retrospect or as we think about the future.

The difference between goal creation and idealization is relatively clear. Setting goals helps us focus on our actions. Idealization, on the other hand, causes us to either blame ourselves for mistakes we have made in the past or be unable to approach our future goals in a realistic way.

In the same way that we idealize the past, when we think that everything was better before, we also idealize the future and imagine that we are able to reach certain situations that take us away from our catastrophic present.

5. Pessimistic or catastrophic thinking

The opposite of the ideal way of thinking is pessimism, or catastrophic thinking. While it may sound strange, both of these thought patterns can be specific to one and the same person.

If we tend to idealize things and then find that our desires were not fulfilled, feelings of lack of control and depression may take over from us. Lack of control may drive us into depression and we may begin to think about the world pessimistically.

For this reason, we need to adjust our expectations to reflect reality. We must do this as much as possible so that we do not create in our minds an unnecessary hope that can never correspond to reality.

Strengthening psychological well-being, welcoming mental well-being

By avoiding the five destructive factors mentioned above, we can achieve mental well-being. We can always strengthen this state through, for example, meditation, mindfulness exercises, or other techniques that can increase our awareness of our own bodies and relax our minds.

In order to achieve all of this, we need to eliminate distractions. This means that we should get rid of things that are not beautiful or usable, as well as things that only have room in our past. Identifying these things in our minds can help us minimize them. We can thus ignore nasty thoughts and thus pave the way for positive practices such as meditation.

Dramatizing our problems only makes them worse. Exercises such as meditation and mindfulness help us to be present in that moment, and they allow us to organize ourselves so that we are ready for life. Most importantly, avoiding such harmful factors will help us achieve the mental well-being and clarity that will allow us to see our problems as things outside of us.