What You Can Do To Fight Mental Health Adversity?
- mp50081
- Mar 9, 2021
- 5 min read
The hardships in your life that might be due to adverse childhood experiences or even mental health issues. As a result you might be having a hard time moving forward in your life. What You Can Do To Fight Mental Health Adversity?
First of all let’s ask the question, What is the meaning of Adversity?
What Is Adversity?
Adversity is any kind of hardship, difficulty as well as misfortune that you may deal with in life.
It can be caused by childhood experiences that caused trauma. It can even be caused by a setback such as a job loss or even when a relationship is ending.
Adversity can be the result of living with a stigmatized illness such as bipolar disorder.
What Are Some Different Types Of Hardship?
It turns out that there are at least six types of adversity or hardship you can face.
Types Of Adversity Include:
Physical Adversity:
A perfect example of physical adversity is physical disability.
A quarterback breaks his spine during a football game. As a result he’s suddenly stuck in a wheelchair and facing a number of challenges. This drastic life change may leave him feeling stuck because of his limitations.
Another example that’s overlooked is chronic pain. Some people with bipolar disorder have episodes that result in unexplained pain.
When this happens everyday tasks become harder to manage.
Mental Adversity:
When you’re facing mental health adversity it can limit you. If you have bipolar disorder you might face hardship due to mood swings.
Extreme highs caused by mania can lead to problems with focusing and less of a need for sleep.
When you having extreme lows caused by depression, you might be facing low self-worth or even feelings of gloominess.
Emotional Adversity:
When you’re facing emotional hardship it can ruin your sense of self-worth. For example if you’re facing physical or even mental hardship it can drain you emotionally.
In our last post, “How To Advocate For Your Mental Health”, we learned that self-worth or self-esteem was self advocacy’s twin flame.
If your facing emotional hardship, it’s hard to overcome it when you have a low sense of self-worth.
Social Adversity:
Being able to socialize with other people is essential. Sometimes it’s hard because of social phobias caused by anxiety.
Social anxiety is a common form of adversity. It has many causes, including childhood trauma from being bullied. Also, social anxiety is a common symptom of a mental disorder such as anxiety disorder as well as bipolar disorder.
Spiritual Adversity:
A big part of facing adversity comes with feeling defeated spiritually.
When you’re facing hardship that’s hard to overcome you start questioning the universe.
Questions such as “why me”? or questioning your faith in yourself or in whatever higher power you believe in.
Financial Adversity:
Financial hardship is something most people around the world face. It’s made worse by another underlying hardship such as bipolar disorder.
Stress caused by financial hardship is gasoline that can fuel the bipolar grease fire. For example a common symptom of bipolar disorder is anxiety and it can be made worse by money problems.
Here’s a related post, “The Six Types of Adversity”.
How Facing Something Adverse Changes You?
When you fight adversity of any kind it can break you and also leave you feeling stuck.
It might make you feel defeated as well as ruin your self-esteem. There are questions you might be asking yourself, “How will I bounce back”? or “What am I going to do”?
Why Is It Important To First Overcome Social Adversity?
Being in an adverse situation forces you to leave your comfort zone.
For example you might feel stuck in an adverse situation, but have a hard time fighting it because of social anxiety. As a result your comfort zone is being alone and this is hard in an adverse situation.
Social anxiety causes you to fear being judged by others, which might cause you to avoid asking for help.
This might be the result of adverse childhood experiences from bullying. Also it might be due to something else such as a phobia.
Adversity forces you to reach out for help, create social networks and also makes you realize that you can’t overcome your struggle on your own.
When you have the courage to face something you fear, you’ll notice you don’t fear it anymore. Over time you’ll build self-esteem and also learn self-control.
Here’s a related post, “How Adversity Can Impact Your Success”.
Tips For Fighting Mental Health Adversity?
When you build or get back your self-esteem as well as self-control it’s time to fight adversity head on.
Here Are Some Tips:
Surround Yourself With Positive People:
A vital part of fighting mental health adversity is to be careful who you surround yourself with.
The people around can indirectly affect your mood as well as outlook. They can be supportive and encouraging when you’re facing an uphill battle.
It helps to be around people who accept your flaws, mistakes as well as your quirks. Sometimes they might be the same way as you and might be fighting the same battle.
Here’s an example. In the 1994 movie “Forrest Gump”, Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise) is saved by Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) in Vietnam after he was wounded.
It was part of Lt.Dan’s destiny to fight and die with honor. When Forrest saved him his destiny wasn’t fulfilled. Along with being angry and traumatized, he also lost his legs.
He may have had PTSD, which includes symptoms such as anxiety, depression as well as self-destructive behaviors.
Lt. Dan felt stuck and lost. His life went through a downward spiral until he was reunited with Forrest. Little by little they became close friends and this helped Lt. Dan turn a corner, especially when he became Forrest’s first mate on his shrimping boat.
After they both faced hardship together and finally achieved success. Forrest and Lt. Dan formed Bubba Gump Shrimp.
After overcoming so much adversity Lt. Dan finally thanked Forrest for saving his life. Then he made peace with himself.
It helps to have good friends when fighting adversity.
Write About It:
It helps to write down your thoughts and it don’t matter where you write your thoughts out. It can be in a journal or it can be a blog, the process of writing your emotions down helps you to reflect.
Benefits of writing include self expression as well as reflecting on your current situation.
Spend Time In Nature:
In this blog we talk a lot about the benefits of spending time in nature.
In a previous post, “How To Fight Depression”, we learned that spending time in nature and being exposed to sunlight boost mood. As a result serotonin, which is a brain chemical that boosts mood is released inside your brain.
While facing adversity, you’ll also be facing stress and anxiety. Even something simple as spending 20 minutes a day in nature can make your stress level go down.
Start Investing In Yourself:
Facing adversity is an excuse many people use to not better themselves.
Facing adverse situations happen to us all, but how you handle it makes a big difference. Many people will face hardship and they may face defeat because of it.
What they need to do is invest in themselves. As a result they can emerge as stronger and wiser people because of adversity.
We had a post, “How To Overcome Limiting Beliefs”, about how our own toxic beliefs about us and our situations limit us. By challenging these beliefs and then letting them go you can become more confident.
Here’s a related post, “4 Proven Ways to Overcome Adversity”.
How Do You Overcome Adversity?
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