10 Positive Mental Health Habits

Let’s look at 10 positive mental health habits that you can use to build a healthy mind, as well as some powerful insights into how the mind works.

These habits include the best tips around AND I have a tonne of case studies from people who have successfully used them and have shared their stories with me. I’ll be sharing them all with you.

You might think 10 habits is a lot, but we’re taught almost none of these techniques, and they each tackle a very specific part of our psychology.

These 10 positive mental health habits will help you shine a light on your habitual mental patterns and begin to unwire them. Often it takes a bout of suffering before we realise that our mind is working against us. You can prevent this ahead of time and start living more fully right now. With time, they’ll become habitual and replace all those old habits.

Let’s get to them.

Habit 1: Create a Mind Inventory (10 Positive Mental Health Habits)

Often our thoughts are deeply unconscious and automatic, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to them. In one sense that is true, because they’re so pervasive and chaotic, but in fact the mind is very repetitive and has a large but limited storehouse of thoughts that it repeatedly circles around.

Creating a mind inventory means we begin to sort and categorise everything that’s going on in there. There are categories, patterns, themes. You’ll find that certain situations bring up the same old thoughts you’ve always had. The mind is often predictable.

Perhaps you find yourself ruminating on old friendships and relationships that went wrong. Great, that’s a source of information. Or maybe you think of a close friend and you send them love and gratitude. Great, another source of information. Look out for these trends: this will help you free yourself from their tyranny, because you start to see that they’re automatic and pre-programmed.

2: Be Ready for Catastrophe

Let’s move on to number 2 of our 10 positive mental health habits.

The mind often goes into catastrophe mode when things aren’t going right for us. This happens during arguments, break-ups, bad days at work, when watching the evening news. You’ll be shocked and horrified when you realise just how negative it can turn in the blink on an eye.

The slightest trigger can set off as a chain reaction of catastrophic thoughts. You start creating horribly pessimistic futures in your mind, extrapolating this moment of temporary suffering beyond all proportions. Just be ready for that, and notice what it’s doing.

If you notice this happening, the next step is to say to yourself: “my mind is in catastrophe mode”. This distances you from it. You realise that it’s not you: you turn it into an object (something you see), when before it was a subject (something you identify with).

3: Create Witness Awareness (10 Positive Mental Health Habits)

Your moment-to-moment experience of the mind is basically a voice and reels of images. These sounds and images are located around where your head is.

We heavily identify ourselves with this mind and begin to do so at an early age. This identification is important: it enables us to function in the world as a human. If not, we can develop psychosis and lack a healthy sense of self.

But if we have a healthy sense of self, we can begin to observe the mind moment to moment, and start to loosen our identification with it.

Before we practice creating distance from mind, it feels like we are it. We are that voice. It sounds so convincing and it speaks so much that it must be us. It even sounds like us!

Meditation is an excellent tool for this. There’s no way I could see my mind clearly without it. And in everyday life you can install the habit of listening to the voice impersonally, as though you were observing not your own mind but somebody else’s. That way, you can see your thoughts as they really are. Then you’ll be in a much better place to both detach yourself from them and alter them.

Someone said to me on social media: “Kind of makes me sad too how many people are a slave to their mind on autopilot and don’t even know. I don’t say this from a soapbox, it’s just unfortunate that a lot of people will never experience even 5 minutes of simply observing their thoughts!” I absolutely agree.

Habit 4: Realise the Mind is a Masterful Storyteller

Much of what’s going on in the mind is untrue. It’s a bunch of stories and tales all fighting desperately for your attention.

It’s like a needy child, but often we take it to be true. While it can offer us wonderful insight, divine inspiration and a control panel for our life, it often just spews out rubbish.

Watch how it spins story after story, most of which are guesses or approximations at best, and many of which are utter nonsense.

5: Don’t Take Things Personally (10 Positive Mental Health Habits)

Let’s talk about number 5 of our 10 positive mental health habits.

As someone said to me on social media, “Not taking things personally, especially from ‘friends’. Each human is going through their own individual stressors and pain. A little empathy for someone, especially someone being mean, goes a long way for your mental peace, just remember that hurt people, hurt people.”

This reminded me of what Don Miguel Ruiz says in his The Four Agreements:

Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream in their own mind: they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

Oh, baby. Just let that soak in for a minute.

This is great advice. I’ve noticed that taking things personally can generate repetitive thought patterns and rumination. We end up spending so much time worrying about what others think of us, why they treat us in a certain way, and so on. This is a debilitating vice and it’s very freeing to wean yourself off it.

6: Gratitude (10 Positive Mental Health Habits)

Someone told me on social media: “I’m a recovering alcoholic with clinical depression and anxiety, and am mid divorce. My world used to be full of anger and fear, but the simple act of identifying and naming three things I’m grateful for each day has helped require my brain to look for good instead of preparing for the worst.”

Isn’t that a beautiful story? You see, the reptilian and limbic areas of our brain are fear-oriented, always looking for threats and obsessing over negative outcomes. Deliberately turning the tables is a fantastic way to overcome these tendencies, and I myself have experienced many benefits from making gratitude a habit.

Habit 7: Replace Negative with Positive

Let’s move on to number 7 of our 10 positive mental health habits.

Maxwell Maltz, author of the landmark book Cybernetics, says your subconscious mind is an impersonal target finder, like an interceptor missile. It automatically acts on your habitual thoughts and emotions, thus bringing about many of your results. Would you rather feed it junk food or clean, healthy fuel?

This isn’t just “positive thinking”, as though we can bypass our problems just putting a positive twist on them. No: this point goes a lot deeper and broader. What you think largely defines who you are and what you experience. Thus, replacing negative with positive entails a wholesale transformation of our psyche.

We make this choice hundreds or even thousands of times per day. Our minds are always running, and as you know, they tend to circle around certain themes, many of which are negative, to delusional levels. If you’re continually caught in such themes, you’re feeding terrible food to your subconscious.

The trick is to watch out for these harmful thoughts and deliberately replace them with the opposite. You can do this throughout the day, and you can use also set aside time for affirmations and auto-suggestion. Both are powerful methods.

Let me quote some more contributors from social media. These people have glimpsed the power of this habit:

“I always found myself judging people, in cranky moods and I hated myself and life! However, I got fed up of feeling hate and anger all the time.”

“I haven’t smashed any inanimate objects to bits in over 4 months because I slowly reprogrammed my way of thinking… I tell myself I am happy, I don’t get angry! I literally stop myself mid fit/rage and say to myself, stop, this does not affect me.” 

“I’ve been working on a mantra to help overcome my negative think spiral…after talking to my partner about how he overcame addiction he Informed me that for him he had a mantra-ish to help him through, which was ‘I don’t need it’ and when he was describing the process it floored me how often he had to repeat that to himself. Literally over and over again. So currently, I’m working on really digging in and repeating it more and more, and trying to be more observant of my thoughts so I can repeat it even when I don’t originally realize I need it.”

8: Find New Inner Voices (10 Positive Mental Health Habits)

This one is motivated by a touching conversation I had on social media with a woman who had lost her inner power. She told me: “I had been hiding her under so much scar tissue that I could barely function as a human; I had no identity. My role was to appear small and pliable, and not take up much space.”

She was submissive, fearful, anxious, and had significant trauma. To get out of this rut and spite her fear, she started doing things scared. After a while, she discovered a new, stronger inner voice to identify with. It was one that kindly but boldly challenged her. It helped her get to the root of her fear: “Over time I found my voice was actually louder than my fear.”

This is beautiful because it illustrates that the mind is often filled with many voices which has different demands, values, needs, motivations, but we narrow our awareness down and identify with just a few. It seems she already had that strong inner voice but beat it down to stay submissive.

Which inner voices are you identified with? Some of them might have become a comfort blanket for you, and helped you get by in certain situations, but are they really helping you flourish?

It takes great awareness of your inner world to be able to identify these voices within yourself and not be unconsciously identified with them.

Someone told me about the effect this had on them: “I have named the evil inner voice and speak back to it. It is now just a small scared child and I tell her ‘Thanks but I got this – you sit down and be quiet now.’ “

Habit 9: Turn Attention to Oneself

Part of the mind’s operation is to look outside itself. The mind constantly projects outwards. It even constructs the sense of Self and Other through mental concepts, making it seem that everything outside your body and mind is not you!

The feeling that things are “Other” than you only exists in your mind and emotional system. In reality, nothing is separate from you. The non-dual mystical traditions have spoken about this for millennia.

This might seem like little more than pretty philosophy right now, but you can begin to embody and contact this fact by reminding yourself to observe yourself and that all your mental activity is a reflection of you, not of the recipient of it, not of the event itself, but of your mind. Turn your attention inward rather than outward.

Habit 10: Meditation

Practicing the fundamental skills of mindfulness helps you see your mind and your body with greater clarity. You can detect what’s going on in your psychological and mental life in many different situations.

You can see how your thoughts and emotions drive you to behave in certain ways. It’s now increasingly used in therapy, coaching, psychology, and medicine for this reason.

In fact, it’s common to hear anecdotes of habits magically dropping away as our meditation practice matures. It seems that with meditation, our body and mind change and grow, ironing out impurities and sub-optimal patterns as they do.

Check out my course below to get a build a solid foundation in meditation.

I hope you enjoyed this article and begin to implement a few of these 10 positive mental health habits as soon as possible. Take inspiration from the fact that with time, they’ll no longer be habits, but part of your default approach to life.