I just saw a video of a guy walking and talking on the phone and offering to shake hands to strangers. When they did, he did a dance move to twirls them around one time. And they start smiling at the fun, briefly connected moment. It brought a smile to my face as I connected to the unexpected silly moment.

Minutes later on social media there was a post of a young Dutch woman in a terminal state expressing her last wish to visit a zoo. Even in critical condition, she was taken by ambulance to the Blijdorp Zoo in (Rotterdam). Brought into a safe area, where she had an incredible encounter with a giraffe that approached her and gently touched her arm with its snout. The world we live in is incredibly connected in so many ways.

That is when it really hit me, that in our lives, connections big and small define our mental health and create communities and countries. How you will or won’t, do or don’t connect to the world reflects your thoughts, values, beliefs, experiences, focus and just about everything about you, and us. You develop all of your connections based on what you decide to embrace and live. Building or blocking healthy or unhealthy connections is an essential, every day life skill. And it is even more important in today’s conflicted world.  

I am talking about all connections and attachments, moving beyond just considering the psychological consequences of parent-child, friendship, peer-to-peer, or relationship attachments. I am including connections to your next breath, the clothes you wear, the room you’re in, your phone, people, food, social media, future plans and all reality, including the thoughts inside your head or noises outside your door. 

Connections impact being mindfully integrated or unrelentingly isolated. How you intentionally embrace, understand, or manage your connections can determine if you are comfortably alone by yourself or miserable and lonely in a crowd. A recent Forbes’s article, “3 Types of Connections You Need to Thrive in Life” by psychologist Mark Travers discusses the importance of connections to yourself, others and nature. 

Connections impact all of you, including your self-esteem. You are born with a sense of self–worth, as a connection of having value just being yourself. Nothing more is required, than to just exist. Then, being yourself, you seek to learn, experience and develop abilities and skills to express yourself. You grow a sense of skill-worth and seek to master the skills you most value and connect with. Then as you reach out to share yourself and your skills, you discover your sense of social-worth. A whole person view of self-esteem.

Thinking about all of the connection in your life is complex, constantly changing and can overwhelm even the most skillful and popular among us. Your mental health can really be a struggle when you can’t manage connections, boundaries or comfortably create: 1) a stable, safe private space to just be yourself; 2) activities to challenge yourself, and 3) a common ground to share yourself. 

Beyond connecting to people, you also connect to systems, politics and policies. It is with these connections that you can develop a resiliency to face overwhelming abusive or distressing life challenges. A current Psychology Today article, “How the Science of Resilience has Evolved” by psychologist Sam Goldstein states, “Resilience is a scientifically grounded, multi-system process.” Adding, “According to Ann Masten (2021), resilience doesn’t live in one place. It’s woven into networks of biology, psychology, and environment. That means the brain, the body, the family, the community, and even government policies all play a part.” Truer word are seldom spoken, considering todays tumultuous political environments.

Considering our current politics, it is useful to realize that connections from today can impact your future, which is the point of epigenetics, the study of how your environmental connections impact your DNA development. Knowing this reveals that your past connections impact who you are today. Which is why it is so important to be mindful of how your past experiences of trauma, abuse, neglect or isolation can still hurt or remain painful connections today in your present life, that are from your past. When your past was difficult and today is difficult, effectively managing connections can become way more relentless, overwhelming, and difficult.  

The good news is that you can change your past painful connections. That is, you can heal the hurt and pain from the past, but it requires that you connect to it. When you look back to validate and re-connect to your past experiences, you now have options today in the present, that you did not have yesterday in the past. That little child who didn’t know how to respond, now is an adult who does. Unless of course, that adult relies on their past childhood experiences to connected to their current difficulties. When this happens, struggling with mental health and cognitive distortions are just the beginning of the difficulties. Using childhood distorted connections as adults can lead to distorted and painful policies and politics. 

The whole world has gotten smaller and more integrated and connected due to incredible and rapid increases in technological abilities. There has become less time to self-reflect, evaluate or dialogue regarding connections. Such hurried social speed makes it more difficult to develop an effective resiliency network. There is a growing divide between our ability to manage rapidly improving technologies with mindfully developed mental health skills. Technologically, science can practically follow the neurological impulses of emotions, and yet, science still can’t agree on what emotions are.   

Which brings into focus the connection struggles of today’s children and teenagers. The roles of virtual or real world connections in our lives have varied over the years, but the needs and requirements to learn skills and abilities to manage such connections has remained fairly constant. When does a child or teen have an opportunity to create a safe space to just be themselves? In my childhood, a connection to a virtual world or virtual relationships was insignificant, but today, such connections are often overwhelming and relentless. In my childhood, I had a strong, real life resiliency network of family, relatives and friends that helped me through tough times. Today, such relaxed connections are rare.

A recent USA Today article, The Teen Social Media Crisis is Here by wellness expert Daryl Austin stated research of, “a 2025 longitudinal study found that increased social media use among preteens predicted rising depressive symptoms. Other research ties heavy use to increased anxiety, low self-esteem, self-harm behaviours, disordered eating and even suicidality.” The article quoted Elizabeth Hoge, psychiatrist/director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program at Georgetown University, stating: “Teens are primarily drawn to social platforms to connect with others, share personal or negative experiences, and form new online friendships.” Their virtual connections impact the ones IRL. 

Which brings us back to realising that all of the connections you embrace, IRL or virtual, really do matter and often can significantly impact and define you mental health and the communities you create.