Quick summary: Managing well-being requires individuals to distinguish between their automatic responses to life and the brief moment of awareness that precedes those choices. By capturing the split second between experiencing a trigger and taking action, patients and practitioners can interrupt harmful cognitive schemas before reactive patterns occur. Integrating this distinction into healthcare practice provides a fresh approach towards emotional regulation, empowering people to actively redesign their mental health strategies rather than remaining trapped in learned behaviours.
How do you approach and managing your mental health?
In discussing this question about how to approach mental health, I recently had a conversation with someone who struggles with high anxiety and they expressed that their approach to mental health involved being emotionally reactive. Being emotionally reactive was something they did. Then later in the day I received an email for training that stated, “It’s training designed to give therapists practical, body-based tools to help clients who may get stuck in patterns like anxiety or shutdown when facing relational stress. Once again, the approach was about getting stuck in an anxiety pattern or shutting down when facing relational stress. Something that may have been learned to do.
Then it dawned on me that one of the biggest challenges for managing and improving mental health as a person, or even as a therapist, is understanding what it explicitly means to mindfully explore one’s “approach” to mental health. And then to understand the practical implications of how to effectively approach your approach.
If you step back to gain perspective, you will discover that to approach “approach” reveals it has two different meanings and uses. It can be a noun or a verb. 1) Approach as a noun is a way of dealing with a task. It’s something you do and reflects decision and choices you have made. Such as being emotionally reactive, getting stuck in anxiety pattern or shutting down when facing relational stress. 2) Approach as a verb is simply moving closer to someone or something in space or time. It’s something that happens. It is the space experienced before becoming aware of being emotionally reactive, stuck or shutting down.
The significance of these contrasting meanings reveals that as a noun it requires personal experience, effort, and intent, but as a verb, it merely requires that you exist. The noun is your own unique construct to interface with the world, and in many ways is a schema. In psychology, a schema is a mental framework or cognitive structure or sequence stored in long-term memory that helps people organize, categorize, and interpret info which creates a shortcut that allows the brain to process new experiences quickly based on past knowledge. In contrast, the verb is not something you create or do, it is something you experience and discover. It is that moment of becoming aware.
Children often do not have their own approach (noun) or schema to deal with things in life. Instead, they discover life as it approaches (verb) them and they gain awareness as they build their understanding of the world.
Mark Twain indirectly explained how approaching (verb) life like a child, is quite different from how an adult has their own approach (noun) to life. He did this by writing about his seven-year-old daughter, Susy.
“Several times her mother said to her: ‘There, there, Susy, you mustn’t cry over little things.’
This furnished Susy a text for thought. She had been breaking her heart over what had seemed vast disasters – a broken toy; a picnic cancelled by thunder and lightning and rain; the mouse that was growing tame and friendly in the nursery caught and killed by the cat – and now came this strange revelation. For some unaccountable reason, these were not vast calamities. Why? How is the size of calamities measured? What is the rule? There must be some way to tell the great ones from the small ones; what is the law of these proportions? She examined the problem earnestly and long. She gave it her best thought from time to time, for two or three days – but it baffled her – defeated her. And at last she gave up and went to her mother for help.
‘Mamma, what is “little things”?’
It seemed a simple question – at first. And yet, before the answer could be put into words, unsuspected and unforeseen difficulties began to appear. They increased; they multiplied; they brought about another defeat. The effort to explain came to a standstill.”
As a child with limited experiences, Susy didn’t have a defined approach to dealing with life’s challenges. But just being born started her on a path of approaching life’s challenges.
To mindfully approach “approach” reveals the vastly different meanings and experiences. As we just discussed, approach as a noun is a way of dealing with a task, but as a verb it is simply moving closer to someone or something in space or time. The BCA approach embraces both aspects as essential to managing your mental health. However, approach as a verb is much less explored in therapy. While much has been written about personal schemas as an approach to life, including the negative aspects of schemas that can be used to distort reality and lead to biased perceptions because the brain prefers information that confirms what it already thinks, much less has been specifically written about how you approach building your approach to life schemas. Mindfulness comes close, as it is about increasing self-awareness, but the verb meaning of approach specifically is about becoming mindful of creating awareness. In a sense, it is not about being childish or innocent, but is about developing skills to reflect a child’s unbiased perspective and approach to gaining awareness and making changes in your life. Essentially, discovering your approach to your approach or schema.
A stop sign is a useful metaphor to distinguish approach as a verb from the noun. When you are driving, eventually you become aware of a stop sign as you approach it. Approach as a verb in moving nearing in space or time. Nothing more is required of you as you experience your driving life. Then, at some point in your approach, you have to decide what will be your approach to the stop sign. Approach as a noun is what you will do based on your experiences, beliefs, values, expectations, habits, relationships, or situation. Will you slow and stop? Or slow roll on through? Will you just ignore and go? If you are teaching a new driver how to drive, your approach might be significantly different than if you are late to an event you really want to get to. But you have your own approach (noun) to each and every stop sign you approach (verb).
In mental health therapy, harnessing that moment you become aware of approaching something, such as a conflicts, relationships, motivation, self-esteem, anxiety, depression, beliefs, values, etc., is where intentional changes happen that can re-define what you do. It is a space where you can be free to mindfully meander, without judgement or expectations, to evaluate and re-design your approach to life. From a BCA perspective, this is the place from which your emotional power can be mindfully harnessed. That is because emotions just give us power, without any innate schema to direct what we will do with those powers. As Paul Ekman wrote in “Emotions Revealed,” “Emotions prepare us to deal with important events without our having to think about what to do.” Emotions prepare and power us to do what we decide we will do. But when did we decide. And how do we become aware of needing to decide?
Exploring a step deeper to understand our pre-awareness approach to life, Tara Bennett-Goleman in Emotional Alchemy talks about the magic quarter second. The magic quarter second is the neurological split seconds between awareness, intention and action. It was discovered by neurosurgeon Benjamin Libet when doing brain surgery. He would ask patients to move a finger and recorded the brain’s neurological response with the actual movement. “In short, it let him separate the moment of intent to move, from the moment of awareness of that intent, from the moment of actual action.” And then Dr Libet discovered, “Once the person is aware of the intent to move there is another quarter-second before the movement begins. This window is crucial: it is the moment when we have the capacity to go along with the impulse or reject it.” In other words, that is the moment that we neurologically begin to approach our approach and decide which approach we will embrace.
So, take a moment and begin exploring how you approach your approach to mental health. When you can comfortably recognize and understand the differences between your approach (verb) to your approach (noun), you are ready to level up your mental health mindfulness skills.
Dane Jorento, MSW, LICSW is a speaker offering keynotes, seminars, and workshops on mental health, trauma, ADHD, and relationships. He specialises in BCA Holistic Therapy, EMDR, and DBT approaches.
