AKA Being nice to people
Building positive relationships is the basis for everything in life: in business, in personal relationships, everything. It is one of the key elements of happiness according to self-determination theory. Not having positive relationships is a factor in many mental health issues. Our own mental well-being affects our ability to build positive relationships with others (including pupils). Itâs vital we acknowledge this.
I suffer with depression, which many people are surprised at because I âdonât seem that sortâ, which I always think is a tactful way of saying Iâm gobby. I manage my depression with medication, understanding, chocolate and CBT techniques. My mental health still has âtroughsâ, but I can recognise the signs. Symptoms of a down period: I reduce my social interaction, sleep more, am angrier and have less capacity to manage stress. It also affects my relationships â the effort of being nice is really hard when so often I just want to say âFluff offâ (you know what I really mean), and retreat to bed to eat chocolate (are you seeing a theme here?). I will try to sabotage relationships and not make effort, when relationships are exactly what I need to help me out of the trough.
When in a trough, my capacity for empathy, and therefore, a positive response to a situation, is affected. It is either reduced or I am completely exhausted by the effort of maintaining âthe nice maskâ. When in a âdownâ phase, itâs really hard to give two hoots about other peopleâs problems. Understanding and discussing this is important â it means I can take steps to improve my mental health and prevent the severity of the depression. Not just better for me, but also for those around me.
Good mental health means we are more able to manage stress. Lazarus and Folkman have developed a transactional model of stress.5 They believe stress occurs when there is an imbalance between demand and resource. When demand exceeds resource we become stressed. But, they discovered that our interpretation is more important than actual facts. How we subjectively assess the stressful event or situation, and our abilities for coping with it are of more importance. This ties in with CBT beliefs â that everything is our interpretation. Stress is about our perception of the demand, our ability to cope, and what the consequences of being unable to meet the demand will be. We can get stuck in ruminative negative thinking â another common factor in mental health issues. If we have positive mental health and well-being, we are less likely to have negative thoughts about our capacity to meet demand, and the negative consequences if we donât meet demand.
Stress is also important because when we are very stressed, we are more likely to personalise peopleâs behaviour towards us. We are more likely to believe someone is doing something on purpose to annoy us. When we are late, we become angrier at traffic jams and are likely to gesticulate or swear at someone (a daily occurrence for some). The most annoying pupil will always be more annoying when we are tired, and we can think they are surely doing it on purpose to âwind us upâ. Believing a person is doing something on purpose will affect our reaction to it. Dagnan, Hull and McDonnell identified the controllability beliefs scale6 where judgements of responsibility predict our emotional response to an action. If we believe a person is doing an action on purpose, we are less likely to have a sympathetic response. Having a less sympathetic response means a situation is more likely to escalate in a negative way. If we believe the person isnât doing it purposely, that itâs part of their condition or they are communicating something to us, we are more likely to have a sympathetic response and a more positive outcome.
By being more stressed, and personalising othersâ behaviour, we are more likely to have a confrontational response to a situation. This will, in many situations, escalate to a negative outcome that could have been avoided. Weâve all had those conversations where we escalate up and up and end up with nowhere to go. âWell, if you are late again you will end up being expelled from every setting in the whole world, for everâ. I do it with my children: âIf you donât clear that up then this will happenâ. They argue back, and I get angrier and escalate the consequences to impossible scenarios: âYou are grounded for 35 years and I am taking everything out of your bedroomâ. I then walk away thinking âHow the hell am I going to follow through on that? I wish I handled that differentlyâ. A sympathetic response is less likely to escalate and more likely to have a more positive outcome.
