Table of Contents
The Importance of Having a Meaningful Life for Your Mental Health
Here in this post, we are discussing and learning about “The Importance of Having a Meaningful Life for Your Mental Health”. You can read more about psychology-related material on our website. Keep visiting Psychology Roots.
There are moments when you’d like to be completely ignored, but for the most part, individuals want to feel that they have the attention of others. The agony of feeling like an afterthought when you arrive into a social event and have to wait for five minutes for someone to acknowledge your presence is all too familiar. Think of the misery that might ensue when your buddy receives your message but doesn’t respond, as opposed to the joy of receiving a reply.
To put it another way: What’s the point of worrying so much about whether or not others notice you? There’s a good chance that the folks who do know you are distracted with other matters. It doesn’t matter whether individuals who don’t know you recognize your presence either. Realistically speaking, how many of us would want to go in and out of a location without the need to stop and chat with other people?
Meaningful Life for Your Mental Health
According to Gordon Flett and colleagues at York University in 2022, “mattering” is a “key psychological resource” in positive psychology. The potential to achieve “optimal health and well-being” may be hindered if you feel chronically unimportant, even if you enjoy the cloak of invisibility from time to time.
What’s the point of it all?
People with “anti-mattering” characterize themselves as someone who “personal identity is dominated by the experience of not mattering to others,” according to Canadian researchers. In order to avoid the stress of being ignored or considered as insignificant by others, you take on this persona. As opposed to merely feeling like you don’t matter, the “against” here signifies “against” being important.
Anti-mattering “should be considered a distinct and particular vulnerability unlike any other risk factor…[it] may become a cognitive obsession that is internalized and leads in self-harm inclinations and an inability or reluctance to participate in self-care.”
Folks who are constantly rejected by possible lovers or employment or those awful people who never respond to your SMS might develop an anti-mattering mentality. Researchers in Canada believe that early childhood experiences of neglect by inattentive and unresponsive parents are the most probable cause. Even the most painful rejections won’t be able to breach the impenetrable shell that has formed around your desire to matter.
When you’ve developed a hardened shell, it becomes more difficult for people to get through to you. As people understand it’s simpler to avoid you, it becomes more difficult to build rewarding connections.
A measure of Anti-Mattering Tendencies
Anti-Mattering tendencies may be tested in five ways. The Canadian researchers set out to design a new 5-item Anti-Mattering Scale in order to take use of anti-unique matter’s properties (AMS). Flett et al. initially developed and then compared their AMS to an existing “General Mattering Scale” (GMS) in connection to measures of depression, loneliness, and anxiety in young adult and adolescent populations. Test yourself on these five things (grade yourself from 1 not at all to 4 a lot) to get a feel of what anti-mattering is all about:
- How much do you feel like you don’t matter?
- How often have you been treated in a way that makes you feel like you are insignificant?
- To what extent have you been made to feel like you are invisible?
- How much do you feel like you will never matter to certain people?
- How often have you been made to feel by someone that they don’t care what you think or what you have to say?
This scale ranged from 7 to 15, with an average of roughly 11 among the undergraduates who participated in the study.
The premise of the AMS is that it isn’t only a sense of insignificance that is central to it (or low in mattering). This little change may be seen in the GMS’s five pieces. The AMS uses the same rating scale:
- How important are you to others?
- How much do others pay attention to you?
- How much would you be missed if you went away?
- How interested are others in what you have to say?
- How much do other people depend upon you?
The average GMS score was 16, with the majority of participants scoring between 13 and 18, while the AMS values were on the lower end of the spectrum.
You can see just by looking at these averages that individuals are more likely than not to believe that they contribute something worthwhile to the lives of others.
Is it a big deal if you’re high on anti-matter?
It is time to examine the psychological effects of avoiding people as a kind of self-protection now that you have tested yourself on AMS and seen how it varies from GMS. Anti-mattering wasn’t merely the antithesis of mattering, as shown by the Flett et al. results.
Anti-mattering and loneliness were shown to have a direct correlation with loneliness, as well as a greater influence on depression when AMS scores were higher than GMS values. There are “ties between low mattering and a maladaptive early schema indicating detachment and alienation from others” in this pattern, according to the authors. The “double danger of feeling alone and unimportant” is described by Flett et al. as a result of the “double hazard of suffering AMS and high loneliness ratings.”
Summary
It is undeniable that having the sense that you matter contributes to good mental health. Anti-mattering may become a part of a bigger identity in which you believe you are of little importance to others, and it can even contribute to a feeling of being marginalized. The York University research revealed that anti-mattering has detrimental repercussions for young adults and teenagers, but this fundamental need looks to be one that may serve as a crucial cornerstone of healthy development throughout one’s life.
Help Us Improve This Article
Have you discovered an inaccuracy? We put out great effort to give accurate and scientifically trustworthy information to our readers. Please notify us if you discover any typographical or grammatical errors.
Make a comment. We acknowledge and appreciate your efforts.
If you have any scale or any material related to psychology kindly share it with us at psychologyroots@gmail.com. We help others on behalf of you.
