When I’m not berating myself about exercise I’m feeling hassled by our cluttered house. Complexity in life – including number of possessions – affects my mental health. There is a psychological cost to clutter and I feel calmer with less.

Gretchen Rubin, a well-known writer about happiness, makes the same observation:

“One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should…”

In this post she walks through the things that stop us from clearing clutter. They are largely psychological.

Don Mills, self-confessed “crabby old fart”, rails incessantly against young people. ”They all have “disorders”. That’s the problem with young people today.”

Apart from this contention, Don’s blog really has nothing to do with mental health. I’m just passing it along as potential laugh therapy.

From a recent post:

“The problem with young people today is that they’re too damned soft.

In my day, young people were tough, damn it. We were gristly, sinewy and hard as nails. My generation was forged in a furnace of fiery parents, sweltering outhouses, creamed chip beef and the type of childhood diseases that either killed you or put some damned hair on your chest…There was no room for mollycoddling and teenaged slackassery. We couldn’t lie around in our underpants all day levelling up in Donkey Kong and text messaging our idiot friends.”

There you have it. Read more of Don’s objections at The Problem with Young People Today.

New research published by the American Psychological Association shows that blogging has psychological benefits for teens suffering from social anxiety.

The study’s lead author, Meyran Boniel-Nissin from the University of Haifa, says that “writing about distress in itself, even without audience interaction, generates desired changes in participants. Although social feedback is an important factor in causing change in bloggers, the very writing has its own value, thus supporting the arguments and replicating the findings pertaining to the therapeutic value of traditional expressive writing.”

A new blog, We Have to Make It, is a good example of a teen writing for therapeutic reasons, although in this case for depression.

From the home page:

“I’m 16 & I battle with depression. I guess I made this blog to make myself better and give others hope… for them to know they aren’t alone. I play basketball, love gaming, music and, I actually like to write…when I’m in the mood :) I sometimes post random things to make people smile lol.”

I really like this blog. It expresses hope and optimism, it is personal but not self-absorbed, and it is well written. I wish more teens would write, and not just for Facebook.

Visit We Have to Make It to read more. The full blogging study by Meyran Boniel-Nissin can be downloaded as a PDF.

A blogger once took me to task – quite publicly – for naming our applications “Optimism”. According to him, they should be called “Hope”. Without a doubt.

I’ve always been puzzled by this. “Optimism” has an element of confidence, with an expectation of progress. Hope is more wishful* . You could say that hope is a precursor to optimism.

With applications unashamedly named “Optimism”, naturally enough I’m very interested in the role of optimism in improving mental health.

In the Huffington Post Dr. Tian Dayton recently wrote about how optimism can be learned, drawing on the well known work of Martin Seligman. Seligman’s work has been foundational in understanding helplessness as a learned psychological condition, and “learned optimism” as its remedy.

From the article:

“Optimists, according to research tend to be healthier, are more active, eat more fruits and vegetables and spend more time actively with others. So who wouldn’t want to be one? The question is, can optimism be learned, and if so, wouldn’t that be a great New Year’s resolution…”

Read more of the article at the Huffington Post, or visit Martin Seligman’s home page at Authentic Happiness.

* except Christian hope, which in the Bible means confident expectation – the return of Christ, transformation and eternal life.

Another of my favorite writers is Alistair McHarg, author of Invisible Driving, Moonlit Tours and Washed Up. His writing is full of absurdities about life and mental illness, a throwback to his wild experience of full-blown mania.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading “Invisible Driving” a few years ago – it is one of only five books that I haven’t recycled.  The first chapter is still on this blog to read, together with an interview about the book.

Alistair is in fine form in his Funny in the Head blog on Healthy Place, where he sets out his new year’s resolutions:

“Lately it’s become fashionable to speculate about the mental illnesses of historical figures, and even diagnose them! It’s a wildly unscientific practice, and easy to parody, but I think I can do better…In upcoming blogs I resolve to diagnose the mental illnesses of popular cartoon characters, and even provide treatment programs.”

To read other unusual resolutions visit Alistair’s latest post.