Newsletter
Mind State Types2021-08-14
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anxiety, mood and cognition make up your mental landscape1. Quantitative scores for each of these can be obtained with existing psychiatric rating scales- or with the more temporal, quantitative and non-overlapping ones we developed2, that are now included in our Life x Mind app.
Different combinations of anxiety, mood and cognition levels can be used to define different mind state types. Based on this, there are at least 8 types, as described below. (Lower case letters denote a low state for anxiety (a), mood (m) and cognition (c), upper case letters denote a high state).
| Level | Mind Type |
|---|---|
| a, M, C | “The Boss” |
| a, M, c | “The Optimist” |
| a, m, C | “The Observer” |
| a, m, c | “The Follower” |
| A, M, C | “The Perfectionist” |
| A, M, c | “The Hothead” |
| A, m, C | “The Critic” |
| A, m, c | “The Sufferer” |
The four high-anxiety (A) types are easily recognizable as being the ones that cause the most distress, disruption in social settings and problems in inter-personal interactions, due to their high reactivity to external events. Excessive anxiety/reactivity needs to be mitigated with mindfulness/meditation, medications, and cognitive-behavioral approaches. On the positive side, the desire that anxiety provides can be used to strive for more and improve things.
Certain mind state types attract success and repel failure (the epitome for that being “The Boss”). Conversely, certain types attract failure (the epitome of that being “The Sufferer”). These types interact with the environment in a positive feedback loop way that reinforces them. The successful become more successful, and the failures fail even more.
The good news is that these 8 paradigmatic mind state types are not fixed. In any single individual they can vary due to their actions, due to environmental effects, and due to treatments, from day to day. Who do you want to be today, who do you want to be consistently, and what do you need to do to achieve that?
We are building these features into our Life x Mind app.
Live. Happier. Longer.
Bob
Footnotes
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Niculescu AB, 3rd, Schork NJ, Salomon DR. Mindscape: a convergent perspective on life, mind, consciousness and happiness. J Affect Disord 2010; 123(1-3): 1-8. ↩
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Niculescu AB, Lulow LL, Ogden CA, Le-Niculescu H, Salomon DR, Schork NJ et al. PhenoChipping of psychotic disorders: a novel approach for deconstructing and quantitating psychiatric phenotypes. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 2006; 141B(6): 653-662. ↩