How can psychology be used in personal life?

In this brief guide we are going to answer the question ‘’How can psychology be used in personal life? and we will highlight some contributions of psychology to promote our quality of life.

How can psychology be used in personal life?

As Williams James, American philosopher and professor of psychology, has already stated; ‘’It’s a great discovery that human beings can alter their lives by altering their mental attitude

And it’s in this field where psychologists have the possibility to improve people’s lives; collaborating, guiding them along the path of overcoming their problems, emotions and behaviors that are an impediment to developing a good quality of life.

We live in a society where the number of pathologies associated with stress and anxiety continues to increase. That’s why it’s important to know some advice from psychology that will help you better cope with these situations.

Although it’s common to associate stress with harmful consequences for our health, it’s not without a positive part if we know how to manage it and use it properly to our benefit, both physically and mentally.

What’s psychology?

Psychology is a discipline that aims to analyze the mental and behavioral processes of human beings and their interactions with the physical and social environment.

Psychological research is included in many cases within what we know as “basic psychology”, dedicated to obtaining knowledge about processes such as perception, memory or reasoning, which influence any type of human behavior.

The best-known application of psychology is its clinical aspect, which aims to help solve mental and behavioral problems to improve people’s quality of life. Community psychology has objectives similar to those of the clinic but its approach is more macro, since it works with large population groups rather than with individuals.

Other well known branches of this science are educational psychology, which analyzes learning with the aim of enhancing it, and organizational psychology, which applies the theories developed by social psychology to the professional field.

Forensic psychology, for its part, focuses on psychological evaluation to support judicial processes, and sports psychology aims to improve sports performance

This science is very important, especially since it deals with the study of mental processes and behavior at the same time. Furthermore, it can be applied in our daily lives and in many things, that is, how we behave, how we react to situations and how we act are all associated with psychology.

How do I improve my life? Psychology contributions

What comes to your mind when you hear the words psychologist, psychology or therapy? With what concepts do you associate them? Have you ever considered going to therapy?

Do you think it could really contribute something to you? The truth is that we generally don’t even consider consulting a psychologist unless we go through a crisis. Could we be missing something?

Let’s think about aspects of daily life that cause us a lot of discomfort and that sometimes we don’t know how to manage. Although we solve many problems naturally and intuitively, we have all been to some point where we fall into a vicious circle or we block ourselves in a situation.

There may be different ways of dealing with daily problems and there are tools to increase the positive aspects of our lives.

We have all come to feel overwhelmed by a responsibility, we have postponed a task for months, we have been carried away by an emotion, we have felt that we didn’t have the resources to face a situation or we have made an “unforgivable” mistake.

And it’s OK! It’s human to feel, to be wrong or not always have the perfect formula. We constantly judge ourselves for having emotions that we consider “we shouldn’t be having”, for being imperfect, for indulging in a lazy day or eating chocolate when we are on a diet. So we end up feeling very bad.

If you notice, so far we have talked about common problems that we can go through. Today’s psychology encompasses many branches that, beyond seeking to “cure symptoms,” arise to promote psychological and emotional well-being.

Positive psychology, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness, among others, are psychological currents based on scientific evidence and whose objective is to give us tools to learn to self-manage our emotions, solve our problems effectively, live in the present moment and think more objectively.

All this accepting life with its good and bad aspects and suffering as something natural. These are interventions aimed at training ourselves to live better.

5 tips that psychology can provide us to apply in our daily lives

Learn to live with emotions

Emotions are part of life and they all have an evolutionary function. We have been at war with them for a long time because intense emotion can be very unpleasant, but today it’s known that the best way to manage them is to accept their presence.

When we identify an emotion and instead of rejecting it we allow ourselves to feel it, paradoxically it will diminish. There are many techniques that help us achieve this, such as mindfulness and CAT. We cannot control our emotions from our intelligence, but we can learn to listen to them and decide the way we react to them.

Learn to generate new habits

“On Monday I start the diet”, “tomorrow I start writing my book”, “next week I will make my appointment” and so on Monday, tomorrow and next week never arrive. You identify?

Gabriele Oettingen, psychology professor at NYU, talks about how being overly optimistic can be counterintuitive when setting a new goal, as we tend to trust ourselves and try less. But being negative doesn’t motivate us to set ourselves new challenges either.

We know that it’s very difficult to beat procrastination or establish a new routine, no matter how hard we want it. CBT and CAT offer us many techniques to help us be more realistic when setting goals and getting our objectives into action.

Learn to live, accept and enjoy the present moment

By this we don’t mean adopting a conformist or foolish stance. We mean learning how to turn off the autopilot and training our attention to focus on the present moment. We live thinking about the past or worrying about the future and are rarely fully aware of what is happening in front of us.

In the present, wonderful things happen that we may be missing, such as a good conversation with a friend, the taste of coffee in the morning, or the colors of the park we pass through every day.

But also in the present there are problems and uncomfortable situations that we would prefer to ignore. Being focused on the here and now allows us to consciously react and enjoy the simpler things in our routine.

Facing difficult situations from acceptance and objectivity

Do phrases like “This is the worst thing that could be happening to me”, “I will never get over it” or “I will never be able to change this” sound like you? The way we speak to each other can create blockages or unnecessarily intensify the emotions that accompany a crisis situation.

At CBT we use techniques to help you put those thoughts into perspective and question whether they are real or not. In addition, there are many techniques to solve problems more effectively.

Your self-esteem cannot be verified by others

Psychology tells us that you are very valuable because you say that you are. If you depend on others to value yourself, this appreciation will be made by others. The need for approval from others is equivalent to saying, “What you think of me is more important than my opinion of myself.”

Other people may have positive or negative opinions about you, however that is their problem. A high self-esteem accompanied by high moral values make you an attractive, interesting and influential person.

It’s your decision to raise your own esteem so that the opinions of others don’t influence your perception of yourself. Today is the time to feel full and valuable.

Cultivate positive emotions

Human beings tend to remember and experience unpleasant emotions with greater intensity by simple evolution: if the emotion is not unpleasant enough it does not make me change something and if I do not remember it, I tend to fall into the same error. It is also common for us to try to avoid “negative” emotions, thus we end up giving them more attention.

We hope that positive emotions come from external factors (such as others making me feel good, material goods or pleasant experiences), which can happen, but how many times do we consciously do something to cultivate them?

Gratitude, compassion, forgiveness, and empathy can be developed. From mindfulness, we work with these emotions to make them more present in our day to day, improving not only our psychological well-being but not the physical as well.

We don’t have to wait until we’re in really bad shape to seek help. Just as we invest a lot of time, money and effort in our studies, our physical appearance or our physical health, we could question whether our emotional well-being is something worth working on.

How can Psychology help me in my personal life?

Psychology can also help us in everyday life not only from the knowledge of psychological disorders and diseases, but also from the knowledge of people and their development. 

From the understanding of the value of the experiences that help us move forward and from the study of constant interactions in a constantly changing social environment.

If we look at the social sphere, psychology can provide us with ideas to be ourselves more authentic and spontaneous overcoming fears and resistance in a context that we may feel hostile or uncomfortable.

In the family environment, it will help us to better understand the value of our role with the people closest to us to face life together, taking into account the difficulties that it constantly presents us in the workplace.

Psychology will make it easier for us to respond to the demands of our work by being productive but in a sustainable way over time to avoid sick leave due to stress-related health problems.

Within the workplace it will also allow us to know a more humanized treatment in customer service and through communication management based on empathy and caring for people both at a commercial level and at a customer service level.

In short, in the personal development section we will share and talk about issues that are far from pathological and we will provide the vision of humanistic psychology that focuses on people and their experiences to move forward with their lives in the most satisfactory way possible.

Why is psychology important?

Due to the breadth of the field of psychology, its importance depends largely on the specific application to which we refer. 

Psychology is obviously useful for enhancing mental health and personal growth, but the benefits of this science are not limited to the psyche. Health psychology, for example, seeks physical well-being and disease prevention through the acquisition of healthy behavioral habits.

The knowledge derived from psychological science is very important for the improvement of human relationships. Thus, psychologists are the ones who are best trained to improve the social skills of shy people, to mediate in cases of divorce or to intervene in mobbing and bullying, among other functions.

Due to all this, the time has come to incorporate psychology into our lives and allow ourselves to be helped by this entire group of professionals whose treatments will make our life easier.

Free ourselves from the stress that is so frequent nowadays. So don’t be afraid and try, check the benefits it brings, that by trying, nothing is lost, you will not regret it.

FAQS: How can psychology be used in personal life?

In this brief guide we answered the question ‘’How can psychology be used in personal life? and we highlighted some contributions of psychology to promote our quality of life.

If you have any comments or questions let us know!

References

Seligman, M. E., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Positive psychology: An introduction. In Flow and the foundations of positive psychology (pp. 279-298). Springer, Dordrecht.

Hammer, L. B., & Zimmerman, K. L. (2011). Quality of work life. In APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology, Vol 3: Maintaining, expanding, and contracting the organization. (pp. 399-431). American Psychological Association.

Seligman, M. E. (2002). Positive psychology, positive prevention, and positive therapy. Handbook of positive psychology, 2(2002), 3-12.