Skip to main content

CHIME

Image
By


Throughout this month, I have seen many patients struggling with deep emotional instability. Given the circumstances, this is more than expected. However, I find this an opportune moment to reintroduce a model of emotional sustainability that can serve as a guide in times of adversity while you work towards a more pleasant, fulfilling, and meaningful life.  

You are already familiar with the foundations of this guide, as I have outlined its core concepts in my last five articles. They are:  

  • C – Connection: Building and maintaining supportive relationships with family, friends, and the community.
  • H – Hope and Optimism about the Future: Believing in the possibility of a better future and working towards positive change.
  • I – Identity: Developing or rediscovering a sense of self that is positive and resilient.
  • M – Meaning in Life: Finding purpose through personal values, spirituality, work, or community engagement.
  • E – Empowerment: Gaining confidence, control, and the ability to make choices that shape one's own life.

These five elements form the basis of emotional sustainability, all of which are directly linked to psychological recovery following significant emotional challenges. They are part of the CHIME acronym in positive psychiatry, which, in turn, represents some of the most well-established evidence-based insights on how to develop and maintain emotional well-being in the face of impactful adversities.  

The practical importance of this approach is that it equips you with greater positivity and fosters resilience, regardless of the difficulties you may encounter. This does not mean dismissing problems, which would inevitably lead to toxic positivity. However, as I discussed in my article from 18 March this year, healing the negatives does not create the positives. You must actively work to cultivate your emotional energy.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accounting for the Invisible

By
It is once more that time of year — the season for gathering documents, for preparing the annual offering to the revenue gods. Tedious, draining, bureaucratic. Yes, all of that. But it is also a curious interval of observation, a quiet adjustment of memory’s lens. After all, the past year — or at least its more tangible husk — lies partially inscribed in these papers. I say partially, for what is captured on the page is a witness of uneven fidelity. Absent are the details, the reasons, the delicate chain of responsibility. The numbers are all there: the income, the transactions, the movement of capital. But backstage remains hidden — the weight of effort, the hush of a conscience at peace. What is left is a pale suggestion of something more vital — this elusive current we call money. Energy transmuted, but only faintly traceable. A flicker of something once vivid, now flattened by ink and deadlines. And so I sift through the papers. Not merely to comply, but to remember. To...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Strength Truly Means: A Letter to Men

By
There exists, hidden in the quiet undercurrents of our culture, a grand illusion: that manhood is synonymous with silence, that strength demands the concealment of pain, and that the measure of a man is his ability to endure without faltering. Such ideas pass through generations like whispered codes, accepted without question, repeated without reflection. And yet, when held to the light of reason, they wither like old parchment, for they are not truths, but relics of fear. It must be said — and said without apology — that you are allowed to speak of what has wounded you. To give voice to pain is not to surrender to it, but to name it, to limit its dominion. Silence may seem noble in the moment, but over time it hardens into a cage. Words, carefully chosen and honestly spoken, are the first instruments of freedom. You are allowed to weep — not as an act of collapse, but as a testament to your humanity. Tears are not the language of the weak; they are the body's recogniti...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Malicious Rejection of Education

By
There are moments — quiet, unbidden — when one pauses and wonders: how did we come to this? After centuries of inquiry, of minds that charted the unseen and hands that steadied the fevered, we now find ourselves in a peculiar and disquieting place. A place where truth is not refuted for want of evidence, but rejected for daring to inconvenience belief. The antivaxx movement is a malicious rejection of education — not a lapse in understanding, but a deliberate estrangement from reason. It perplexes, not for its novelty, but for its brazenness. This is not the soft silence of the uninformed; it is the clamour of the wilfully blind, adorned in the rhetoric of liberty and cloaked in a defiant performance of scepticism. Vaccines — the elegant product of scientific rigour and logistical triumph — are cast aside in favour of speculation, rumour, and the seductive pull of conspiratorial thinking. To refuse a vaccine is not an emblem of critical thought. It is, more often, a retreat...
Post a Comment
Read more