Psychology & Mental Health A–Z
A clear A–Z guide to psychology, mental health and the everyday experiences that influence how people think, feel, react and behave. Each entry starts with a general explanation, followed where relevant by a Josh DG perspective drawn from ideas explored across joshdg.com.
Jump to: A · B · C · D · E · I · M · N · O · P · R · S · T · U · V
A
Anxiety
Anxiety is a natural response to perceived threat, pressure or uncertainty. It can affect thoughts, emotions, behaviour and the body, and may involve worry, tension, restlessness, increased alertness or physical sensations such as a faster heartbeat. Anxiety becomes more concerning when it’s persistent, intense or begins interfering with everyday life.
Josh DG perspective
Anxiety can also be understood as an alert system. Something has been interpreted as needing attention, causing the mind and body to respond. Sometimes that alert is useful and proportionate to what is happening. At other times it can react too strongly, remain active for too long or respond when there is no obvious danger. This makes anxiety something worth understanding as well as simply trying to remove.
Explore further: What If Some of the Things You Struggle With Aren’t Always Weaknesses?
Anticipatory anxiety
Anticipatory anxiety is anxiety that appears before an event or situation happens. The mind begins imagining what could go wrong, sometimes creating a stress response long before there is anything immediate to respond to.
Josh DG perspective
The anticipation can sometimes become harder than the event itself. A future situation may be experienced repeatedly in the mind before it happens, meaning the person is responding not only to the event, but to their interpretation of what might happen.
Explore further: Here’s One Social Anxiety Hack Nobody’s Talking About
Awareness
Awareness is the ability to notice information, experiences or changes within yourself or around you. It can involve thoughts, emotions, behaviour, physical sensations, people, environments and circumstances.
Josh DG perspective
Awareness creates a starting point for understanding. It’s difficult to work on something that hasn’t been properly noticed yet, which is why noticing what is happening often needs to come before trying to change it.
Explore further: Why Self-Awareness Comes Before Self-Improvement
B
Brain
The brain is the physical organ inside the skull that forms part of the central nervous system. It processes information and supports functions including movement, memory, emotion, perception, learning and decision-making.
Josh DG perspective
The brain can be thought of as the physical foundation, while the mind describes the more individual layer of thoughts, meanings, perceptions and interpretations that emerge through a person’s experience. Separating the two can make it easier to think about why people with broadly similar brains can experience the same situation differently.
C
Comparison
Comparison is the process of judging or understanding something in relation to something else. Social comparison happens when people evaluate themselves, their progress, abilities or circumstances against other people.
Josh DG perspective
Comparison can change how a life feels without changing anything about the life itself. Someone can feel content until another person’s progress, appearance or circumstances become a new measuring point. Nothing has been taken away, but the mind starts keeping score, and progress that previously felt meaningful can suddenly feel smaller.
Coping mechanisms
Coping mechanisms are the thoughts, behaviours and strategies people use to manage stress, difficult emotions or challenging situations. They can be helpful, unhelpful or a mixture of both depending on the situation and how they are used.
Josh DG perspective
A coping strategy can help someone feel better without necessarily addressing what is making them feel bad. Exercise, keeping busy, distraction and other useful tools can provide genuine relief, but relief and resolution aren’t always the same thing. Understanding what sits underneath the need to cope can matter as much as the coping method itself.
D
Depression
Depression is a mental health condition involving persistent low mood or loss of interest and enjoyment, often alongside changes in energy, motivation, sleep, concentration, appetite, self-worth or hope. It can range in severity and can affect everyday functioning.
Josh DG perspective
Lower emotional periods can sometimes slow life down enough for previously ignored problems, needs or patterns to become more visible. That doesn’t make clinical depression positive or mean it should be left untreated, but difficult emotional states can sometimes contain information about what needs attention, support or change.
Explore further: What If Some of the Things You Struggle With Aren’t Always Weaknesses?
E
Emotional regulation
Emotional regulation is the way people notice, manage and respond to emotions. It includes how emotions rise, how strongly they are felt, how long they last and how a person behaves while experiencing them.
Josh DG perspective
Behaviour is often the visible end of an emotional process that began earlier. Becoming more aware of what builds before a reaction can make it easier to understand why the reaction happened, rather than judging the behaviour in isolation.
External awareness
External awareness refers to noticing what is happening outside yourself, including other people, surroundings, circumstances and changes in the environment.
Josh DG perspective
External awareness also means paying attention to the areas of life shaping day-to-day mental health: relationships, routines, work, finances, responsibilities and environment. Self-awareness helps explain what is happening inside; external awareness helps identify what around you may be contributing to it. Together they give a fuller picture.
External validation
External validation is reassurance, approval, recognition or positive feedback received from other people. It can support confidence and connection, but relying heavily on it can make self-worth more dependent on other people’s responses.
Josh DG perspective
Validation isn’t the problem; dependence on it can be. When progress, confidence or self-worth only feels real after somebody else notices it, the response of other people begins holding too much influence over how a person feels about themselves.
Explore further: Self-Improvement vs Seeking Status and Approval
I
Identity
Identity is a person’s sense of who they are. It can include values, beliefs, personality, relationships, culture, roles, experiences, interests and the way someone understands themselves over time.
Josh DG perspective
Identity has an internal and external side. Problems can appear when the version being presented to other people receives more attention than the private person underneath it, especially when appearance, productivity, status or approval begin deciding what feels valuable.
Explore further: When the Version of You People See Starts Becoming More Important Than You
Interpretation
Interpretation is the meaning a person gives to information or an experience. Two people can encounter the same event but understand, evaluate and emotionally respond to it differently.
Josh DG perspective
The event itself is only part of an experience. The mind also interprets what the event means, and that interpretation can influence thoughts, emotions, behaviour and mental health. Understanding the meaning the mind has attached to something can therefore be as important as understanding what happened.
M
Masking
Masking is the conscious or unconscious hiding, suppressing or adapting of natural feelings, behaviours or traits in order to appear a certain way or meet social expectations. The term is commonly discussed in relation to neurodivergence, but people can also mask emotional distress or other parts of themselves.
Josh DG perspective
Masking can make the outside presentation of a person look more settled than the experience underneath it. Staying busy, appearing confident, forcing a smile or leaning heavily on coping strategies can help someone function while also making the underlying problem harder to see. Looking okay and being okay aren’t always the same thing.
Mental health
Mental health describes psychological and emotional wellbeing, including how people think, feel, cope, relate to others and function in everyday life. Mental health can change over time and is influenced by biological, psychological, social and environmental factors.
Josh DG perspective
Mental health can be viewed as a changing overall reading rather than a fixed state. What a person experiences, thinks about, interprets and takes in can add to or take away from how balanced they feel. This helps explain why somebody can appear fine externally while their internal state changes throughout a day or over longer periods.
Mind
The mind is a broad term used for conscious and unconscious mental processes such as thinking, feeling, remembering, imagining, perceiving and interpreting. Unlike the brain, it’s not a separate physical organ.
Josh DG perspective
The mind is where individuality becomes especially important. Experiences can be similar while the meanings attached to them are completely different. The brain can be pictured as the thumb and the mind as the fingerprint: the physical foundation may be broadly shared, while the pattern of interpretation is personal.
Explore further: Brain, Mind and Mental Health
N
Nervous system
The nervous system is the body’s communication network, made up of the brain, spinal cord and nerves. It helps receive and process information and coordinates responses throughout the body, including automatic responses involved in stress, safety and arousal.
Josh DG perspective
Understanding an experience isn’t always only about changing a thought. The body can already be responding before a person has consciously worked out what is happening. Paying attention to physical state alongside thoughts and circumstances can give a fuller picture of why a reaction feels so strong.
O
Overthinking
Overthinking is a common term for repeatedly analysing, replaying or worrying about thoughts, choices or situations beyond the point where the thinking remains useful. It can contribute to indecision, anxiety and mental fatigue.
Josh DG perspective
Overthinking isn’t useful in every situation, but the same tendency can sometimes mean a mind naturally considers more outcomes, notices risks earlier or prepares for possibilities other people haven’t considered. A trait can become a difficulty in one environment and an advantage in another.
Explore further: The Hidden Strengths Behind Anxiety, Overthinking and Depression
Overstimulation
Overstimulation happens when the amount or intensity of sensory, social, emotional or informational input becomes difficult to process comfortably. It can lead to irritability, anxiety, fatigue, difficulty concentrating or a need to withdraw and recover.
Josh DG perspective
What looks manageable from the outside can contain far more input for one person than another. Sounds, conversations, movement, information and social demands can accumulate, meaning the final reaction may be responding to everything that built up rather than only the last thing that happened.
Overwhelm
Overwhelm is the feeling that the demands, thoughts, emotions or information a person is dealing with exceed what feels manageable at that moment.
Josh DG perspective
Overwhelm can become harder to understand when several unrelated problems are being held in the mind at once. Separating the different pressures can create enough mental space to see what is actually demanding attention and which problem needs to be dealt with first.
P
Private wins
Private wins are improvements, achievements or useful actions that happen without an audience, announcement or external recognition.
Josh DG perspective
Private wins can feel less exciting because they don’t come with immediate social feedback, but they can build capability, resilience and self-belief over time. The less progress depends on being seen, the more that progress can begin to feel internally owned.
Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behaviour. It explores areas including thinking, emotion, perception, learning, memory, development, relationships and the ways people respond to themselves and the world around them.
Josh DG perspective
Psychology can make everyday experiences easier to understand by looking beneath visible behaviour. Instead of stopping at what somebody did or felt, it asks what thoughts, interpretations, emotions, experiences or circumstances may have contributed to it.
R
Resilience
Resilience is the capacity to adapt, recover or continue functioning through stress, adversity or change. It doesn’t mean being unaffected by difficulty, and it can vary across situations and periods of life.
Josh DG perspective
Resilience is often built through small experiences that don’t look significant at the time. Quietly handling difficulties, learning what works and accumulating private wins can create forms of strength that are less visible than public achievements but more useful when life becomes difficult.
S
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to notice and understand aspects of yourself, including thoughts, emotions, behaviour, needs, strengths, limitations and patterns.
Josh DG perspective
Self-awareness is more than thinking about yourself after something happens. It includes catching thoughts, emotions and reactions while they are developing, recognising triggers and thresholds, and understanding what works with you rather than against you. Awareness comes before change because it’s difficult to work on something that hasn’t been properly noticed.
Explore further: Why Self-Awareness Comes Before Self-Improvement
Self-confidence
Self-confidence is a person’s belief in their abilities, judgement or capacity to handle situations. It can vary between areas of life and can be influenced by experience, feedback and environment.
Josh DG perspective
Confidence that depends heavily on feedback can feel stable while reassurance is present and disappear when it’s not. Building an internal sense that effort and progress still count without an audience can make confidence less dependent on other people continually reflecting it back.
Self-improvement
Self-improvement is the process of intentionally developing aspects of life, behaviour, skills, habits, wellbeing or understanding of oneself.
Josh DG perspective
Self-improvement works differently when mental health and self-understanding are included in the process. A routine can look productive without addressing the thoughts, emotions or circumstances underneath it. Understanding what actually needs attention can matter more than copying the habits of somebody whose mind and life work differently.
Explore further: Why Self-Help Books Make Sense but Still Don’t Work for You
Social anxiety
Social anxiety involves significant fear or worry about social situations, particularly situations involving scrutiny, judgement, embarrassment or rejection. When persistent and severe, it can form part of social anxiety disorder.
Josh DG perspective
Part of social anxiety can happen before the social situation begins. The mind may simulate possible conversations, reactions or mistakes in advance, creating anxiety around an event that hasn’t happened yet. Understanding the anticipatory part can help separate the imagined situation from the one that eventually takes place.
Explore further: Here’s One Social Anxiety Hack Nobody’s Talking About
Surface Identity
Surface Identity is a Josh DG concept describing what can happen when too much of a person’s identity becomes tied to how they look, how they are perceived, how productive they appear or how much validation they receive, while the deeper internal person receives less attention.
Josh DG perspective
Surface Identity is the version other people get to see: appearance, posts, activity, presentation and the story being shown publicly. Underneath it sit thoughts, insecurities, stress, private experiences and everything that doesn’t make the surface. Problems can begin when maintaining the visible version becomes more important than understanding or supporting the person underneath it.
Explore further: When the Version of You People See Starts Becoming More Important Than You
T
Thought patterns
Thought patterns are recurring ways of thinking or interpreting experiences. They can develop through learning, habits, beliefs and past experiences, and may influence emotion and behaviour without always being consciously noticed.
Josh DG perspective
Thought patterns can become so familiar that they start feeling like facts rather than interpretations. Noticing the pattern creates space to question whether the mind is repeating an old conclusion or responding to what’s actually happening now.
U
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is the state of not knowing what will happen, what something means or what outcome to expect. It can increase anxiety because the mind has less information available to predict or prepare for what comes next.
Josh DG perspective
When information is missing, the mind can start filling in the gaps itself. For an anxious mind, those gaps can quickly become possible negative outcomes, meaning uncertainty creates room for imagined possibilities to feel more immediate than the facts currently available.
Explore further: How Uncertainty Can Make Anxiety Feel Worse
V
Validation
Validation is the recognition or acknowledgement that a person’s feelings, experiences, thoughts or efforts are understandable or meaningful. Validation can come from other people or from within oneself.
Josh DG perspective
Validation can be useful without becoming the measurement system for a life. The problem begins when an achievement, decision or version of yourself only feels valuable after somebody else responds to it. External validation works better as something appreciated than something required.
Explore further: Self-Improvement vs Seeking Status and Approval
This A–Z will continue to grow as new ideas, concepts and perspectives are explored across JoshDG.com.
About this A–Z: This page brings together established concepts, everyday psychological experiences and Josh DG concepts and perspectives. It’s intended for general information and reflection, not medical advice, diagnosis or a substitute for professional support.