Why Mattering Is So Important to Our Mental Health
Unravel the profound connection between our sense of mattering and mental health. Explore how feeling valued and significant can bolster emotional well-being, and why it's crucial to cultivate this sense in our everyday lives.
Anti-mattering is when you feel you do not matter at all
This quality can lead to mental health disorders
- New research developing the 5-item Anti-Mattering Scale shows how people high in this quality can be vulnerable to mental illness
- However, it is also a key psychological resource
- In positive psychology, the quality of “mattering” is considered to be an important psychological resource
Does Being High on Anti-Mattering Matter?
High AMS and high loneliness scores produce what Flett et al. refer to as the “double jeopardy of feeling alone and insignificant.”
- Anti-mattering can become part of a larger identity in which you feel that you lack value to others, contributing to a sense of marginalization.
Why Does it Matter to Matter?
When you suffer from what they call “anti-mattering,” you define yourself as someone whose “personal identity is dominated by the sense of not mattering to others.”
- You adopt this identity as a shield for the specific reason of protecting yourself from the stress of being ignored or regarded as irrelevant by others.
- The “anti” here, literally means “against” mattering, not simply being low in the feeling that you matter.
5 Ways to Test Your Anti-Mattering Tendencies
The AMS compares to the General Mattering Scale (GMS) in its relationship to measures of depression, loneliness, and anxiety
- How much do you feel like you don’t matter? How often have you been treated in a way that makes you feel insignificant?
- To what extent has you been made to feel invisible? How much will you be missed if you leave?