Just as it is important to feed healthy foods to your body, it is equally important to put positive thoughts into your brain. Your mental health is crucial to your physical health and emotional health. But if you have a negative mindset, your mental health could deteriorate.Â
Lifestyle factors and mental illness are also what can lead to you having negative thoughts. Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and other disorders can force a dark cloud over you whether or not you want it there.
No matter why you have negative thoughts, the repercussions can trickle throughout multiple areas of your life, like your ability to gain insurance.
Answers you give to life insurance interview questions can determine your premium rates or even your approval. If the underwriter determines your mental health has too much of an effect in other areas of your life, they can deny you coverage or make you pay steep rates.
However, when you know how your negative mindset affects your life insurance, you can make adjustments and avoid expensive premium rates or being denied coverage.
What is mental health?
To understand mental health, you also have to learn the emotional health definition and what social well-being is. Your emotional health revolves around how you think and feel. Your ability to cope with life events, and how you acknowledge your own emotions.Â
Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to be happy all the time to have good emotional health. Some days you have to create your own sunshine when having a bad day, and that is a sign of being emotionally healthy.
Your social well-being is your ability to create and maintain positive relationships with others. This relationship should be meaningful and consist of regular communication.
As adults, it is hard to socialize with friends, families, and neighbors every single day, but regularly can be stretched intervals.
If you’re a busy adult, especially with children, talking only a couple of times a month can be healthy. As long as all parties are comfortable with the flow of the relationship and the connection is maintained well, then your social well-being is just fine.
Our social well-being and emotional health play together to determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make life decisions. The stability of those two factors reveals if your mental health is in good standing.
When any of those factors mentioned above are out of whack, you can experience mental health problems. Those problems can affect your behavior, mood, and thinking. Here are some other factors that play a major role in your mental health:
- Family history of mental health problems
- Biological factors like genes or brain chemistry
- Life experiences like trauma or abuse
Why do life insurance providers care about my mental health?
Your mental health includes your emotional, psychological, and social well-being. All these play a huge part in how you make life decisions.Â
Someone who is isolated and does not have loved ones around may give up on life easier than someone who does, and someone who is emotionally stunted may sleep too much and skip out on work.
Both instances negatively affect life insurance companies because they may have to send a payout on your behalf should you give up on taking care of yourself and pass. Alternatively, if you stop paying your premium because you are not working, then they lose out money.
Insurance providers would much rather take on a good reliable client. To them, that is someone they believe will have a higher chance of living longer and paying their premiums. They may view someone who has a negative mindset as the opposite of a dependable customer.
It is important to remember that your mental health affects how you act, and a person with a negative mindset may not always make positive decisions. Early warning signs of mental health problems can be:
- Unexplained aches and pains
- Feeling helpless or hopeless
- Smoking, drinking, or using drugs often
- Feeling confused often, forgetful, on edge, angry, upset, worried, or scared
- Fighting or yelling with family and friends often
- Eating or sleeping too little or too much
- Pulling away from people and normal activities
- Having low or no energy
- Feeling numb or like nothing matters
- Having extreme mood swings that cause problems in relationships
- Having consistent thoughts and memories you cannot get out of your head
- Hearing voices or believing something that is not true
- Thinking of harming yourself or others
Mental Health Issues Can Be Money-Sabotaging
The fact that having a negative mindset can affect your finances can be considered a major reason life insurance providers decline coverage for those with mental health issues or give them a higher premium.
The negative emotions you experience can weigh on you harder than positive emotions because they are a signal that something is wrong. If they did not hit you as hard, you probably would not recognize that there is a problem.
Still, with the weight of those negative emotions, people do not heed those warnings and fix the issue. Instead, they let it tear them down and affect them in all aspects of their life.
Being that you need to be okay physically, emotionally, and socially to work well and make money, it usually affects finances the worst. Money issues typically make things more stressful, which only worsens your mental health.
Insurance providers are aware of how a negative mindset can lead to you being in a destructive cycle that involves mental health issues and financial turmoil.
Jealousy, anxiety, depression, guilt, sadness, embarrassment, and feeling overwhelmed are emotions that can be money-sabotaging if you do nothing to stop them in their tracks. Each of these emotions can cloud your judgment and hinder your ability to make rational decisions at work, in your personal life, and socially.
How Your Mental Health Hinders Your Life Insurance Rate
Learning how to avoid depression, anxiety, and negative thoughts can prevent your life insurance rates from increasing altogether. If not, life insurance underwriters can note your mental health issue as an underlying condition during underwriting.
On the bright side, underwriters consider your overall health history and not just at the time you apply. So you may experience a slight increase in your premium rate, but not denied coverage.
Due to individuals having different health histories, it is difficult to ballpark how exactly a negative mindset raises your life insurance premium. Though, knowing why it affects it can prevent it from even being an issue because you know what to look for when taking care of your health.
As a rule of thumb, exercising regularly, eating healthy, keeping stress to a minimum, practicing self-care, and following your doctor’s recommendations are all excellent ways to keep your emotional, physical, and mental health in good shape.
