Research has documented the important role of neighborhood quality in influencing individual well-being. Developmental science has demonstrated that the local built environment is essential to mental health. Evidence from both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies suggests that both structural and social attributes of a neighborhood can affect the mental health of residents. Negative aspects of the neighborhood (e.g. perceived level of accessibility to green space, more crime, feeling unsafe, less walkability) have been found to be associated with depression, anxiety, and measures of stress, while positive ones are associated with benefits for both physical and mental health.

Research has shown that neighborhoods affect health via multiple paths of influence:

• Physical conditions—aspects of the natural environment and the human-made built environment including features such as air, water, and soil quality, hazardous substances, streets, sidewalks, and buildings.
• Service conditions—features of the physical environments that provide public services such as schools, child care centers, grocery stores, public transportation systems, businesses, and parks.
• Social conditions—including the relationships among community members, such as mutual trust and support and the willingness to intervene for the public good.

Everyone wants to live in a good neighborhood. And for a good reason: Proximal external conditions matter to our health and well-being.

At the same time, internal conditions matter too. In my practice, clients often find it useful to reflect on their inner landscape in similar terms. The human mind, in this context, may be likened to a society. Like society, the human mind contains many separate yet connected entities, resources, and constituencies, which may at times be oppositional to each other. As in society, inside our minds different agendas vie for influence and control. As in society, in our minds we may choose to align ourselves more closely with certain ideas, processes, or habits over others. Like society, the mind is many things but also one coherent whole.

If you accept that your mind is a society, then your mindset—those beliefs, processes, mental resources and habits that are readily accessible, proximal, and familiar—represents your neighborhood. Just as the external environment affects health, so does the internal environment. Your external neighborhood is made from physical structures, social processes, accessible resources, and other people nearby. Your internal neighborhood is made up of those mental structures, processes, and resources that are proximate, accessible, and familiar: your go-to mental moves, as it were. An impoverished, chaotic, oppressive, or violent internal neighborhood will have similar effects to those of a low-quality external neighborhood.

Moreover, a high-quality neighborhood affects your well-being even if you do not consistently take advantage of its offerings. Just knowing that there is a nice park, a good restaurant, or a friendly neighbor in my neighborhood adds to my quality of life, even if I don’t use these resources that often.

The same goes for the internal neighborhood. For example, merely recognizing my creative impulse as an important aspect of my internal makeup—acknowledging and valuing it—will improve my sense of well-being even when I am not actively involved in creative activity. Just knowing that I have an effective meditative practice to calm myself down when needed is enough to improve my sense of well-being, even if I don’t use the practice often.

Community exerts much of its effect through physical, behavioral engagement: You go places and do things. Likewise, the internal neighborhood is built on cognitive and emotional engagement. If you spend time at the local coffee house, you’re engaged in your community. If you spend time regularly practicing, say, an attitude of gratitude—an awareness of the good, fortunate things in your life—then your internal neighborhood includes a gratitude component. If your first thought upon an instance of failure is “I’m an idiot; I always fail; I fail at everything” then you are residing in a low-quality mental neighborhood, compared to someone whose first thought in that instance is “I’m human; human beings sometimes fail; I can learn from this.” If the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning and look outside is the well-kept neighborhood park rather than a trash-strewn sidewalk, then that will improve my mood and sense of well-being. If the first thought I have upon waking up in the morning is curiosity rather than anxiety about what today will bring, then my sense of well-being will likewise improve.

Finding, moving into, and nurturing our connections to a high-quality neighborhood is effortful, yet the health-related payoff is high. The same goes for the internal neighborhood. Part of the work of therapy is to identify the client’s internal resources, healthy cognitive processes, core values, and constructive beliefs and help them commerce regularly with those mind elements and bring them to the forefront of their consciousness through mental engagement and practice.

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