What is Mental Fitness?
October 10 is World Mental Health Awareness day and the theme for 2023, set by the World Foundation of Mental Health, is ‘Mental health is a universal human right.’ World Mental Health Day is about raising awareness of mental health and driving positive change for everyone’s mental health something we are deeply passionate about at Wondersource.
It’s also a chance to talk about mental health, how we need to look after it, and how important it is to get help if you are struggling. As we know now, maintaining good mental health is a necessity for good physical health and a priority for living a fulfilling life. In the same way that we exercise our bodies to stay physically fit, we must also take steps to cultivate mental fitness. Mental fitness encompasses emotional resilience, self-awareness, and the ability to handle life's challenges with grace.
A recent study led by Harvard demonstrated that 50% of the population will experience a mental health condition at one point in their life and the latest Gallup poll showed that people are more stressed than ever before in history. It has never been more important to prioritise your well-being. And, mental fitness is not only an investment in your health and success, it also helps you to lift up those around you, be a role model and show others how to prioritise their needs and well-being and show up as the leader you know yourself to be.
In this blog post, we'll explore the concept of mental fitness and provide actionable strategies to support and strengthen your mental wellbeing.
Understanding Mental Fitness
Mental fitness is not merely the absence of mental illness; it's the proactive cultivation of mental strength and resilience. It involves building a toolkit of strategies to help you manage stress, navigate adversity, and thrive in both your personal and professional life. Here are some key aspects of mental fitness:
Emotional Resilience: Mental fitness equips you to bounce back from setbacks and adversity. It's about developing the ability to adapt to change and maintain emotional balance in difficult situations.
Self-Awareness: Understanding your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is crucial for mental fitness. Self-awareness enables you to identify areas for improvement and make informed choices.
Stress Management: Mental fitness involves effective stress management techniques that help you cope with the demands of daily life without becoming overwhelmed.
Strategies to Support Your Mental Fitness
Practice Mindfulness: Mindfulness involves paying attention to the present moment without judgment. Regular mindfulness meditation or simply being mindful in your daily activities can reduce stress and improve overall mental wellbeing. Consider going for a walk in nature without a phone to listen to music or podcasts and just being present with yourself and your experience.
Build Resilience Through Adversity: Instead of avoiding challenges, embrace them as opportunities for growth. Each obstacle you overcome strengthens your resilience. Look for empowering meaning when faced with challenges. For instance, if you’re feeling particularly challenged, consider that you’re being tested to see how much you truly care about what you want to achieve.
Seek Support: Don't hesitate to reach out to friends, family, or a mental health professional when needed. Sharing your thoughts and feelings can provide valuable emotional support. Especially if you’re feeling shame about something, sharing it in a safe space, provides an opportunity for it to be healed.
Slow Down and Find Time to be Still: So often we find ourselves rushing from one place to another not realising how stressful that actually is on our bodies and spirits. Slow down, be more present in your life and find time for stillness. Whether it’s taking a walk in the park without listening to any music or a podcast, lying down for 10 minutes with no agenda, the benefits of finding moments of stillness are incredible. Your day can go from feeling stressful and agitated to feeling calm and at peace, simply by giving yourself space to do nothing for 10 minutes.
Regularly Forgive Yourself and Others and Release Resentments: Forgiveness is a process and we don’t want to forgive before we’re ready, but too many of us hold on to grudges and resentments without realising it or noticing how it’s holding us back. Forgiveness and releasing resentments can be a part of your daily routine. Here are some ways to practice forgiveness and releasing resentments: Practice empathy by considering things from other people’s perspectives, honour your honest feelings and how you feel about a situation, write a letter to someone to share your honest feelings without actually sending it, write in a journal to reflect and consider how you might let go of the resentment, pray to ask to release what’s not for your highest good, visualise the person who you feel resentful towards and send them love and well wishes, reflect on times when others forgave you and how that made you feel, ask yourself about the circumstances that may have led the other person to behave in such a way, trust that when you let go of your resentments, better things can move into your life.
Stay Physically Active: Physical fitness is closely linked to mental fitness. Regular exercise releases endorphins, reduces stress, and enhances your mood. If you’re feeling burntout, opt for forms of exercise that are more relaxing and restorative like yoga, pilates and going for a walk. Ideally, include weight training as well.
Support your Gut Health and Eat Nourishing Food: Cut out inflammatory foods like sugar and processed foods and eat an anti-inflammatory diet with lots of vegetables and protein. If you’re not sure where to start, the Mediterranean diet is consistently voted one of the healthiest diets in the world.
Practice Gratitude: Cultivate a sense of gratitude by regularly reflecting on the things you're thankful for. This simple practice can boost your overall happiness and resilience. Consider writing five things down that you’re grateful for each day and include one thing about yourself in the list.
Create Safety in Your Body: According to expert Dr. Linnea, Nervous System Regulation is, at its core, the ability to move flexibly between different states of arousal in response to stressors. The goal is to get into the habit of identifying when your body is in fight, flight or freeze mode which can be indicated by a tightness in your body, shortness of breath, agitation, a fast heart beat and an inability to be present to name a few, and then letting your body know you are safe. To create safety and calm, we need to cultivate a calm nervous system and we do this in two ways:
Creating safety in our mind: Changing how we perceive situations getting into a place. Ideally getting to a place where we feel the world is ultimately safe and things are happening for us. We can create safety in our mind by speaking to ourselves with love and compassion and regularly challenging our limiting beliefs and fears. Our brains have been hardwired through evolution to focus on the negative so it’s important to acknowledge this and train our brain to look for the good. This doesn’t mean avoiding our genuine feelings. Rather, instead of feeding our insecurities and fears, we can rewire our brains through practices like gratitude, self-compassion, positive self talk and affirmations, writing down our fears and then writing down the opposite of what we fear to see a more balanced perspective, regularly visualising what we want to happen rather than what might go wrong, cultivating trust and faith, prayer, speaking positively about ourselves and our lives, working on our sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
Creating safety in our body: Changing our body’s physical response to situations. We can create safety in our body by practicing breath-work like the 4-7-8 method (breathe in for 4, hold for 7, breathe out for 8 and repeat five times), talking to yourself with self-compassion, feeling your emotions and self-soothing, sitting in stillness, going for a walk in nature, yoga, dancing, singing and laughing.
Set Goals & Stay Disciplined: Create an exciting vision for your life without holding yourself back or limiting yourself and then set goals that inspire you. If you’re not used to allowing yourself to imagine and dream big, setting a vision for your life might seem impossible and you may feel bogged down by doubts. That’s ok! Allow yourself to dream big from where you are and you’ll add to the vision over time as you get more comfortable asking for what you want and envisioning a life that supports the best of you. Our minds need a compelling vision to get excited about. Break down your long-term goals into smaller, manageable steps. Achieving these milestones can boost your self-esteem and motivation. Commit to stepping outside of your comfort zone and continue to show up even when it feels hard and it doesn’t seem like you’re making progress. If you commit to your goals no matter what and commit to getting a little better every day, eventually you’ll land where you need to be. Remember that you are capable beyond belief eventhough your mind won’t understand this when you start out. Take the first step and trust that the guidance will come, you’ll grow in confidence, the support will appear as you go.
Incorporate Daily Meditation and Visualisation: Once we’ve created a compelling vision for our lives and dreamt big without holding ourselves back, meditation and visualisation can be incredibly powerful to bring our vision and the feelings we want to predominantly feel to life. Meditation helps us to quiet our mind and connect to our inner wisdom, whereas visualisation, helps us practice and rehearse how we want to feel and what we want to experience, drawing it in to us. An incredibly powerful tool, successful athletes use visualisation to support their dreams and goals and ambitious professionals with goals and visions, should be doing the same.
Prioritise Joy and Self-Care: Make self-care and your happiness a non-negotiable part of your routine. This can include taking time for relaxation, hobbies, laughter or pursuing activities that bring you joy.
Make Time for Rest and Get Enough Sleep: We all need time to rest and recover. Prioritise sleep and rest as it will enable you to be more resilient. If you struggle with sleep, there are countless things you can do. Cut out caffeine after noon, get off technology two hours prior to bed, get sunlight on your face first thing in the morning, stop eating food two hours before bed, have a wind down routine like taking a bath, journaling about your day or doing a short yoga sequence, take supplements like magnesium glycinate.
Practice Emotional Freedom Technique (tapping): The power of tapping can’t be overstated. Research indicates that it can effectively lower the body’s levels of circulating cortisol—a hormone secreted in response to stress—by over 24 percent. EFT Tapping is considered an "evidence-based" practice for helping with anxiety, PTSD, phobias, depression and more. There are countless free videos available on YouTube covering everything from fear and anxiety to sleep and abundance.
Stay Connected: Maintain and nurture your social connections. Engaging with loved ones can provide emotional support and a sense of belonging. However, it’s important to be mindful of who you spend time with and make sure that your relationships don’t feel one-sided and they feel uplifting and good.
Set Healthy Boundaries: If you’re new to setting boundaries it can be hard to know what to do. The goal is to prioritise yourself and make decisions that will honour your needs and dreams first. This might mean saying no to a birthday party on the weekend because you’re tired and you know you need some rest, it might mean not answering your phone for an emotionally draining friend when you don’t have the emotional capacity to talk, it might mean saying you don’t want to talk about something when someone is pressing you on a topic you don’t feel like discussing. The more you get comfortabale with honouring yourself and your needs first, the easier it will become to set boundaries.
Pray or Set Intentions: Whether you’re religious or not, studies show there are so many benefits to praying. Whether it’s to your higher self, the universe or God, there is no right way to pray or set intentions. At the beginning of the day, you might intend to have an amazing day and to feel light, confident and at ease. Walking into a meeting you can set the intention for the meeting to go well and all of your ideas to be well received. At the beginning of the month you might set the intention to be an energetic match to all of your desires, for things to go your way, to feel joy, love and ease, to speak confidently and be a magnet for abundance and miracles. Consistently speak words of positivity and love about how you want to experience things.
Limit Stressors: Identify sources of stress in your life and work on strategies to minimise or eliminate them. Sometimes, this may involve setting boundaries or saying no to additional commitments. Prioritise your needs first. Ask yourself what you need and give it to yourself. Maybe you need a long walk at lunch time, an early night to bed or a call with your friend.
Educate Yourself: Learn about mental health and wellbeing. Knowledge empowers you to recognize signs of stress or mental health issues and seek help when necessary.
Prioritising your mental fitness must be a proactive and ongoing journey that can lead to a happier, more fulfilling life. By practicing mindfulness, building emotional resilience, seeking support when needed, and adopting self-care routines, you can effectively support and strengthen your mental wellbeing. Remember that mental fitness is a lifelong endeavor, and small, consistent steps can lead to significant positive changes in your overall mental health and quality of life.
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