What Does it Mean to be Mentally Fit?
Are you stuck in a rut of negative thoughts, low self-esteem, and perpetual conflict? Perhaps you’re in what feels like a permanent state of drained, low-energy living. Or, you just can’t figure out why you’re struggling through everyday tasks, projects at work that you previously enjoyed, and personal relationships that used to bring happiness to your life.
Want to change this? The solution may very well lie in improving your mental fitness.
Before you write this proposition off as a pointless self-improvement hoax, let me ask you: Have you ever really thought about what mental fitness actually is?
How about its importance, mental health benefits, and what it could do for your life? Research shows that mental fitness is just as important as, and can have an even greater positive impact on your life than, physical fitness. Ready to unlock the many benefits that being mentally fit can bring you into your everyday life?
Read on to learn about what increased mental fitness can do for you and how to boost yours today!
Why We Need Mental Fitness
You might wonder, why do we have to “practice” or “improve” our mental fitness? Our brains have kept us alive through much of human history during periods of time when we have been faced with a great deal of extreme conditions and trials. Shouldn’t they be able to handle our daily tasks now?
However, it is precisely that — the fact that our brains are so evolutionarily predisposed to keeping us alive in ancient, pre-modern times — that causes us to need to adapt our brain to today’s life.
It’s helpful to think of our brains as being composed of three key parts: the reptilian brain, the new mammal brain, and the old mammal brain. It’s our reptilian brain that is programmed to deal with our stress and basic behavioral responses. This was really helpful to us when we were faced with immediate dangers, like making it through a freezing night or being chased by tigers.
Unfortunately, our stressors are much less clear cut and much more difficult to address today. Dealing with the things we deal with now — a never-ending news cycle full of tragedy, constant worry regarding paying for our living expenses, difficult personal relationships, and cut-throat professional lives — is like being chased by really slow, ever-present tigers to our reptilian brains.
Because our lives and stressors are so different nowadays, we have to work to retrain our reptilian brains to handle our modern lives — making them fit for the workouts we put them through every day as we exist in our world.
To do this, we have to stop defaulting to using the “saboteur” section of our brain — the one that produces negative emotions, causes you stress and anxiety, and fuels regret and shame; and start defaulting to the “sage” section of our brain — the one that produces positive emotions and helps you focus and remain calm. When people improve their mental fitness, the “sage” section of their brain becomes visibly larger in MRI scans.
Aspects of Mental Fitness
There are a few important components when it comes to mental fitness. Since it’s the measure of your ability to change and control your thoughts and brain, being mentally fit gives you an increased ability to be aware of the way you behave, think, and feel in your daily life. This allows you to have a stronger resilience to, and less negative, self-defeating thoughts when faced with challenges and setbacks in life.
Being able to control your patterns of thought and behavior helps you to pull yourself out of self-sabotaging patterns and stop negative thoughts from spiraling out of control. Through practice, this will help you build positive neural pathways, reduce anxiety and stress, develop higher self-esteem and self worth, and feel mentally healthy.
Though the brain itself is an organ, not a muscle, it can be trained like a muscle. There are a few muscles within your brain. Some of those muscles are responsible for positive and negative thought processes. Improving your mental fitness allows you to strengthen the brain muscles responsible for positive thought and emotions.
Patterns of Thinking and Behavior
I’m going to ask you to try a quick exercise. Take a minute to consider what you have been thinking for the last few hours.
Pay attention to how these thoughts make you feel. What behavioral patterns do they bring about?
For example, when you become overwhelmed, do you fall into a suffocating blanket of detrimental, unhelpful thoughts, like,
“Maybe I’m not good enough for my partner,” or “I think I might be the wrong person for this job?”
If you’re struggling with mental fitness, this likely then leads to feelings of hopelessness, stress, or despair, then actions that make the situation worse, like stress eating or avoiding the problems that you are facing entirely.
Now, think about how many other negative thought patterns you engage in daily. If you’re like many other people, it’s probably a lot.
In order to change these self-destructive patterns, you need to be aware of, and then address, negative thoughts as soon as you start having them. Then, change those thoughts into more helpful, positive ones by practicing self affirmation techniques.
Controlling Your Brain and Building Positive Brain Pathways
As you begin to alter your patterns of thinking, and by extension, your patterns of behavior, you’ll begin building positive brain pathways and will feel more in control of your life again.
Research shows that training your brain to default to positive thought processes instead of negative ones actually increases the muscle mass in the area top left part of your brain that handles positive emotions, focus, calm, and creativity.
Just like physical fitness, mental fitness involves the development of target muscles. There are certain muscles in your brain that are responsible for negative thoughts and emotions. Using them frequently by allowing yourself to slip into negative thought patterns results in persistent feelings of frustration, guilt, and doubt. This will leave you with greater levels of anxiety, stress, and unhappiness.
So, just like you would at the gym, you need to stop working out the muscles you don’t want to build and start exercising the muscles that you want to be as strong as possible!
To build those positive brain pathways that you need for the life full of increased wellbeing and happiness you want, you need to identify and change your thought patterns in order to strengthen your target brain areas.
What Are the Benefits to Mental Fitness?
Now that you know what mental fitness is, let’s talk about how it can help you in every area of your life. With improved mental fitness, your life will become easier and more enjoyable. From being able to accomplish routine tasks, like going to the grocery store, in a breeze, to improved emotional health, to increased mental energy that’ll help you to exist with enhanced self efficacy and self-confidence, you’ll notice positive change everywhere.
It’s about time that you took control of your life by taking control of your brain! Remember, it’s your organ! You deserve to reap the benefits of all the wonderful things it can do.
Relationship with Yourself
First and foremost, being mentally fit will do wonders for your relationship with the most important person in your life — You!
Say goodbye to negative self talk and low self-esteem; say hello to a fresh sense of self-confidence and a newly found self love.
Having a positive relationship with yourself will benefit you in a plethora of other areas of your life. The way you perceive, think about, and present yourself directly affects how other people, in both your personal and professional life, perceive and think about you.
Being mentally fit enough to face life’s challenges with a calm mind will allow you to be more successful and to have an improved self image. Living in cycles of positive thoughts that lift you up instead of negative ones that take you on a spiral down will leave you feeling happier, improve your overall wellbeing, and leave you with more energy to take on the world.
Mental Health
Good mental fitness is linked to good mental health conditions. If you’re struggling with mental illness, from major depression to social anxiety, make improving your mental fitness a priority!
Just think about it: How can you possibly have good mental health if you’re constantly putting yourself down or feeling like you aren’t good enough for your relationships or professional responsibilities? You can’t!
You need to change the way you think now into a way that is mentally fit in order to feel really, truly secure in your life. Doing this will not only reduce anxiety, but provide you with increased energy and feelings of control over your life, leaving you feeling happier, hopeful, and content with your life.
Personal Relationships
Desiring a more relaxing, less conflict-ridden personal and social life? Start by improving your mental fitness.
Being mentally unfit can truly sabotage your personal life. From constantly questioning whether your friends, partner, and family really love you, to feeling extreme guilt for saying no to an outing, to fearing that if you speak up and tell people what you need or want you’ll be hated. Bad mental fitness has a way of harming every aspect of your private life.
You deserve a personal life full of relationships you actually enjoy being a part of. Strengthening the brain pathways and muscles responsible for self-confidence, positive emotions, and higher self-esteem in your journey to improve your mental fitness will allow you to approach your relationships with a calm, clear head — no more doubting your worth again!
It’ll also leave you with an increased ability to advocate for your wants and needs in your relationships and a greater sense of self love, letting you get back to feeling fulfilled in your personal relationships. Remember, it’s hard to love others when you’re struggling to love yourself.
Professional Life
Looking for a way to take your professional life to the next level? Improving your mental fitness is the answer you’ve been searching for! Research shows that people who are more mentally fit are three times more creative and are able to perform almost a third better than those who aren’t in the workplace. They also have an easier time navigating difficult situations with colleagues and are more successful in business.
Being mentally fit also allows you to complete your work much more effectively and efficiently as you improve your brain’s wellbeing, you’ll notice that you’re able to complete a lot more work with much less time and effort.
Or, maybe you’ve lost your passion for work that really used to make your heart sing and are looking for a way to get that drive back? Becoming more mentally fit can help with that too! Let’s face it — having more energy and enthusiasm for life is going to make everything more enjoyable.
No longer will you feel drained and burned out doing what you used to love — you’ll start to feel like you felt on your first day again.
Even if your job has never been something you’ve loved, improving your mental fitness can help you find more satisfaction, and less frustration, in it, putting an end to starting and ending each day feeling completely exhausted.
Improved Overall Well Being
At this point, I think it goes without saying that improved mental fitness has the power to improve your overall wellbeing. It not only has the power to boost your overall mood and reduce stress, but can provide for a multitude of benefits to your physical health.
Good mental fitness can reinvigorate your desire to eat healthy and try new foods, restart your gym routine, get a healthy body, and strengthen your immune system. Because strengthening neural pathways that are responsible for positive emotions will leave you feeling more energized in all areas of your life, it’s no surprise that people report an increased sense of wellbeing, and improved sleep after improving their mental fitness.
Stronger Resilience to Challenges
Having strong positive brain muscles will, without a doubt, make it easier for you to successfully handle the challenges of life. From problems that pop up in your daily routine to those that change your life entirely, you’ll feel more equipped to tackle everything that comes your way!
What are you waiting for? Stop feeling bogged down by life’s frequent challenges by starting to improve your mental fitness today!
How to Become Mentally Fit
If you’re reading this and are feeling like, you might not have very good mental fitness right now, I have splendid news for you: All of this is 100% learnable! All it takes is a little bit of consistent work, practice, and mental exercise.
Even better news: There are professionally developed programs, with proven results, designed to improve your personal mental fitness.
Mental Fitness Bootcamp
The method used in the mental fitness bootcamp has improved the lives of over 400,000 participants from 50 different countries.
After going through the program, women report experiencing less stress, better sleep, more energy, a healthier body, a sharper mind, and more positive thoughts and feelings. Many also attest to this program’s ability to improve personal and professional relationships and state that they no longer get trapped in negative thought patterns.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up today to work with a mental fitness professional who can’t wait to see you get started on this life-changing experience!
Mindfulness and Mental Dexterity Exercises
Just like you have to complete physical exercise and physical activity, like lifting weights and running, to improve your physical health, you’ve got to complete mental exercises, such as mindfulness and memory exercises and mental dexterity exercises, to improve your mental wellbeing and fitness.
I’ll be happy to work with you to find what mental exercises will enhance your life and improve your well being the most. Together, we’ll start to fit these exercises into your daily life and find ways to make mental fitness workouts work for you! I’ll help you practice interrupting negative thought patterns with positive affirmations and constructive, productive thoughts. You’ll feel mentally fit before you know it!
Sustained Practice and Coaching
Just like you have to stick to a workout schedule and complete regular exercise if you want to make progress at the gym, you are going to have to take a few minutes each day to make mental fitness exercises and practice a part of your daily routine in order to maintain independence from negative thought patterns. There is no such thing as a mental fitness break!
Don’t worry, though! Once you get into the habit of developing your mental fitness, those habits have been proven to stick.
I’m here to help, and can’t wait to see you thrive as you embark on your journey to mental fitness!
