When to think about mental fitness
Mental Health is almost entirely a reactive approach to managing our mental wellbeing. This is completely the wrong way around. We should be actively managing our mental fitness from the beginning.
So, in answer to “when to think about mental fitness” the answer is: now
This is an extract of my book: Mental Fitness for Hackers — PREORDER HERE
We are not taught to manage our mental health. Worse than that, we aren’t encouraged to manage our mental fitness throughout life but instead mental health kicks in when things have gone wrong.
If you look through forums, facebook groups, twitter and speak to people this is not just a shame, it’s a huge lost for society. Weeks, months or years lost.
Mental health is most often associated with managing or recovering from depression, stress or anxiety. When you’re over that, you have managed your mental health. You are somehow “fixed”.
I think this is important… but it’s not the whole story.
If you’ve ever treated your mental health, whether informally through reading or talking to friends or formally through CBT or counselling you’ll know that there are key concepts which help you reframe situations, manage your emotions and generally deal with yourself better.
These techniques of reframing help us step back, separate out the emotion from the reality, and approach our own actions with a clearer head. It’s often hard to do but it makes a difference.
But it turns out the same techniques and ideas can be applied to make you mentally “fitter”, even if you’re feeling generally ok.
I think of “mental fitness” as how you mental and emotional health fits with what you want to be getting out of life at the time. During your 20s for example, you might want to be highly wired, running at every opportunity but you also need to be able to take a step back which being wired won’t help you do.
As you take on new things in life, you need to be aware how your mental or emotional state are being to be put under stress. If you’re a driven person, want to push yourself and feel like your should achieve great things you’re going to need to manage your mental fitness even more.
Ambition needs fitness
Having big ambitions means you need strong mental fitness. Even buying and renovating a house can put a hell of a strain on your emotional and personal life.
Life is full of these stressful events: career changes, retraining, starting a company or changing the world in whatever small way. Each event is likely to make you question if you can succeed, whether you have the support and make you feel that you’re going to fail.
If you don’t manage your mental health, these events can have the wrong effect. They will slow you down, make you feel less able and limit what you’re willing to do.
Fortunately, there are techniques to help you do this.
Mental health techniques allow you to reframe situations which can take pressure away. You can learn to manage emotions such as doubt, stress and imposter syndrome in a variety of ways so that you can do things that these feels might otherwise stop.
In a way, you become your own coach or supportive friend. You learn to spot when your mental and emotional state is about to stop you and then use techniques to push on through but without exhausting yourself.
This does not mean you are cured forever or will never feel anxious or stress. But you will have a powerful toolkit for dealing with them.
If we taught mental fitness in school and university, I believe people would try more adventurous things. They would move careers sooner. They would deal with problems at work in a better way. They would build a better world.
That may sound grand, but consider this: the world is built by people. Read the biography of any great person in history and they will have had their own demons but will somehow of got through them.
We, as a race have a lot to do. We need to be better at doing it. Mental fitness is an important part of that.
To do that you need to know the tools and techniques.
