What is Mental Fitness?
Life Design and Mental Fitness
“Winners and losers have the same goals.” -James Clear
While I wouldn’t personally call anyone a loser, this quote speaks loudly to me. Winners and losers have the same goals. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want a better life. They want joy and peace; love; fulfillment, good health; financial stability.
29% of people want to quit their jobs and be their own boss.
85% of people are unhappy at their jobs.
Why are people settling for this? Over my 5 years of entrepreneurship I have spoken to hundreds of people eager to change their lives, but are hesitant to make the necessary changes. If you don’t change it, you choose it. So why are people choosing mediocracy?
Obviously this is a complicated answer, but I believe that how people think, regulate stress, react to life, process their emotions, nourish themselves, and regard themselves is the heart of it.
Mental fitness comes back to the foundations to help us master our own minds so that we can in turn go out into the world and live extraordinary, satisfying lives.
What is Mental Fitness?
Mental fitness is about strengthening and maintaining your mind and cognitive abilities, building resilience to stress, thinking clearly and rationally, and managing your emotional health. Mentally fit people are better equipped to cope with life’s challenges, understand how their thoughts impact the way they feel and behave, have greater joy, presence, and inner peace. They’re able to get out of their own way, have unconditional self-acceptance, and live their lives on their own terms.
In addition, they strive towards creating greater purpose and fulfillment in their lives, self-actualization, and not just getting by, but flourishing.
Mental fitness is just as important as physical fitness for preventative health. To continue this comparison, it’s easier to sit on the couch and eat cookie dough rather than go to yoga, lift weights, or run. It’s also easier to let the mind run wild, get stuck in negative thinking patterns, unhealthy habits, and let our cognitive abilities deteriorate with age.
Mentally fit people take personal responsibility for their lives, are determined, autonomous, and competent. They understand that they create their reality, and seek a healthy lifestyle.
The Five Areas of Mental Fitness
Emotional: The ability to feel, process, and regulate emotions; unconditional self-acceptance, resiliency, understanding that feelings are there to guide us, but yet they are not facts.
Social: Partnership, intimacy, parenting, friendships, and community/networks.
Financial: Relationship with money, low stress with money issues, feeling in control and responsible of finances, financial goals and wellbeing.
Physical: Healthy habits, enough high quality sleep, a nutritional diet, exercise, optimal hydration, free of addictions.
Spiritual: Faith; A meaningful connection to God, and/or something bigger than oneself.
What does practicing mental fitness do?
People didn’t realize how malleable the brain was until quite recently. Science has shown that we have the capacity to rewire our brains throughout our lives, not just those highly impressionable childhood years. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the nervous system to change in response to stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections. This means that our strengths can be enhanced; weaknesses can be strengthened, and maladaptive thought patterns can be changed. The more we feed negative thoughts, habits, and behaviors, the more likely they occur. Practicing mental fitness has the ability to break patterns, create/strengthen neural pathways, and rewire our brains so that we think in a manner that supports our best lives.
When you are mentally fit, you recognize that you are the CEO of your own life. You get to choose how you react to whatever life throws at you.
The result: unconditional self acceptance, resiliency, vibrancy, and self-actualization (the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming).
I will be speaking much more on this topic moving forward. Thoughts or questions? Drop them below.
With love,
Lindsay
