Mental Fitness: Enhance Your Performance, Relationships & Peace of Mind
Do you believe physical fitness/wellness is a worthy lifelong pursuit? It affects your memory, overall health, strength, quality of sleep, weight and ability to combat diseases, etc. It’s often a core tenet of self-care these days.
What about mental fitness? Do you give it equal weight?
Mental fitness is the capacity to respond to life’s great challenges with a positive mindset instead of a negative one. It allows you to reduce mental stress, frustration and negative emotions.
The more challenging a situation is, the more mentally fit you need to be to deal with it.
Think about it in terms of physical fitness. If you are mildly fit, you can handle walking on flat terrain but the moment you are faced with a hill you are likely going to be physically stressed.
If you are moderately fit, you’ll be able to walk up the hill without being physically stressed, but the moment you are faced with a mountain your body is going to start getting stressed.
The same goes for your mental fitness. Most of us are able to handle the low and medium hills of life without much mental fitness, but as soon as we hit the mountains we start breaking down.
We get anxious, frustrated, stressed out and overwhelmed.
There is nothing wrong with these emotions but if not processed well it will negatively impact our performance at work, the quality of our relationships and our overall peace of mind.
However, if you are mentally fit you’ll be better equipped to handle the challenges the universe presents.
You easily transition from emotions that aren’t serving to those that support you. You’ll see life’s mountains as opportunities to train your brain to get stronger - to look for the gift or lesson in each circumstance.
Many of us met a mountain last year, COVID-19. It was like our Mt. Everest.
Some were well equipped to deal with the challenges, some survived with some bruises, and others crashed and burned.
There are many reasons for this, not just mental fitness.
There is NO judgement here. Just an opportunity to reflect and get curious about one aspect of it, the role that our mental fitness CAN play in helping us survive, thrive and build resilience.
We are all born innately perfect. Just like our muscles can be strengthened to enhance our physical well-being to achieve greater strength and health, we can also strengthen certain “muscles” to improve our mental fitness so we can increase our peace of mind, cultivate healthy relationships and build peak performance.
What practices in your life currently help you stay mentally fit? I'd love to know.
If you’d like to learn some ways to stay mentally fit, check out next week’s blog about the core muscles of mental fitness.