Mental fitness: What you need to know

Many of us are far more aware of how mental health impacts our wellbeing. While mental health stigma still exists, there’s no denying that our lifestyle impacts how we think and feel.

According to recent statistics, around one in four adults will experience a mental health problem in any given year and with three-quarters of the population may start experiencing issues by the age of 24.

Similar to our physical health, there are ways to improve and maintain our mental fitness. The concept has only emerged in the past few decades. Just like we can improve our physical health by moving our bodies, we can improve our mental health by strengthening our minds.

In this article we’ll look at what mental fitness is, mental fitness tips in general and how you can encourage it in yourself as well as your workforce.

Mental fitness explained

Mental fitness means having the mechanisms, strategies and resilience to maintain a healthy and positive state of mind – even in the face of adversity. It’s not just about doing ‘mental exercises and yoga', it’s about prasticing a broad range of things to holistically contribute to your mental wellbeing.

You may have heard that the brain deteriorates with age. But there is proof from neuroscience that at any age, through training, we can change our brains to become even more mentally strong, healthy, and fit. You can apply this to your employees, no matter their age.

Mental fitness is made up of four core components:

• Emotional: Self-acceptance, self-esteem and resilience. This helps you manage strong emotions.

• Social: Social companionship and support networks. This improves employee wellbeing.

• Financial: Feeling in control of your finances helps reduce stress in your life.

• Physical: Reduce risk of chronic illnesses developing and improve the health of your brain.

These core values affect a person’s wellbeing. Helping an employee look after these areas of their life will greatly improve their work performance, attendance and health.

Emotional fitness vs mental fitness – what’s the difference?

It’s very easy to confuse emotional and mental states of mind. After all, they’re interconnected. Emotional fitness is all about the ability to express emotions in a way that is healthy, while mental fitness focuses on our ability to adapt to change and challenges. There is a lot of cross-over, and both are crucial for our state of mind.

How does mental fitness benefit you?

Mental fitness exercises help strengthen neural pathways in the brain. Having this strength gives you a more grounded thought process, allowing you to manage your emotions and be more objective when faced with challenges that may be uncomfortable.

The more that we feed negative thoughts and emotions, the more likely they will occur. It’s been proven by multiple sources and published psychology journals, that thoughts that evoke certain emotions cluster together, meaning every time we repeat a thought, it strengthens over time. Here are some other ways mental fitness can benefit you:

• You can improve sleep quality

• You can pause and reflect, rather than being reactive

• It can improve your confidence and self-esteem

• It helps you be more present

• It can help give you a renewed sense of purpose

• It enhances your mental resilience

How mental fitness helps

Through the right exercises and lifestyle changes, you can work on your mental fitness without consciously trying to in time. You’ll feel more confident, resilient, and energised by improving your mental fitness. While it’s natural to feel sadness and worry from time to time, good mental fitness will help you stay resilient and reduce your chances of falling into a depression.

The relationship between physical fitness and mental health

It’s not surprising that there are a lot of overlap between mental health and fitness. Physical exercise helps boost the flow of oxygen to your brain and increases the amount of endorphins.

This shows the relationship between health and fitness. It’s not surprising that people who are in good shape and take part in regular physical activities also enjoy the intellectual benefits of exercise.

By combining physical activity and mental health exercises allows for better overall wellbeing in physical and mental fitness.

So with these clear mental benefits of exercise, it is important to include body and mind fitness routines in your mental fitness plan.

How can you improve your mental fitness?

There are several kinds of exercises you can do to improve your mental fitness. We split them into three different skills to work on:

• Recognising the patterns that create difficult emotions and negative moods.

• Regulating overwhelming emotions and thoughts as and when they arise.

• Resolving the patterns that detract from your well-being by building new ones.

Part of improving your mental fitness is discovering strategies that are most effective for you. Similar to how some people prefer to play outdoor team sports instead of going to the gym, you’ll discover methods that work better for you.

Here are some common ways to improve your mental fitness

Reading

Reading is a great activity because it can stoke the imagination and ignite so many different parts of the brain. There are endless genres and types of reading material available. It’s unlikely that you’ll run out of interesting things to read.

Beyond the mechanics, reading helps you visualise the subject matter on the pages before you, and imagine what voices sound like in the written dialogue. This can also be a great relaxation technique.

Meditation

Meditation is a way into a personal, mental muscle-building playground. It strengthens our ability to watch all the troubling things that our minds do. It helps with interrupting and shifting the mental habits that cause us trouble.

Meditation also helps us to focus and tune out distractions, which allow your employees to be able to focus on the tasks they have.

Try breathing exercises

While meditation may be a bit more tricky to do at work, breathing exercises have many of the same benefits and are easier to practice.

Slowing down and deepening the breath has been shown to help calm the mind. It can also reduce blood pressure, improve memory, and settle emotions.

Here’s a breathing exercise you can do anywhere:

1. Take a long, slow, deep inhale through the nose. Let the breath expand into your chest, rib cage, and belly.

2. Pause for a moment.

3. Now exhale through the nose in a way that matches the speed and length of your inhale. Feel the belly drawing in and the chest and ribcage falling slightly.

4. Pause and repeat this cycle at least three times.

Play games for your brain

There are a number of different games and puzzles to help with keeping your brain sharp. Games that test reasoning and other portions of your brain are fun ways to keep your mind sharp. Consider these games:

• Crossword puzzles

• Sudoku

• Board games

As well as these traditional games, there is now a vast market for apps which will give you daily mental exercises to undertake. They design these to improve memory, reasoning and general mental fitness.

Introduce variety

Keeping your brain active can include trying new things. If we continue in the same routine, our brain will be under-stimulated.

Doing new things, or doing the same things you usually do in different ways, will retrain your brain and keep it stimulated.

It may even produce new brain cells. In essence, breaking out of your routine can help keep your brain healthy.

Some easy ways you can introduce variety into your life are:

• Take a new route to work

• Try new food

• Travel to new places on your weekends or time off

• Use new tools or methods to accomplish your routine tasks at work

Get into a routine of self-care

Self-care is going to be your best friend when it comes to mental fitness. We’re not talking bubble baths and face masks, we’re saying go for that run when you don’t feel like it, go through your admin tasks, take that nap or have that home-cooked, nourishing recipe you’ve been meaning to try. By building this habit, you can realise the effectiveness of self-care for your mental fitness.

Conclusion

Mental fitness takes time to achieve but can really benefit you long-term when it’s maintained. Just like how you’d preserve your muscle mass – or improve it – at the gym, your mind is very much its own muscle that can be adapted to more healthy coping mechanisms and patterns of thinking for better resilience in the long run.