Mental Fitness: It's All in Your Head

We often see news reports or read blog posts about the importance of exercise. Physical fitness gets lots of attention for a good reason. When you are healthy, you can reduce personal risk factors for diabetes development, heart disease, and obesity-related conditions.

What doesn’t get as much attention is mental fitness.

It’s just as crucial for your health as physical exercise, yet it is often neglected.

When you perform mental dexterity exercises each day, you can keep your mind sharp and healthy as you get older or deal with stressful situations.

If your memory seems to be lagging, it might be time to consider a mental fitness routine as part of your daily schedule.

What Are the Benefits of Mental Fitness?

When you incorporate mental fitness exercises into your daily routine, the outcomes are as beneficial for your brain as a vigorous workout is for your body.

Memory training exercises lead to higher fluid intelligence levels, allowing you to access the mind’s natural reasoning abilities with greater consistency. This brain strength makes it easier to solve the problems that come your way each day.

That’s one benefit you can receive with a mental fitness emphasis. Here are some of the others that you’ll want to consider.

1. It provides resiliency against multitasking.

Each time you switch tasks, it can take up to 15 minutes for your brain to catch up to the new duties. Even if you are productive, your mind needs time to transition. When you focus on mental fitness, you’ll have more focus resiliency.

By focusing on one task at a time, your concentration levels can improve. That outcome helps you become more productive with your daily duties.

2. You become more positive with yourself.

Most people are their own worst critic. Although you might not be impressed by what the mirror reflects, those negative thoughts aren’t shared by the other people you know.

One aspect of mental fitness involves positive affirmations, delivering more robust neural pathways that lead to higher satisfaction levels and enhanced well-being.

You can start this process today by making a list of your best qualities. You don’t need to be perfect!

When your goal is to improve your mental fitness, just keep working to be better tomorrow than today.

3. It gives you the courage to try something different.

When you get into a routine, life becomes comfortable.

It’s remarkably satisfying to walk into a restaurant and know the staff understands your “usual” order. That interaction makes you feel socially connected.

It can also make you mentally weak. When you’re unwilling to try new experiences, mental fitness becomes a lesser priority.

If you try fresh foods, travel to new places, or even take a different way to work, your brain stays active. That outcome increases its overall vitality.

4. You have more time.

Even though you’re investing time in yourself by pursuing mental fitness, you’ll find more room on your schedule with this effort.

It only takes a few minutes each day to visualise, meditate, play games, or complete some memory exercises.

The mental resiliency that comes from those activities can help you achieve positive outcomes from other decisions with added speed.

You might even have more energy because your mind has additional stress controls it can use.

What Is the Takeaway for Mental Fitness?

Your body needs physical exercise to maximise health outcomes. Your brain requires the same stimulation through mental fitness.

You don’t need to go to a “brain gym” to achieve results.

Like reading a book or learning a song, something simple can take you to where you want to be.

Why not schedule a mental fitness break right now?

Anthony Taylor, runs ThreeFifty9, a consultancy specialising in supporting middle managers to be mentally fit leaders. He is the host of the newly launched Mental Fitness Podcast, and author of Mental Toughness Metaphors: Stories to build resilience for parents, coaches, trainers and thinkers and Tips From the Top: The Secrets of How to Navigate Middle Management.