Greetings and welcome to Lesson 8 of my ‘Introduction to Mental Fitness’ course. If you are new to the course, check out the introductory post first.
Hello you!
Welcome to Lesson 8 of the Introduction to Mental Fitness course. We are now well into the content and building momentum.
In the last lesson I introduced a definition of mental fitness, in fact, I introduced 2.
The first definition was built on the basis of the analogy with physical fitness and orients mental fitness as something you build through training:
“Mental fitness is your ability to cope with and meet the psychological demands of life, without undue fatigue or damage to your mind or body. This includes the basic necessary psychological tasks of everyday living (e.g. planning/organising, managing emotions, dealing with people, communicating, reading/writing/remembering, navigating, managing impulses) but also the more robust psychological demands of high performance settings like university (e.g advanced learning/studying, examinations, competition).”
The second definition was built on the idea of mental fitness being an attitude or approach to living that emphasises mental/psychological wellbeing.
“Mental fitness is a personal framework for understanding what we can do, as individuals, to build a happier and more productive life.”
Regardless of which definition resonates more with you, it is safe to say that in exploring mental fitness, we are going to be exploring specific skillsets you can learn and implement that will have a positive impact on your mental/psychological/cognitive wellbeing.
In this lesson I want to explore the broad conditions that need to be in place for you to successfully start building mental fitness.
I’ll start this process by first considering what characterises someone who is dedicated and disciplined with physical exercise.
Understanding the dedicated exerciser
Think of someone in your life who exercises regularly and has done so for an extended period of time. It might be you.
What characterises that person in terms of their thoughts, beliefs, feelings and behaviour?
I’d say the following:
- They can articulate their goals in terms of their exercise.
- They believe that getting physically fit is a function of the effort they put in
- They acknowledge that they can improve in terms of their physical fitness
- They have an ongoing interest and knowledge-base in terms of the impact of physical exercise on wellbeing
- They’ve built habits into their life with regards to exercise
- They have specific skills in their exercise area of interest
- They get positive feelings and sense of self-worth from the exercise itself, but also the fact that they are disciplined enough to exercise regularly
- They allocate significant time and resources to their exercise program
- They have a willingness to experience discomfort in the service of making themselves better
Without these conditions in place, people are unable to sustain a long-term committment to exercise.
So what about someone who is working on their mental fitness?
I think there are 3 broad conditions that need to be in place for someone to build fitness. These correspond closely with the characteristics of dedicated exercisers.
I summarise these in the following diagram:
Let’s explore each of these in turn….
Vision/goal
Individuals who work on their mental fitness have one or more mental/psychological/cognitive goals that they are working towards. I covered a lot of these in Lessons 3-6 when talking about motivations for self-improvement.
These goals range from the everyday (e.g. do better at my degree) to the ever-present (e.g. I have a vision of my future self that I want to become).
When I do presentations on mental fitness I often represent the range of goals as follows:
This is by no means a complete list of why someone would engage in mental fitness training but they neatly cover the range of reasons.
Those who engage in activities consistent with mental fitness training (e.g. regular meditators) can typically articulate why it is they are doing so. They have some sense of what they want to get out of it. They can tell you what motivates them to continue working on themselves.
Attitude/ beliefs
Your behaviour is a function of how you view yourself, other people and the world in general.
Thus, your attitudes towards psychological growth will influence whether or not you are interested in and/or work on your mental fitness.
I think there are a number of underlying beliefs/attitudes that are needed to engage successfully with mental fitness training:
- You see yourself as a ‘work in progress’ with room to change and improve aspects of your mood, personality, and abilities.
- You believe that psychological growth (e.g. making improvements in how you think and feel) is possible and desirable.
- You have a willingness to learn, with a focus on gathering and applying knowledge and skills about mental health and wellbeing.
- You believe that you have the capacity to apply this knowledge to make meaningful changes in your own life.
- You have a willingness to try new things and put yourself in new situations.
- You have a willingness and expectation that there will be mistakes and missteps along the way.
If these concepts seem foreign to you, it might be that you’ve never really considered them before, or perhaps you hold different beliefs. For example, you might feel, based on previous experience, that you don’t have a lot of control over your mood. As this course takes shape, you will more likely be seeking evidence that it is indeed possible to manage your mood.
You might also be quite happy where you are at in your own life and disagree with the ‘work in progress’ idea. As this course develops, you might be more interested in whether I can provide a convincing argument that seeing yourself as a work in progress is a beneficial stance to take.
I remember when I first started articulating these beliefs/attitudes, I had a reaction to the idea that I was a ‘work in progress’. The self-critical reading of this is ‘I am not good enough’. The more motivational reading of this is ‘I have untapped potential’. What settled me into this belief was realising that even before I had even tried articulating the idea, I was still trying to get better at the various things I do. I’ve always been trying to get better which means implicity I’ve always seen myself as a work in progress. Naming it out loud simply allowed me to think more strategically about how I wanted and planned to get better.
Behaviour
Regular exercisers are good at translating their goals, knowledge and intentions into action and then tracking whether that action is leading to the outcomes they want. To put it simpler, they don’t just talk about exercise, they do it.
Individuals who build mental fitness are similar. As they develop knowledge about how the human mind works, they translate this into skills and habits that they embed in their own lives, to change how their mind works. They observe whether the changes they’ve made are having a positive effect and then embed or modify their behaviour as a result.
I like to think about this behavioural condition/component as being a ‘self-experimenter’.
Self-experimenters enjoy understanding the limits of how they can modify themselves.
They:
- identify aspects of themselves that they’d like to change (e.g. ability to manage their mood)
- educate themselves on how to change those aspects of themselves
- learn new skills and habits that translate that education into specific actions
- embed those skills and habits into their everyday life
- monitor whether those changes impact the aspect of themselves they were wanting to change
Prior to putting this mental fitness course together, I was not much of a self-experimenter. I tended to stick to the status quo in terms of how I dealt with situations in my life. I didn’t think very consciously about learning and applying new skills in order to change aspects of myself.
I am slowly changing that about myself. I introduced mindfulness meditation a few months ago, with some specific goals in mind. I’ve also got a lot better at observing how my diet influences my mood and wellbeing. I’m certainly not at a Tim Ferris level self-experimenter, but I’m slowly adopting this component of mental fitness.
Takeaway message
Building mental fitness means having some coherence in terms of your goals, attitudes and behaviour.
Ideally, you have psychological goals (e.g. better mood, better performance, better relationships), a belief that you can make those goals happen by acquiring knowledge and skills, and the capacity to experiment with whether introducing those skills into your life helps you meet your goals.
If you read that and think it is only partly you, then I totally understand. I’m only part the way towards having such a coherent strategy in place in terms of my own mental health.
This course therefore is my attempt to outline such a strategy, for myself and for you.
In the next lesson I will demonstrate how this strategy applies to real-life examples.
In the meantime, consider the Reflection Questions and Suggested Tasks below
Reflection Questions
I want you to take a moment to re-consider some statements used in the article above. They are the attitude/beliefs I think one needs to hold in order to successfully engage in mental fitness training.
- You see yourself as a ‘work in progress’ with room to change and improve aspects of your mood, personality, and abilities.
- You believe that psychological growth (e.g. making improvements in how you think and feel) is possible and desirable.
- Willingness to learn, with a focus on gathering and applying knowledge and skills about mental health and wellbeing.
- You believe that you have the capacity to apply this knowledge to make meaningful changes in your own life.
- You have a willingness to try new things and put yourself in new situations.
- You have a willingness and expectation that there will be mistakes and missteps along the way.
To what extent do you agree or disagree with these statements?
Is it possible to work on your mental fitness without them?
What important attitudes/beliefs do you think I’ve missed?
Suggested Tasks
If you’ve been following along with the suggested tasks of previous lessons, then you’ll have a notebook or electronic document in which you are completing these tasks.
I want you to create a new sub-heading called ‘Goals’. This can go after the content you put under ‘Motivations’.
I want you to look at the different skill areas listed below. Don’t worry if you don’t completely understand each skill area. I just want you to get a basic feel for each of them. You can have a look at this post/handout if you want to understand them a bit better.
Getting better at managing your emotions
Thinking effectively – e.g. being more rational and logical
Understanding yourself better – i.e. knowing your strengths and weaknesses
Working out your meaning and purpose in life
Building positive relationships with others
Helping other people
Ensuring your personal safety
Caring for your body
Changing aspects of your environment for wellbeing – e.g. tidying your home or making your study space more efficient
Enhancing your cognitive abilities through specific substances or activities
Being good at learning
Building skills for the workforce
Financial control
Establishing new habits
Having fun and unwinding
What I want you to do is identify at least 2 skill areas where you would like to improve. Note those under ‘Goals’.
If you can, be specific about what the improvements would look like if they happened. For example, if you identified ‘establishing new habits’ as a skill area in which you’d like to improve, what would this look like if it happened? Would it be about finally getting that exercise program up and running? Would it be about eating better? Would it be quitting smoking?
However, don’t worry if you find it difficult to be specific about your goals at this point. We’ll be digging further into them as we head into this course. Right now, the goal is simply to have identified a couple of skill areas that you might be interested in building further.