Mental Fitness Activities to Enhance Change

As most people caught up in balancing career, family, and personal fulfillment, I have struggled with achieving my desired goal of weight loss. Even as I compose that sentence, I feel guilty for sharing the excuses I often used; ‘I don’t have time, [or] I am too busy’. While I recognized the importance of attaining this goal to improve my physical health, I also had to acknowledge that promoting this change was intricately tied to my mental health. It is difficult to change habitual behaviors even when necessary. Initiating change beckons a battle between our brain, body, and emotions. Knowing what is right does not always foster that good feeling needed to motivate and sustain it. Change is uncomfortable and throws off the automated system to which our brain has adapted. Fostering change requires understanding and engaging in mental fitness activities.

The Importance of Mental Health

Mental health is often realized as a state of mind, a sense of well-being, enabling us to manage life’s stressors. Thus, it encompasses the emotional, psychological, and social spheres, affecting how we think, feel, and act. Our well-being represents balance, allowing us to experience life positively and find happiness. Our mental fitness activities quickly attune to patterned, automated habits to enable this. If you stop reading for a moment and reflect, you realize there is a pattern in how you think, feel, and act to similar life experiences. This is your mental health achieving balance to cope with repeated life events, freeing your cognitive resources to engage in new life experiences.

The Mental Health Challenge

However, life is not static, and habit-forming coping mechanisms may not work in all situations. The results are disruptions in our equilibrium, an inability to cope, a decline in our mental health, and ultimately the need for change. Without change, we can easily find ourselves in a state of crisis. As our mental health is intricately linked to our physical health without change, we also eventually experience a decline in physical health.  

Mental Fitness Activities

Here are five activities you can engage in to improve your mental health and encourage positive changes:

1. Self-awareness – First, become aware of the need for change. This could emerge from the insight of others or simply an acknowledgment that you struggle to function as you once did.      Notice negative shifts in your mood, thoughts, sleep, or appetite.
2. Trigger Identification –      Begin aligning your self-awareness to people, places, and things that may be a potential cause for your declining mental health. This way you can better identify and eliminate or reduce those triggering factors one at a time.
3. Be Intentional – Demonstrate intent when implementing the change. Integrate the new way of thinking, feeling, and acting into your routine. In so doing, this change becomes habitual,      making it more welcoming to your cognition. Start small.
4. Be Realistic – Relapse occurs, don’t let it define you. There is a tendency to expect success with change, and while this will happen over time, it is not immediate. Expect that there will be moments when old habits will take over. These will be the moments to work even harder on the previously shared mental fitness activities.
5. Accountability – Create a system of accountability, to self and others to support change. It is not possible to sustain change in secret. Accountability is important to mental health. So, share your goals with others, and keep a check on your progress.

Enjoy your journey to change. I am still on mine.