What is mental fitness?

Many of us are becoming far more aware of how mental health impacts our wellbeing. There is no denying that our lifestyle impacts our mental health and wellbeing, yet often we allow ourselves to create unhealthy habits, patterns of thinking and behaviours which lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices and poorer mental health. It is important that we take accountability for our own thoughts and behaviours and use self-reflection to recognise these, so we can encourage ourselves to be the best version of we can be.

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

Like our physical health, there are ways to improve and maintain our mental fitness. This 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 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 having a bath and doing yoga; it’s about practicing a broad range of self-care activities to holistically contribute to your mental wellbeing.

While it’s common to notice some cognitive decline as we age or experience stress, developing mental fitness can help us protect our brain health and overall wellbeing. At any age, through training and practice, we can change our brains to become even more mentally strong, healthy, and fit.

What are the four components of mental fitness?

1. Emotional

Self-acceptance, self-esteem and resilience. These help you manage strong emotions and help you to feel in control of making decisions and life choices that can often be difficult.

2. Social

Social companionship and support networks. This improves our wellbeing; as humans we are naturally social and thrive from contact and support of people that care about us.

Read more: What is social wellbeing?

3. Financial

Feeling in control of your finances helps reduce stress in your life. It can be easy to fall into the pattern of poor budgeting and debt which causes stress and overwhelm. Therefore, maintaining the habit of checking your finances and money goals can help you feel more in control and reduce stress.

4. Physical

Physical and mental wellbeing are intrinsically linked, so it’s important to maintain your physical health to reduce the risk of chronic illnesses developing and improve the health of your brain.

These core values affect a person’s wellbeing. Ensuring you take care of these areas in life will greatly improve your work performance, attendance and health.

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

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

What are the benefits of mental fitness?

Building resilience is a key aspect of developing mental fitness and mental strength. This strength cultivates healthier, more positive thought processes, 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 it is that they will occur. Every time we repeat a negative thought, it strengthens. By making mental fitness a focus, we can increase our resilience and mental strength, which in turn helps us feel more capable and boosts positive thinking.

Here are some other ways mental fitness can benefit you:

• You can improve sleep quality
• You can pause and respond to stressors, 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 resilience

Though incorporating habitual self-care exercises and making lifestyle changes, you can work on your mental fitness without consciously trying. 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 experiencing unmanageable stress or low mood.

The relationship between physical fitness and mental health

It’s not surprising that there is 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 your body releases. It’s not surprising that people who are in good shape and take part in regular physical activities also enjoy the neurological benefits of exercise.

Combining physical activity and mental health exercises allows for better overall wellbeing in physical and mental fitness. It does not have to be extreme exercise to feel these benefits, you can enjoy a walk in nature, swim in a local pool or even complete a gentle yoga workout at home. Everyone’s lifestyle and fitness levels are different, yet being able to safely increase your heart rate, boost your blood flow and release endorphins will naturally have a positive impact on how you feel mentally.

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. This is called cognitive distortion; it is when someone’s experiences or taught beliefs distort their reality negatively and often incorrectly. These distortions can form into habitual thoughts. And the longer the cognitive distortion happens the longer it can take to undo this learnt thinking.
• Regulating overwhelming emotions and thoughts as and when they arise. By doing this, you interrupt the trigger for the brain’s fight or flight response and bring yourself physically and mentally back to state of calm.
• Resolving the patterns that detract from your wellbeing by building new ones. This is a little more than simply stopping bad habits, it is understanding the reason why this habit was created, by considering ‘what was the reward for this?’ A negative thinking pattern could have been created to gain different rewards, such as to feel secure, in control or even to feel less anxious in a particular moment. Therefore, recognising the conception and pattern of negative thinking and behaviours can help you to implement more positive 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.

Mental fitness training ideas

Here are some ways to improve your mental fitness.

1. Reading

Reading is a great activity because it stokes the imagination and ignites 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. Reading helps you visualise the subject matter on the pages before you and imagine what voices sound like in the written dialogue. This can be a great relaxation technique.

2. Meditation

Meditation is a great mental muscle-building activity. It strengthens our ability to notice and let go of any of the troubling things that our minds do. It helps us to identify, interrupt and shift the unhelpful mental habits that cause us stress.

Meditation also helps us to focus and tune out distractions, which allows us to implement this as a general practice in everyday life.

3. Try breathing exercises

While meditation may be a bit trickier to do at work, at university or in social situations, breathing exercises have many of the same benefits and are more convenient to fit into the environment you are in. Slowing down and deepening the breath has been shown to help calm the mind. It does this by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for the ‘rest and digest’ response, which counteracts the ‘fight or flight’ response that we produce when we are stressed.

Here’s a breathing exercise you can do anywhere:

• Take a long, slow, deep inhale through the nose. Let the breath expand into your chest, rib cage, and belly.
• Pause for a moment.
• 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.
• Pause and repeat this cycle at least three times.

4. Play games for your brain

Games that test reasoning and other portions of your brain are fun ways to keep your mind sharp. Consider engaging with:

• Crossword puzzles
• Sudoku
• Board games

As well as these traditional games, there is now a vast market of apps which will give you daily mental exercises to undertake. Some of these games are designed to improve memory, reasoning and general mental fitness. Although we understand that technology is a vast and accessible space to use things like gaming apps, please remember that spending too much time in front of a screen can be detrimental to your mental wellbeing also, so remember to be mindful of the amount of time you spend on your devices.

5. Introduce variety

Although routine and similarity can offer a feeling of security and comfort, it can also be beneficial to stimulate your brain. Keeping your brain active can include trying new things and even pushing yourself out of your comfort zone gently. 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 cooking a new recipe.
  
• Learn to speak a new language
  
• Try to learn a new music instrument

6. Get into a routine of self-care

If you’re a self-care beginner, you’ll soon learn that it is your best friend when it comes to mental fitness. We’re not talking bubble baths and face masks – self-care happens on a deeper level, so we can be in tune with ourselves mentally and emotionally. It means even though you lack motivation, you still push yourself to go for that run or meet a friend. Self-care could even be to take steps to feel more cared for by taking 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.

Action creates motivation

When you push yourself to do something even though you don’t have the motivation to, it creates a positive loop within the brain and releases the feel-good hormones. Go through your admin tasks, stop procrastinating on tasks and act to complete things you have been avoiding. This will allow you to feel more in control, and feeling that you are accomplishing goals helps encourage you to keep wanting to move forward.

Read more: How to practice self-care on a budget

7. Plan the new behaviours.

It can be easier said than done when you are trying to adjust or change patterns of behaviours. Often, we jump in with the mindset to change everything at once, which in turn creates the feeling of overwhelm and anxiety. Therefore, writing down the patterns of behaviours you want to change, including the new habits you want to include and where in your life, can be helpful. Create manageable goals to make those changes, making the changes in small steps rather than expecting yourself to change everything all at once.

How an Employee Assistance Programme can help improve your mental fitness

One way you can help your employees is by providing access to an EAP (Employee Assistance Programme). Whether you have an EAP at your workplace, or are a leader thinking of implementing one, it’s a great way to give employees access to counselling support when they need it. It can allow them to talk through their issues with one of our qualified counsellors, who can help identify exercises for them to improve their mental fitness over time.

At HA | Wisdom Wellbeing, our service is available 24/7, 365 days a year, and can easily be accessed via our unique wellbeing app Wisdom. Through Wisdom, you can navigate our own mental fitness exercises such as meditation videos, informative podcasts, meditation soundbites, nutritionally backed recipes and so much more.

If you’d like to find out more information on how our services can improve mental fitness with similar exercises mentioned in this article, please contact HA | Wisdom Wellbeing on 0800 206 2552.

Conclusion

Mental fitness takes time to achieve but can 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. It is important to remain consistent, even on the days you did not manage to stick to your new pattern, or you didn’t reach a specific goal; what’s important is having self-compassion, reminding yourself that you tried and there is always tomorrow to try again.