Mental Fitness
“Our life is what our thoughts make it” - Marcus Aurelius
Our culture is obsessed with physical appearance and fitness. The ideals of female beauty and male strength are deeply ingrained in our psyche.
Gym memberships and exercise equipment sales spike every January as we resolve to get in better physical shape.
But we rarely, if ever, talk about mental fitness. And when we do, it’s often in the context of someone showing mental “strength” or “toughness” by soldiering through a sudden tragedy, illness, or dire circumstances.
But what about enduring the unprovoked ire of your 14-year-old daughter every day? (perhaps fresh in the author’s mind)
Balancing the endless demands of being a working parent? Managing your emotions while scanning headlines about war atrocities, the apocalyptic effects of climate change, or a political system tearing apart at the seams?
Not to mention “What are we doing for dinner!?”
We don’t see our brains, so we don’t think about keeping them fit. But literally everything we experience in life happens in our minds.
We can train our minds in the same way we train our bodies. Ignoring our mental fitness comes at the expense of our happiness and health.
The good news? You don’t need to become a yogi sitting in meditative contemplation for hours a day.
It Starts With Awareness
Specifically, awareness of our emotions and how we manage them.
We often feel at the mercy of our emotions, helpless as they flood us in response to the endless ups and downs of daily life.
It’s helpful to think of emotion as energy in motion.
We have the ability to manage how that energy flows. Managing starts with understanding how the machine in our heads—our brain—works.
How Our Brains Create Emotion
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain highlights a new way of understanding how our brains create emotions and shape our reality.
Your brain is a prediction machine. Every second, it weighs billions of possible scenarios based on two inputs:
1. Internal data from body signals in our organs, tissues, hormones, immune system…(called interoception).
2. External data from your five senses.
The brain’s sole goal in making these predictions is to manage your body budget—the finite energy and resources needed to keep the mind-bogglingly complex symphony of life running smoothly.
What’s fascinating is that much of what we think of as an emotional reaction to external events is actually our brain making sense of internal signals. As Dr. Feldman says, “Believing is seeing.”
In other words, we mentally construct the reality we experience and often misattribute it to external forces.
Why This Matters
It’s key to understand how the daily events of the world—and our personal lives—can create a state of chronic stress that depletes our body budget.
This depletion often leaves us feeling constantly overwhelmed, which we mistakenly believe is caused entirely by forces beyond our control.
When we feel this way, we often don’t show up as our best selves. We lose our grip (and rightly so—this stuff is hard!).
Many times we turn to a drink, a smoke, or anything else to escape.
Where to Start: Your Mental Diet
A useful place to begin with mental fitness is balancing your mental “diet.” At the NeuroLeadership Institute, I was introduced to the concept of the Healthy Mind Platter.
Just as we think about the food we put in our bodies, we can think about the daily inputs we give our minds.
Credit: Neuroleadership Institute
When these inputs are out of balance, so are we. And for many of us, these inputs are chronically out of balance—or exercises we’ve never tried before.
Speaking of excercise…
You’ve probably heard the advice: “To get out of your head, get into your body.”
Any type of sustained physical movement, even for just a couple of minutes, can have a positive impact on your body budget.
Something that feels overwhelming emotionally before a walk or workout can feel much more manageable afterward. The external factor hasn’t changed—what changes is how your brain interprets it, thanks to the positive impact on your body budget.
The same principle applies to sleep. “Sleep on it” might be the best advice in human history. How often have you felt completely different about something that was bothering you after a good night of sleep? The problem may still exist, but it feels less overwhelming because your body budget has been restored.
Equanimity: The Ultimate Goal of Mental Fitness
I see all of this as part of the road to equanimity: an even-minded mental state—being steady and balanced no matter what experiences arise, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
Easy to understand, real real hard for us humans to achieve.
And It’s easy to mistake equanimity for indifference, but it’s far from it.
Equanimity is about controlling what we’re able to (ourselves) in the face of life’s uncontrollable circumstances.
It means allowing ourselves to feel the pain of the hard things but not wallowing in it longer than necessary—and recognizing when we are.
Equanimity frees us to move forward with intention, leveraging our unique talents to make an impact. And it’s through these small, intentional impacts that we start to change the world around us.
Nothing changes until you do.
And then everything does.
-Coach Kris
P.S. Dr Barrett’s work is relatively new and likely to help revolutionize our understanding of the brain. You can find her book here or listen to her talk about the book in this podcast.
P.P.S. On equanimity, The parable of the Chinese Farmer has come up in several classes throughout my training. And I’ll take any chance to share that wisdom through the voice of Alan Watts!
