Are you psychologically fit? Hmmm. You may be physically fit and ripped like those people you see at the gym, but is your mental state comparable? Most people never think of this. They believe what they learned in adolescence and the sprinkles of stuff along the way are sufficient for life. Wrong! We need to maintain and improve.
Psychological Fitness: the ability to integrate and improve cognitive, emotional, and behavioral practices.
Your mind is your PC for your body. It deserves upgrades, updates, and protections throughout your life. If you don’t and you let things go it will get all kinds of bad stuff. Bad people can hack it and give you negative thoughts. You could be susceptible to poor thinking and poor growth long term. Kinda makes sense now that we relate it to a PC, doesn’t it?!
We were never taught about the mind
Our beautiful brains are used to control our thoughts, memory, motor skills, vision, emotions, physical touch, body temperature, breathing, and much, much more. We are never taught about the human mind in school unless we pursue it. It is very important to feed our minds in healthy ways. Be it actual foods or the expansion of our knowledge. Learning and growing are my focus personally.
Ok, so how do we do this? We don’t get that nifty online user manual of our brain at birth so let’s figure it out. One of the first things that comes to mind is that we first need to be aware. Awareness is going to be key to getting started. Next, I believe we should start taking a look at how we process information.
Are we the type that seems to be stuck in self-pity and denial about our present reality? We have to learn to recognize what story we’re telling ourselves about our lives. It is important to use the past as a guide of how to map out the roads ahead, but not stay stuck in it. Old negative habits need to be discarded and new and healthy ones need to replace them.
Who’s in your circle?
If you are around people with no values and no goals all the time you could see how easy it could be to end up the same. Look at your circle of friends for this information. You may need to start making some hard decisions about the company you keep. I must tell you, this will potentially be difficult and will suck. You may end up alone throughout this process, but you need to understand the importance of your mental health and well-being.
To progress we need to control as many controllables as we can and the rest we will have to let go. Working on yourself is going to have its challenges especially if you’ve been the same way with the same mentality all of your life. Once you can eliminate those negative sources, you then can have a clearer head to do the work. Each new day will bring new challenges and that’s ok.
Take each day as an opportunity to build your world the way you want. Learn as much as you can about yourself and the world around you. Try to do your best to take in as much goodness as possible. The more stress you are exposed to the harder it will be, so do pay attention to that. We can’t avoid stress, it’s a part of life but recognizes how you react to it. How long do you let it eat at you?
The less time you spend dwelling on things the better. Get back to some hobbies you enjoy or create new ones. Be a part of your own bigger picture. Do your best to pay attention to how you speak of yourself. Are you really hard on yourself and do you believe the negativity? Work on that and try to catch yourself when you do realize it. It will go a long way towards helping yourself get that psychological fitness that you need and deserve.
Conclusion
Find the necessary tools for you to get stronger mentally. Each of us is very different so there is no one size fits all. Sorry. Take your psychological fitness seriously just as you may your favorite sports team. Buy yourself some books instead of sports memorabilia. Get mentally stronger every day by expanding on your knowledge. Do you know how your mind works for you or how it works against you? Get started now!
Question
Have you developed any healthy mind skills of any kind? If so what are they? Please let us know so that it may help others with their journey.
