Support your emotional fitness

It’s well known that if you want to keep your body fit, you must do some regular exercise. But when it comes to our mental health, few of us take the time to maintain and improve it our emotional fitness. For some reason, we expect to be in great mental shape without doing any work. And when we realise we’re struggling, we look for a quick and easy fix instead of developing the skills that will help us in the future.

When you embark on any process of complex change, it’s important to gather supports in your life for that journey. Here are a few supports that can help you with implementing changes:

Peer support

Connect with people on similar journeys to your own.

They might have done the journey at a different time, or taken a slightly different route, but they’ll have insights into the challenges ahead of you and, most importantly, how to overcome them.

No matter how unique you may think your struggle is, many people have overcome the exact same issues, and many people are doing the work to overcome them right now, all around you. Connect with them.

Food

You run on energy. Whether you’re a human, a robot or a tomato plant, you need energy to do anything. If you’re doing strenuous activity, you need more energy. Making changes in your life is an incredibly strenuous activity. So fuel that practice. You can’t have mental health without food.

It’s important to note here that food can easily become wrapped up in the types of behaviour that make mental health worse. As we explore those behaviours throughout the book, consider how they apply to the way you eat.

Watch out that you are not trying to use food as a magic pill to solve mental health challenges. If you think you’ve discovered a too-good-to-be-true diet that promises to make anxiety and depression disappear, it’s far more likely that all you’ve discovered is a potential eating disorder to slap on top of your existing issues.

Eat to fuel being yourself and doing what you love.

Exercise

Exercise is another support, similar to food that you cause in a way that benefits your mental health or makes it worse. It is not a replacement for the changes you need to make. You can be in amazing physical shape while also struggling with serious mental health challenges. Whence start thinking that simply exercising more will fix the problems in our life, we’re slipping back into the trap of searching for a magic pill that will solve all of our troubles.

Sleep

You have to have adequate sleep. Not only is it necessary for everyday functioning, but particularly when you’re doing something like changing your brain – which eh, is what we’re going to be doing – you need to sleep. It allows your brain to flush out all of the toxins that build upon there during the day, and allow it to build new connections and absorb the things you’re learning. Sleep helps you handle your emotions better: you can react less and be less disturbed by things that normally might bother you.

Your breath

This is the most important support you’ll need on this journey. Your breath is your unbreakable tether to the present. You’ll often forget that it’s there, but you can always find it again, right where you left it. Come back to your breath when you encounter a challenge, or when you meet something beautiful, or when you take a step. If you notice you’re floating off into the past or the future, follow your breath back to the path.

A recovery-focused therapist

It’s so important that any therapist you work with has a focus on recovery and helping you do the things you want to do in life. If you get a therapist who says you’ve got chronic disease and all you will ever do is manage it, that’s like asking a personal trainer to help you train for a marathon and him telling you it’s not possible, you’ll never be able to do it.

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend working with that trainer. In the same way, I wouldn’t recommend working with a similarly negative healthcare practitioner. If you work with a professional on your fitness goals, whatever they may be, make sure that professional has a demonstrable track record of helping their patients to achieve the goals you’re pursuing.

Extracted from The Mind Workout, by Mark Freeman. The Mind Workout combines mindfulness, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It outlines twenty easy-to-follow steps you can take to free yourself from the ways of thinking and behaving that cause mental health challenges in your life – from cutting out the compulsions that cause uncertainty, anxiety and distress to relieving stress and distraction.