Life Lesson 05: Take Care of Yourself (Pt 2: Mind)

We are going to look into metal wellness as we are stepping into part two of our three-part series.  And piggy-backing on with our last topic, sleep is key to keeping our mental capabilities at peak performance, as the downtime is much needed and required as we continually add, purge, and modify our knowledge and memory databases.  Maintaining good mental health requires us to take care of our cognitive, social, and emotional abilities.  Staying sharp in these areas will aid with keeping our mind sharp for the long haul.  Exercising our brain takes a similar discipline and a targeted approach similar to muscular fitness, and as we age this becomes more important. 

In looking to keep cognitive faculties engaged, we need to pull away from our screens and actively use the brain.  This can take form in reading, doing puzzles, or learning a language, where we are using parts of our brains to inform what we’re doing.  Another more active aspect of training our mind is through multi-sensory engagement completely outside of our daily work routine, such as cooking a meal, playing sports, or doing some DIY around the house, as whatever the activity is engages your mind to monitor an evolving situation and respond to the changing stimuli.  Side note – preparing and cooking meals has the added benefit of being able to ensure a proper nutritional balance keeping your brain (and the rest of the body) healthy.

While taking care of cognitive functions can be straightforward and practiced alone, we must venture out to sharpen our social abilities, as these are driven by interpersonal interactions.  The foremost of these interactions is active listening.  We are constantly surrounded by sounds and distractions, but to actively filter everything out and focus on one input takes practice and diligence.  We can never truly engage in meaningful conversation if we are not fully engaged as listener as much as when we engage to speak.  In doing active listening, our full attention is given to the speaker, and we will be able to pick up on differences in tone, body language, and emotions from the conversation.  Actively listening leads to effective communication, and in achieving this, we can objectively communicate.  The subjective context surrounding those conversations requires yet another ability to strengthen – our emotional communication.

To round out our mental upkeep, we must be in tune with the “softer” side of our mental operations, taking stock of our emotions, behaviors, and feelings.  Having a good handle on where we are emotionally and what pressures we are facing helps us to effectively handle the stresses life throws at us.  Taking an objective view of our reactions, we can see that the car door we just slammed is a “check engine light” for our soul, that may mean we need to take a deep breath, go back inside, and finish that conversation with our wife before storming off.  Also, certain actions can have positive effects on our underlying emotions or behaviors, such as going for a run to release endorphins to temporarily provide a mood boost.  However, it is imperative to know how we are likely to react in a given situation, so that we can improve ourselves by avoiding the traps of previous mistakes or failures.  Hypothetically speaking, if I know I am likely to go a little too far at a friend’s wedding with an open bar based on prior occasions, I can use this knowledge to know that I need to be responsible with my drinking to ensure that I (and those with and around me) have an enjoyable evening, again hypothetically speaking of course. 

It takes hard work and dedication to uphold positive mental fitness in life today, given the diversions and commotion constantly surrounding us.  But in taking charge and striving for improvement, we can be mentally disciplined.  We are building upon our physical foundation and the person we deserve to be and want to be is beginning to take shape.  I’ll leave it here for now and we’ll pick it up next as we delve into the spiritual.