Exercise for the Brain: The Discipline of Mental Fitness
...because our mental health is at stake
For the sake of my mental health, I don’t play chess anymore. Oh, it’s a fine game I understand, requiring fundamental skills like visualization, calculation, evaluation, and strategic thinking.1 There is no hidden information and there are no elements of chance (says Wikipedia). But if you make a mistake, you lose.
That’s why I will always lose. Because my way to handle pressure is by playing defense…. back off, hunker down, protect and defend.2 Which is no way to win.
I learned this about myself as a kid while playing chess one day with my older brother. He moved his bishop into position to take my queen. On my turn, I immediately moved the good lady over one square and out of danger.
“You know you could have just taken my bishop with your queen,” he told me with a smirk. The thought had never even crossed my mind.
Crazy, I know. But I can’t say I’ve grown out of this tendency. In the face of an aggressive assault, my natural instinct is to back up, dig in and defend.
I once even suggested this approach to my 10-year-old soccer team after a particularly devastating loss. “We could all just line up on the goal line so the other team can’t score,” I offered helpfully. They wisely declined. It sounded neither fun nor effective.
Well, in life as in sports, those who always play defense rarely end up winning.
Today this has me thinking about defensive battles being waged in today’s America and likely the world. One that strikes close to home is the battle for our mental health — a crisis, it is said, of epidemic proportions. And who can blame us with all that’s being hurled our way?
For many of us, the go-to response is defensive — to protect ourselves; we are survival organisms after all. We try our best to limit our exposure to things that are unhealthy for our minds. But what if, instead of holding the line to “maintain our mental health,” we played were intentional about pursuing our mental fitness?
After all, we’d never expect to stay physically healthy without working on our physical fitness. Why would we expect to stay mentally healthy without working on our mental fitness? What if we used our physical fitness playbook to pursue our mental fitness?3
What if we designed a fitness program for our mental health using the physical model.
Basic physical fitness training includes a program of strength, endurance, flexibility, and body composition. To compete, we add training for agility, balance, power, and quickness. How can we do this for our brain? For mental:
Strength: practice disciplined, critical thinking, keep learning and growing
Endurance: practice concentration and attention. Focus on only one activity for an extended period of time.
Flexibility:4 consider new ideas and new ways of thinking and then respond creatively when circumstances arise.
Healthy consumption - let’s root out the mental flab.5 We need to be more lean. Test what we read and what we hear. Limit what takes us off track, and favor what is sound, reasonable and actionable.
Agility: practice being nimble with thoughts and ideas. Try on an opposing point of view. Let go of certainty and challenge assumptions. Find clever ways to parry attacks on ideas and turn them around. 6
Balance: practice steadiness using a balanced approach. Beware of veering off course or getting toppled by aggressiveness hurled our way.
Power: in places where you are mentally strong, exert yourself with conviction. Practicing in front of a mirror may help!
And a couple of components unique to the fitness of our mentality:
Acuity: practice paying attention to accuracy and detail. The sharper we are, the harder it is to dull us.
Focus: reduce multi-tasking and organize space to reduce distraction.
Be discerning: what we “learn” we pattern into our neural networks.
Training mental fitness will take time, energy, intention and dedication, but our mental health is worth it. We’ve got to stop hunkering down in our defensive bunkers and wondering why our mental health is declining.
Instead, put that miraculous mind to work. Engage. Reason. Write. Speak. Listen. Learn. Tackle new challenges. Apply what you know to find out what you don’t. This is what keeps the gears clicking.
Now, we’re playing to win.
What will you do TODAY to improve your mental fitness?
According to A.I.
Yep, I was always the goalkeeper for my youth soccer teams.
And here, a quick reminder that our brain — the organ of our mental performance — is an organ in our physical body. All the things we do (or don’t do) for the health of our body influence our brain health, too. Increased blood flow. Enhanced nutrient supply. Sleep. Rest. Recreation. Our brain revels in all of these.
Mental toughness is overrated.
How much of what we’re consuming mentally is actually mindless? How much is unsupported by facts?
Critical thinking is a skill in dire need of practitioners.