Weekly Mental Fitness Workouts
October 22nd - October 29th
Happy Sunday Folks,
For those who attended our live session this morning, I am grateful for your presence and commitment to training with us at the mind gym.
For those who couldn’t make it, I am grateful for the opportunity to reach you now and look forward to connecting with you during a live event very soon.
As always, I appreciate your support and remain excited about the growth of this community. If you have friends, family, or colleagues who, like you, are interested in exercising their minds to improve mental well-being and enhance happiness.
I invite you to share this with them as a zero-cost resource to train their mind.
Mental Fitness Workouts:
Optimism: Reframe your barriers
Difficult experiences are unavoidable. Stress is unavoidable. Unwanted thoughts, feelings, emotions, and body sensations are unavoidable. In fact, these are all natural parts of life.
What is under your control is choosing how you think about these challenges and attempting to adopt a positive mindset around them.
Your Exercise:
Step #1: Reflect on what is good about your daily life stressors
Avoid ruminating about what is bad about them
Step #2: Practice self-compassion
Give yourself a break and treat yourself with kindness
Step #3: Let Go
Register what has happened, release the event by accepting it, and refocus back onto what is most important at the moment
Committed Action: A Self-Compassion Plan
If you truly believe that difficult thoughts, feelings, emotions, experiences, and stress are natural and avoidable parts of life, then we all deserve to give ourselves some grace when we face these moments.
Your Exercise:
Identify the ways that you can treat yourself with self-compassion when you experience stress that is completely under your control.
Reflect on where you typically are when these stressful moments happen.
Set yourself up for success —> Connect your self-compassion strategies to the spaces where your stressful moments typically happen
Take 10 minutes to make your strategies obvious to utilize in the spaces where you experience stressful moments
After you have made them obvious, take an additional 10 minutes to make your strategies attractive to utilize in those moments
Finally, take an additional 10 minutes to reduce any more friction that stands in the way and make the choice to utilize your strategies as easily as possible
When you are finished, you should have a plan that looks like this:
At my desk, I experience stress when I am trying to meet a deadline for a project I am working on. One of the ways that I can give myself self-compassion in these moments is to take a minute to breathe through my stress. To make this obvious, I will attach a Post-it note that says “breathe during stress” onto my monitor and have my favorite breathing exercise pulled up in a YouTube tab during work.
Podcast To Check Out: The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish
#176: Dr. Leah Lagos and Joe Mazzulla: Control Your Heart, Conquer Your Stress
This podcast features the head coach of the Boston Celtics talking about his journey utilizing the mental fitness technique called resonance frequency breathing to train his heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is widely regarded as a measurement of resilience and can be tracked through biofeedback modalities.
Stress Training: Measured Breathing (4 inhale-1 hold-7 exhale)
6 days a week x 10 minutes
If you enjoy this practice, feel free to extend the days or time out to meet your current needs!
This breath pacer is a great tool to utilize for this practice
This breathing practice will be periodized throughout this mesocycle (September 18th - October 29th) similar to how you may periodize the bench press to increase weight. Our objective is to breathe for a longer time for the outcome of reducing stress.
Focus Training: 5-4-3-2-1
Engaging with our senses brings us to the present moment and outside of our head. Taking time to register what we notice with our 5 senses is a powerful way to train focus.
How it works:
Set 3 reminders on your phone across the week
When the reminder goes off take a moment to notice the following:
5 things you see
4 things you feel
3 things you hear
2 things you smell
1 thing you taste
I challenge you to notice unique things each time you practice
I hope that you all have a wonderful week ahead. As always, I am happy to be a resource for you during your mental fitness journey. Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts, comments, and questions.
Be Easy,
Ryan