Insight #6b - How To Build A Mental Fitness Program
As I embark on my year of learning, I’ve decided to post about things that I’ve learned, summaries of helpful books that I’ve read, or general musings that I’m pondering.
In my last post, I explained why we should view learning with the same mindset we view fitness. The purpose of learning is to strengthen our mind and ensure we have the ability to meet what life throws at us. Just like physical fitness, being mentally fit is a life habit, not some sort of end goal. If we view learning as a way to improve our mental fitness, then we choose what to learn based on which area of the brain you want to work on.
Fitness is a broad term that encompasses multiple things. It is not enough if we focus only on aerobic activities or solely do weight training. A well rounded fitness plan requires a variety of activities and a constant change up to avoid plateauing. Similarly, we should consider the following aspects when working on our mental fitness:
STRENGTH - The ability to learn something difficult.
Each time we learn something difficult, we’re strengthening the muscles of our brain. The goal is to constantly challenge ourselves to become stronger and better able to learn. But just like our body, our brain has different regions and we can imagine each region as a muscle group. No one wants to have massive arms and stick thin legs, or one arm bigger than another. In the same way, we should beware of only strengthening one aspect of our thinking. We need to rotate between working on our logic, our creativity, our memory, our language skills, our judgement, our emotional intelligence, our rationality, etc.
STAMINA - The ability to focus and persist for an extended period of time
With the sheer amount of content being generated everyday, our ability to focus is decaying. We are quicker to become bored, easier to distract, and require more to stay stimulated. This makes it all the more critical to work on our mental stamina. Our biggest barrier to learning is not the lack of opportunity or even time, but the mental endurance to focus. Set yourself time constrained goals to hone your endurance and focus. Try the equivalent of a long distance jog by learning something 10min/day for 1 year, or a marathon where you power through a course in a month.
FLEXIBILITY - The ability to achieve full range of thinking.
Just as physical flexibility increases our range of motion, mental flexibility increases our ability to apply what we’ve learned. Rather than learning something new or increasing the intensity, we take what we’ve learned and internalize it to deepen our understanding. Research the different ways the concept is used in real life. Create analogies or try this exercise where they explain a concept at 5 different levels, from a child to a grad-student. The better our flexibility, the deeper we can go and the more mobility we’ll have in applying it to our lives.
AGILITY - The ability to apply your learnings to another unrelated domain
While flexibility is the range of motion in a specific muscle, agility is the ability to work multiple muscles in tandem. The best insights often come from taking the learnings from one area and applying them to a completely unrelated field. For example, debt is mainly a concept from finance. But you can also think about relationship debt when one party takes more than they give. Or sleep debt when each night you shortchange your sleep by just a little. Or project debt when delaying one project to prioritize another. Compare what you’ve learned to another subject with the specific goal of finding connections. This not only helps you review what you’ve learned, but also trains you to think outside the box.
RECOVERY - The ability to let your subconscious work
In learning, we usually emphasize the value of deep, concentrated, focused work. However, what is equally important and effective is allowing our minds to relax and wander. It’s why many insights occur not when we’re working on the problem but when we’re in the shower, on a walk, or in bed. Although it seems like we’re not doing anything, we’re allowing our subconscious to work. In the book A Mind For Numbers, the author describes how she failed high school math but was able to become an Engineer Professor by mastering this. Just as our bodies improve the fastest when an intense workout is followed by a period of recovery, our brains process the fastest when we alternate between focused and diffused thinking.
In our hyper-productive culture, we rarely give our minds time to wander. Instead, any down time is spent checking our phones and we unwind by surfing the net or watching Netflix. This has the effect of shutting down our minds or filling it with distraction. It doesn’t create space for your mind to wander and your subconscious to work. Instead, try experimenting with different activities that you truly enjoy yet give your mind a chance to roam. It could be art, cooking, going for a walk, watching a sunset or a soak in the bath with some good music.
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With the framework above, you can draw on the thousands of fitness programs for inspiration on how to build your mental fitness regime. In this document, I’ve started some exercise ideas inspired by physical exercises, yet this is just the beginning. In my next post, I will cover what mental fitness encompasses and the critical components we often forget about in fitness.
In the meantime, let me know if you see any other parallels between physical & mental fitness!