Insight #6c - What Mental Fitness Encompasses
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.
I previously covered why we should view learning with the same mindset we view fitness and how we do so. But a holistic definition of fitness includes more than just exercise. For example, you can exercise 3x per week but still be overweight if you don’t take into account your daily activity and what you eat. In this post, I’d like to touch on other factors we need to keep in mind.
Exercise vs Daily Activity
While exercise is planned, structured, and dedicated time, physical activity is any movement that is carried out by the muscles that require energy. If it is difficult to carve out time or find willpower to exercise, we can focus on simply incorporating more activity into our lives. It’s taking the stairs instead of the elevator or going for a walk with a friend instead of a coffee. Finding these little ways to sneak in activity can yield a big difference.
Similarly, we can build in more mental activity in our daily lives without carving out dedicated time. We can listen to audiobooks while driving or podcasts while doing chores. We can watch something educational while eating or read a page of a book while we’re waiting for something instead of scrolling social media. Individually these activities might not make a difference. But they do add up.
(As a side note, I’ve found Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss, a great book for this. Short valuable snippets that’s easy to read with no issues starting and stopping)
Quality, Convenience & Availability of Food
One of the biggest impacts to our fitness is what we eat. And this is a challenge as we have a plethora of choices: from fast food to fine dining, highly processed to all natural, mass produced to organic. Each option is a trade off between convenience and cost, ease and benefit. Yet what we choose can have a significant impact on how we feel in the long run. We need to consider the quality, not just the quantity of what we eat.
This analogy is even more apparent in the information we consume. Not only are the types of choices similar, it also affects us in the same way:
Cravings - Junk Food is anything that provides lots of calories but little nutritional value. In other words, things that take up a lot of time for little learning. When we grow accustomed to sugar, salt, and fat, our bodies will crave it in increasing quantities. Similarly, the more accustomed we are to entertaining easy-to-digest snippets of information, the stronger our cravings will be to continue. Anything else will seem bland and boring until we’ve reset or retrained our taste buds.
How it’s Prepared - In the past, there was a strong belief that healthy foods are tasteless and boring. Yet through creativity and experience, many healthy foods actually taste better than junk food. It’s all in how it’s prepared. In the same way, spending an evening learning & studying may sound dry and boring but this is a myth. Get creative and experiment and you may find it more pleasurable and relaxing than a night of Netflix.
Digestion & Absorption - Processed foods vs whole foods may have the same nutritional content on paper but are absorbed differently by your body. This is because whole foods take time to digest, resulting in a slower consistent release and better absorption rate. In the same way, highly processed information may be easier to digest but we don’t absorb as much. We learn the most when we need time to process the information and mull it over.
Compounding Effect - One evening of indulgences will not ruin your life. Nor will one week of eating healthy change your life. But the effects over time are drastic and if we start when we really care about the results, it’ll be too late. In the same way, know that your individual learning decisions won’t be apparent immediately but are nonetheless important.
If we want to eat properly, we have to consider what is convenient and readily available. It’s why many health experts recommend stocking the fridge with ready-to-grab, pre-prepared, healthy snacks.
In the same way, it makes a big difference to pre-curate a list of interesting articles, books, podcasts, and videos so that they’re ready to go when you have a moment. When I haven’t spent the time, I tend to feel overwhelmed and then procrastinate. Or I become impatient and just pick the first interesting thing (ie. trendy clickbait articles or bestseller trends). Taking the time to research and prepare your material ensures the quality of what you are about to learn. I’ve also realized I need to review & update the list regularly to keep up my interest. Otherwise like food, it goes stale and becomes less appealing overtime.
All the advice for junk food applies as well: make it inconvenient to access and in small limited doses. I find keeping my games & social media apps off my homescreen helps. The few extra swipes needed to locate an app creates friction, which prevents me from automatically going to them whenever I’m bored. Parental controls work not just for kids. You can set timers that limit a certain app or website to X many minutes per day. This is particularly helpful for apps where you easily lose track of time.
Community & Support
And lastly, just like regular fitness, everything is easier said than done. So join a club, find a learning gym, or give me a shout if you’d like to be my mental workout buddy!