Get mentally fit this coming year

Rather than make all the usual New Year’s resolutions …. getting fit, going to the gym, eating healthy to lose weight or getting 8 hours of unbroken sleep a night  … how about you consider training your brain to become more resilient and emotionally intelligent?

All of us carry around an average of 3 pounds of brain inside our skull but never really give it much of a second thought. Do you understand what makes your unique brain tick or how to get the best out of it? Spending time on your mental fitness can create long term benefits for your mind and body. Here are some ideas to start training your brain:

Improve your memory

I am terrible at remembering things – names, birthdays, things on my shopping list, as I get older I just put it down to cognitive decline due to aging. However, there are techniques we can use to improve our memory. Mnemonists routinely memorise strings of words, entire poems and card sequences by creating stories to help them remember or placing items to be remembered along a visualised route.

Actors use a related technique where they attach emotional meaning to what they say. We always remember more emotionally charged moments better than less emotionally loaded one. Actors also link words with movement, remembering action accompanied lines significantly better than those delivered whilst stood still.

Creating good routines like always putting your car keys in the same place or just deciding to pay attention can make a big difference to how much information you retrain. I am going to try and create a mental association with names to help me remember.

Build mental resilience

Resilience is what keeps us going when life gets tough. It is the grit or staying power that prevents us from walking away and quitting. Resilience is built by how we frame challenges, set backs, failures or losses. Choosing to view things as challenges that provide opportunity to learn and grow, as opposed to resigning yourself to failure or a victim mentality. Instead of beating yourself up for something not going the way you expected, put a cap on negative thoughts and remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes and that is how we grow stronger and learn.

Pay attention!

You can have a brilliant mind, but it is not of any use if you can’t keep focused. Paying attention is a complex mental process that involves an interplay of zooming in on the detail and stepping back to look at the bigger picture. You can buy tablets, drugs and supplements (including caffeine!) that claim to improve focus and concentration.

If you wanted to stay on the natural path, there are a few things you can try yourself – raising your arousal level will boost your powers of concentration. Cutting down on distractions will help you have greater states of concentration. Clear your desk or environment so that it is not full of things that may catch your attention and draw you off task. Music can help you to focus as long as it is something soothing and familiar.

Tune up your emotional intelligence

The key to improving your emotional intelligence is curiosity and time.  Be aware of your emotions, pay attention to what is going on get curious about why you are feeling the way you are feeling or why you react a certain way.  The next step is to then build in a small pause before responding and taking action, this helps build emotional agility and you feel you have choices rather than your reaction be an automatic response that just happens in an instant.

If you experience emotions that make you uncomfortable, don’t ignore them, pretend they are not there or distract yourself, instead accept them, ask what they are trying to communicate – just like a toddler that acts out when frustrated, ask yourself what the feelings is telling you.

Allow yourself to be vulnerable

Clients will often talk about putting up their defences in relationships after previously being hurt or betrayed. Be building your walls higher and higher you are keeping yourself isolated. If you want to become more courageous, you need to make yourself vulnerable, expose your truest feelings – whether that’s anger, shame, fear, anxiety. Vulnerability does not mean bearing all to everyone, it means letting people know if you need a bit of support.  It’s a bit like the part of you that will be self deprecating so that you get in there first before other people can say the unkind things about you … if you name your vulnerability it takes the power away and you don’t have to work so hard at hiding it.

Saying what needs to be said can be hard, but with practice vulnerability can become second nature

Find your tribe

A brain science experiment was conducted in a nunnery in Minnesota. All the nuns lived healthy lifestyles in the sense that they did not drink, smoke, they had healthy diets, daily movement, periods of rest and no great stress, which would account for their healthy aging. The study found that the sisters who lived communally lived longer than those that lived in solitude. Some conclusions were drawn about social network and connections as a key to a healthier mind in later life.  You don’t need to become a nun to stay mentally agile but you don’t need a few good people in your life.

So make a pledge to yourself this New Year’s that you will work on developing your brain power over the coming 12 months.