Imagine this, you are in the midst of yet another major problem...
You start to consider the mountain of work that seems to be increasing, the dissatisfaction in your relationships and the financial pressures that are causing your central nervous system to flush your body with a hot stream of panic as soon as you see a letter for yet another bill. You know that there is no doubt that these circumstances would have once led to you storming out of the house in a rage that would signal the beginning of a familiar pattern. A destructive set of behaviours that ultimately only caused harm to you and your loved ones. A pattern that would conclude after a dark, silent and regretful 24 hours were spent listening to your over critical mind tell you all the reasons why you are failing in life. In these moments where you recall some of your challenges, you break away from this worrying chain of thoughts by taking a long drawn out seven-second exhalation and smile while you think about how fortunate you are to have learned mental fitness. To put it simply, mental fitness can be a game-changer in your life. What is Mental Fitness There are several available descriptions to be found through a google search about what it means to have mental fitness. Mostly, you will see a focus from places like Healthline proposing an idea that mental fitness is the development of skills to regulate and maintain your emotional well-being through things like meditation and calming exercises. My take is that in simple terms, mental fitness is one of the most critical antidotes to getting you or a loved through tough times. This primary message about can be broken down into two key points:
1. The importance of your social connections and more specifically knowing who is your Gotcha Mate. Gotcha4Life places emphasis on the importance of being connected and reaching out to your friends or family when you need it. This means that you need to know who is the person that you can rely on no matter. The person that you can open up with to have a real, warts and all conversation without feeling like a burden. Having this capacity to open up with someone is absolutely crucial for your mental health and overall safety, particularly when we know that loneliness increases the likelihood of mortality by 26% (Holt & Lund 2015). We know from Movember's research that 70% of men say their friends can rely on them for support, but only 48% say that they would rely on their friends. What this means is that you want to be there if a friend or family member was in need of support but you would be worried about asking for help if you needed it. While you probably already know that talking can be helpful, it may be hard to find the right person to talk with right? We understand that it may not always be easy to reach out to a friend or someone you know to share things with them. We know that it is common for some of you to not know the right time to have a conversation like this it or what to say or how to say it or you may even be concerned about the way the person responds if you do share with them. If any of the above resonates with you, know that you are not alone and that you have the Gotcha4life community to support you. The way that we can support you is through a range of programs, workshops & training that have already had significant results for men, women, boys & girls across Australia.
2. Your mental fitness is like a muscle that needs to be built, strengthened and maintained In many ways, you can think about your mental fitness as being a similar process to how you can develop your physical fitness. Think about this. From the collection of your family and friends, who out of these people regularly exercises? When considering these different people, it is likely that someone in this group prefers to walk while another would much rather kick around a footy in the park and finally someone else loves to lift weights at the gym. Building your mental fitness is very similar to this. It may be that you try going for a walk with a friend while you talk, watch an online meditation or breathing video, trail a martial arts or boxing class, commence writing your thoughts in a journal, start talking to a counsellor or you may even consider that it is best to complete a workshop to learn some tips and strategies on how to start building your own emotional muscle. If you are thinking that now may be the right time to build mental fitness, a good starting point could be to try one of the points that seem to best fit who you are as a person. Remember, the focus of this is all about you finding the way that will work for you. Just like the variations in the way your friends and family exercise, there may be a few different ways that you can build mental fitness. But, the major point is that you find the type of daily or weekly mental fitness activities that you can use to get you through life's ups and downs. As a starting point, you could try one or two points from the list above or even consider start doing one of these with one of your friends or family members. If you feel that reading this has brought things up for you and you want to talk to a counsellor or professional, then we have provided a list for you to view here.
コメント