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3 things you should do to start your mental fitness journey

This article discusses three practices that can help you kick-start your mental fitness journey.

This article is especially for those people who want to start their mental fitness journey but don’t know where to start. This is also an eye-opener for people who either don’t believe in mental fitness or don’t believe in its impact on our lives.

After reading this you will get a framework to boost your mental health to live a better life.

Coming from a simple middle-class family where people have only one life goal which is to earn money, I have understood the importance of mental health, financial freedom, and physical health. I have read a lot of self-help books on mental fitness before building this simple framework that can be followed throughout your life.

1. Meditation: I am sure most of you are already aware that meditation is very beneficial for mental health. It’s just the belief that you don’t have time to practice it or have not seen the immediate benefit, you might have dropped the practice very soon.
   – For people who don’t get time: Meditation is something which can be started with 3 minutes/day. The only key is that you maintain consistency. There are apps like headspace and calm which can help you achieve that consistency.
   – For people who drop it after doing it for a few days: Meditation doesn’t have visible benefits in short term. Monks used to call our minds monkey’s mind and training monkeys is hard. So be with it and have faith that you will be able to harness the benefit of meditation sometime in future. Don’t try to quantify that future time rather try to practice meditation without a break.
2. Writing: Our monkey mind is very good at creating stories and meditation certainty helps in controlling that habit. Although, meditation will not solve the problem then and there. If your mind is giving you a hard time by creating endless negative stories, try writing. Write whatever you are feeling at the moment. Don’t try to frame the correct sentence, just write. Editing can be done later. Once you are finished writing your mind will be relaxed as the mind now knows that all the storylines are written to be referred to in future if required. So you stop thinking about it. You can actually write counter logic as well in future if required to give an ending to your storyline.
3. Reading: Reading gives you a completely new perspective to think through things. Most of the good books are written by people who researched the topic for many years and some time decades. You won’t get such a deep perspective on the topic by reading a couple of blogs. You also get a worldview on the topic which helps you think through anything very maturely. So reading is a must to develop your thought process which in turn gives you better mental health.

These are some of the steps which helped me in my journey toward mental fitness but there are more ways like writing journals and learning a new language. I firmly believe that mental fitness doesn’t only give you a healthy mind but also helps in keeping you disease-free.

Do let me know how you keep your mind fit and healthy in the comment below. I write more such content based on my life experiences.

I also write about life lessons on Twitter.