Ever since the pandemic brought about a new normal, mental health awareness and importance have become imperative more than ever. Our fear and anxiety have become the cause of stress. Our Recruitment Coordinator, Coralie Gouedic is sharing how any person can be successful in achieving sound physical and mental health in the blog below.
Written By: Coralie Gouedic Laurent, Recruitment Coordinator
There is a famous Latin phrase that the Roman Poet, Juvenal, wrote:
“orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano”
It means that in order to have a healthy mind, we need a healthy body. Physical exercise, a healthy, nutritious diet, and general fitness. We are bombarded daily with messages for body fitness, and I think this is fantastic, but we rarely hear about mental fitness. Being mentally fit is as important, or even more important. Without mental fitness, it doesn’t matter how well prepared we are, how high our academic level is, or how many connections we have. If your mind decides to stop, game over.
What is mental fitness?
Mental fitness is keeping your brain and mind in good shape, arriving, and staying in a state of being well, having a healthy attitude towards life, and exercising our brain to maintain our cognitive functions working properly. How do we achieve this? By taking time to do mental exercises to stimulate your brain and by working towards improving the four emotional components of mental fitness which are: self-acceptance, self-esteem, resilience, and emotion management.
- Brain Boost: Some exercises we can try are puzzles, learning a new song, sit for a moment and use your imagination, also the use of your physical senses (smell, taste, etc), or math exercises. There are several ways to boost your brain. Eating fatty fish, berries, nuts, are also excellent ways to keep your brain healthy. But the most important thing that your brain needs is oxygen, thus the title of this article.
- Self: We need to take time to relax, visualize, and affirm ourselves. We need tools not only to cope but also to thrive.
- Resilience: Resilience is the ability to recover after trauma, and it can be used in every aspect of life, not only after traumatic events. Showing resilience at work matters, as there is constant change, we will receive constructive feedback, and even when the change is positive we need to use it, for example, if we get promoted and we suddenly have more responsibilities there will be a need for adaptation and recovery.
- Emotion management: Being in control of your emotions at work can be the difference between opening doors or getting fired.
An easy way to improve how you react to different situations is to STOP, DROP, and PROCESS. Stopping is the hardest part as it requires willpower, but once you have managed to stop yourself, you can drop the situation and then take your time to process and, if you are lucky, learn.
Feeling better already? Find more tips to help you refocus and re-energize here.