What Is Mental Fitness?
Mental Fitness is a practical, proactive and preventative approach to mental health that equips people with the knowledge, confidence and skills to build their resilience and protect their wellbeing.
Just as we can improve our physical health through physical fitness, so too can we improve our mental health with the daily habits and rituals of Mental Fitness.
It’s about more than just about avoiding mental illness. Instead, it's about building a life-long set of simple skills that can help us feel calmer, more focused and less overwhelmed.
Imagine if we could inspire people to think of their Mental Fitness just like their physical fitness.
Why Mental Fitness Matters
Mental ill-health is one of the defining challenges of our time. Increasing numbers of people are being diagnosed with anxiety or depression, while many more people are struggling under the weight of burnout and everyday chronic stress.
The World Health Organization has stated that mental ill-health will be the world’s number public health problem by 2030. Unfortunately, we remain stuck in a ‘wait and treat’ model of mental health care. When people do seek help, our public health services can’t keep up, and people become discouraged.
Instead of people having the knowledge and skills to understand and take action on their mental health, we often wait until things go wrong, because we’re ashamed of what people might think, or simply because we’re too busy getting through the day.
By contrast, Mental Fitness helps people talk openly about what good mental health looks like and how to get there; and how to support others without stigma or misunderstanding. Most importantly, the Mental Fitness approach is open to everyone, whether they have a pre-existing mental illness or not.
We’ve taken an idea that most people can understand - physical fitness - and applied the same principles to improving an idea people often find confusing - how to improve our mental health through simple daily habits and rituals. As we build our Mental Fitness over time, we become more prepared and equipped to handle life's disappointments, setbacks and obstacles and face the future more calmly and optimistically.
Mental Fitness:
The 'how-to guide' for building your resilience and protecting your mental health.
How to Improve Your Mental Health
What if there were a new way to think about mental health and resilience? Not as something negative, scary or mysterious, but as something as normal as tying your shoe-laces. Something relatable, practical and actionable, and that each of us can work on throughout the different seasons of our lives, like a never-ending project. Things that they don’t teach you in school.
The science of wellbeing shows that individuals have more influence over how they think and feel than they often believe they do. By learning and applying the mindset, habits and tools of Mental Fitness, we can learn to feel better and become more skilful at dealing with life’s challenges. Through Mental Fitness, we can make the process of managing and improving our mental health simpler, empowering, and dare we say it - fun.
Practicing Mental Fitness consistently helps protect and improve our mental health, even in difficult times. As we understand how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are interconnected, we build our resilience, so we can face the future with more strength and hope. When we practice Mental Fitness, our challenges are met by our growing resilience, so we feel in calm, in control and ready to face the future.
The Mental Fitness Toolkit
The Mental Fitness Toolkit turns the latest research from the science of wellbeing into practical skills you can apply every day to feel calmer, stronger and more focused.
Instead of getting lost in a maze of wellbeing tricks and gimmicks, the Toolkit offers us a set of easy-to-follow principles that help us think, feel and act better.
The result is a skill-based approach to learning about and optimizing the most important aspects of our physical and psychological well being.
Movement
Nutrition
Rest
Connection
Mindset
Purpose
Focus
Appreciation
Reframing
Perspective
Making Mental Fitness a Way of Life
Mental Fitness is more than just an idea. It’s a way of life that helps you focus on the things that really matter, build your ability to handle setbacks and change, and face each day with strength and resilience.
With the right tools and a proactive mindset, you can build a lasting foundation of wellbeing, and create a more fulfilling, balanced life. When things go wrong, you’ll have the skills to pick yourself up and keep going.
Mental Fitness doesn’t happen by itself however. Just like our physical fitness, we need to train and build it over time. That’s where Resilience Agenda can help. Whether you have all the time in the world, or even just a few minutes a day, we can help you make Mental Fitness a way of life. What have you got to lose?