Creating a Mental Nutrition Plan

Many of us are familiar with a nutrition plan that involves food and exercise. But not nearly as many are familiar with the idea of creating a nutrition plan for the health of your brain and mental state. If you want your brain and your life to be running at peak performance, then it’s a good idea to create a mental nutrition plan for yourself. And think about it much like the food pyramid that was so popular back in the 1980s and 90s. There are 6 major mental nutrition “food groups.” 

1. Things you consume which can include food, supplements, alcohol, drugs. 
2. Relaxation activities or self-care. 
3. Reflection. 
4. Energetic activities or exercise. 
5. Service based activities. 
6. Your support system.

After creating your mental nutrition plan, check in with it and check in with yourself on a weekly basis. What part of the plan were you consistent with and how are you feeling based on the actions you took? If you need to adjust and find that you need to spend 10% more time on self-care and 5% less time on reflection during the week then go for it. And be gentle with yourself—like a food nutrition plan, you’re allowed to have junk food once in awhile and some plans involve cheat days. Don’t go overboard with the metaphorical junk food but keep an eye on it.

You've heard that you are what you eat; well you are what you feed your brain too. Mental nutrition is important, it matters, and so do you.

Energetic Activities: A Major “Food Group” For Mental Nutrition

When exercising or doing things that involve any level of physical activity, the real or perceived impact of the activity is almost always measured with a focus on the external.

• The loss of weight or lowering one’s BMI
• How much faster you were able to do said activity
• How one looks as a result (thinner or more muscular or more toned)
• Rosier cheeks
• Looking healthier

All of these are noble when accompanied with proper balance and a healthy mindset.

However, the impact of energetic activities (or at times, lack thereof) is not often enough measured in an improvement in how one is feeling, the quality of their thought life, and how it can help provide healthy balance, perspective, and energy to one’s daily life.

Energetic activities can and should be one of six core, major groups that form one’s mental nutrition pyramid. 

Energetic activities have been proven reduce anxiety and depression, and improve mood and one’s motivation. It improves cardiovascular function (ain’t nobody got time for heart disease), and can mitigate the effects of stress.

Energetic activities aren’t only “gym” activities; they can include: stretching, laughing, walking, sex, playing outside, building things, or anything that increases your heart rate to beat a bit more rapidly.

Simple lifestyle modifications can help you engage in more energetic activities. This can include taking one flight of stairs instead of the elevator or walking through the airport instead of standing still on the people mover (the horizontal escalator thingy).

We need to be intentional about our energetic activities so that when we get busy or when something comes up, we don’t push our preferred energetic activities to the side.

Schedule your activity or activities in your calendar or put up a post it note on your bathroom mirror—there are so many ways to find and make time. You can add it to a vision board or create a visual system where you keep track of how often you meet your energetic activities goals and then reward yourself at certain points during your progress.

Start out small if you must. Incremental changes make the biggest differences over a long period of time. Rather than trying to run twenty miles per week, how about twenty minutes? If you want to increase time or distance at some point, then go for it but the most important part is first creating healthy habits (that goes for any one of the six core groups of your mental nutrition) and then becoming aware of what benefits these new habits have on your life. If you miss your mark or lose steam, that’s okay. You’re a human being and you’re trying your best. Your main goal is not a specific number or to beat a time or to weigh a certain amount; it’s to create the healthiest, happiest, most well-adjusted version of you as possible.

How to Effectively Deal with Difficulty or Failure

This is about retraining the brain. Instead of asking why this is happening to you; CHOOSE to acknowledge that everything is happening FOR you and not TO you. This is the first step in leading toward a more solutions-based mindset that will then lead you away from the thing that isn’t working and toward your vision of what “success” looks like.

You can of course, take time to mourn the failure or thing that didn't work, but at some point soon after take time to reflect on what you can learn from the failure and how you can pivot and eventually turn that loss into a win. Everything happens for a reason but only if you choose that mindset.

Take a look at your coping skills and mechanisms. Avoiding dealing with the failure or numbing the pain with alcohol or substances or excessive anything is not a solution and will only prolong the pain and might even make the effects of the failure worse. Instead, go back to reframing the failure as a lesson and find ways to cope by taking care of your physical and mental wellness. 

Take responsibility if it's required and be vulnerable with the person, persons, or entity who was affected by the failure. If it’s appropriate, express that you wish to work toward a more successful outcome and ask for feedback and assistance if necessary.

And don’t forget to forgive yourself. You are a human being and doing the best you can with the information you have at the moment.

Lean into failure—own it, wrestle with it, and learn from it. Failing doesn’t make you a failure, it simply allows you to move closer toward success. You’ve bounced back before and you’ll do it again.

What is Mental Nutrition?

Put simply it’s the fuel we feed our brains in order to have a well-adjusted and healthy life. Paying attention to our mental nutrition helps us manage our emotions, deepen our empathy, create a toolkit to handle adversity and unplanned crisis, as well as to deepen our fulfillment of the day to day.

Mental nutrition is partly interchangeable for mental health; and we as a society are so afraid to mention it or even say the words mental health, as if they’re dirty words and someone else’s problem or for those “unhinged” and seemingly unproductive members of society. The hell it is.

The functioning of your brain, healthy or unhealthy, isn’t “all in your head,” as if you’re making things up, just like if you have lung cancer, it’s not just “all in your lungs.” Mental health is a brain event and very real just like lung cancer is a lung event and very real.

We must not bury our heads in the sand or be fearful of opening Pandora’s Box if we start learning about and taking care of our mental nutrition. The healthier our brain, the more fulfilling and productive and happy our life will be. We must be intentional about taking care of our mental nutrition.

Mental nutrition is important for the individual. For the team leader. For the manager. For the corporation. For the system and for the collective.

It starts with me. It starts with you. It starts with us…together.

How to Support a Colleague Going through a Difficult Time

Helping and holding space with a colleague while going through a difficult time can be incredibly confusing. People are often reticent to be around someone going through a difficult time because they don’t know what to say or are afraid to say the wrong thing. 

But the best way to help a person going through a difficult time is to simply go to that person, in a private and respectful place, of course, and first acknowledge that they are going through a difficult time. Then validate what they are going through by saying things like: 

• “that must be difficult,” 
• “I feel for you,” or 
• “you’re brave…” 

…as long as it comes from a genuine and caring place. 

Then ask them if they want to talk about it or if they want advice or if they want to scream or cry or take a walk to let off steam. You don’t have to have all the answers and you won’t be able to fix their problem. 

Try not to say things like: 

• “I feel bad for you.” No one wants pity. People would much rather have empathy; so the phrase “I feel bad for you,” becomes, “I feel for you.” 
• “It's going to get better,” because you can’t keep that promise nor can you actually predict when it’s going to get better. Instead, you can say, “it’ll get different,” because that is a promise you can keep. Life is full of ups and downs; it will get better, not so good, and then better again. 
• “I know how you feel” because you don’t. Just be there and be present.

Simply giving them the space to express themselves goes a long way in helping that colleague going through a hard time.

How to Reframe your Thinking to Get a Better Outcome

So you want a better outcome on whatever you're looking to achieve. In order to work toward a better outcome you must acknowledge that the current outcome is not an end point but rather a lesson on the way to success. We often have some idea of what we want an outcome to look like and then act on what we perceive to be the first steps toward achieving it. But instead of doing that, identify how you want to feel after you’ve achieved that outcome and then trace your steps backwards from the end point all the way to the beginning.

Rehearse in your head and out loud what a successful outcome would look and feel like. Use past experiences of success to inform this. 

• What did the success feel, look, and sound like? 
• How did you handle it? 
• Had you experienced any other successes prior to the occurrence you’re thinking of and if so, can you dig deep and analyze to find patterns that led to each of those successes? 

If you do find a pattern, you can use it to inform the actions you take while you’re working toward achieving this new goal. 

One thing to note here: don’t fall into the trap of becoming attached to the outcome you’ve created in your rehearsals. And don’t fall into the trap of only relying on actions from past successes to inform future successes. You’re essentially practicing only so you can train your brain to be more accustomed to what success feels like and can then make it more of a habit.

I have no doubt that by taking any or all of these actions, you will be on the path toward a better outcome in no time.