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.

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 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.