Enter the mind gym – how can you prevent your mind from getting out of shape?

According to a 2013 UK NHS article, over the Christmas period each person puts on an average of two pounds. The extra weight and resulting sluggishness can be difficult to lose.

Whilst you can usually see the effect of festive canapés by standing on the scales, how often do you think about the weight that you have put on your mind throughout the year?

Too much weight on the mind can provide a burden that is invisible to the naked eye. That burden can also stifle performance, stop creativity and introduce unwelcome stress and anxiety into daily life. However, is there a way in which we can keep our minds in better shape, not only during the festive period, but every day?

In this article, we examine:

why the shape of your mind is just as important as the shape of your body;
how your mind can get out out of shape without you realising; and
ways of keeping your mind in better shape,

so that you can help yourself think more clearly, become more creative and enjoy a more fulfilling career and life.

Where the mind starts to lose its shape

Life today is busy and fast moving. To-do lists can quickly turn into must-do lists as you try to balance your different work and life priorities. At its busiest, work can sometimes feel more like an impossible circus act, rather than something that can be performed effortlessly with care and skill.

You may try dealing with your daily juggling act by just trying to survive the week in one piece and flopping into a heap at the weekend. However, inevitably, the life and work to-do lists never really pause for long and mornings, afternoons, evenings, weekdays and weekends can easily blur into one.

But stop. If the days, weeks and months blur into one, just imagine what that does to the way that you think.

Why the mind starts getting out of shape

The moment that you decide to step onto this type of ‘human hamster wheel’, the aim of work and life becomes ‘doing things’. But if your life revolves around ‘doing’, it isn’t really give your mind much chance to stop and exercise its muscles, on its own.

Let’s explain this a little more.

Whilst every job requires some level of thinking to carry it out effectively, the way in which we think when carrying out work activities (for example research, writing e-mails, participating in meetings etc.) often incorporates a large element of automatic or sub-conscious thinking. i.e. you’re not necessarily always thinking about how you approach a task, nor will you often be re-building an entire process from scratch.

The childhood mind vs the adult mind

However, If you contrast that to childhood learning, children are constantly learning new things and experimenting with their approach to learning. This means there is a huge difference in the activity of the mind of a child and the mind of an adult, because at school, the ‘muscle of the mind’ is getting lots of exercise during the day. This becomes noticeable in children during the long school summer holidays where boredom and restlessness can kick in, because their minds aren’t being stretched enough.

So, it’s not surprising that the more you rely on automatic thought to get through the work day, the ‘flabbier’ the mind will get, because it isn’t getting the same level of exercise that it used to when you were a child.

Now you might think, so what? Isn’t this just the natural development of the brain from childhood to adulthood and simply the way that our minds work later in life? That might be the case. However, when you look around the planet and see that many of the world’s problems are not created by children, a ‘flabby mind’ clearly has the potential to create problems if left unchecked.

When a flabby mind becomes obese

If you don’t give yourself time to allow your mind to exercise itself, it could, for example:

make learning more difficult;
make you less adaptable to technological changes;
limit your creativity;
make you less curious;
make it harder for you to be innovative; and
make you feel more irritable or anxious without you understanding why.

Furthermore, the more flabby the mind becomes over time and the less that it is given time to regularly exercise, the less prepared you will be to deal with challenges that life throws at you in the future.

However, if you become aware of the habits that can contribute to a flabby mind, you can do something to avoid it, or get it back into shape. Let’s look at some of the behaviours that prevent your mind exercising itself and how you can get a flabby mind back into shape again.

The habits that cause our minds to lose their shape

The moment that you step onto the human hamster wheel that we mentioned earlier, the more likely it is that you will become fixed on ‘what you have to do’ or ‘clearing what’s on your plate’.

However, taking this approach means that you may develop the habit of:

just getting through work, rather than thinking about how you are doing it;
allowing work to take over everything else;
never allowing anything else onto your plate other than work, for fear of becoming overwhelmed.

Modern technology has exacerbated a perceived need for ‘quick thinking’, ‘fast solutions’ and ‘deliver now’ behaviours, which can if you’re not careful, make work feel relentless. However, the work on your plate is only part of what you do in a day. The more that you make repetitive task based work the majority of your day’s activities, the less opportunity there is for your mind to have the freedom and space that it needs to exercise itself.

So how can you ensure that you have quality time for your mind to get gym fit?

Getting the mind back into shape

Let’s be frank. If you keep yourself on the constant treadmill of repetitive work for too long, your mind will get seriously out of shape. That may show up through stress, anxiety or ultimately burn out. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you have ever wanted to be more creative, bring more ideas to the table, or follow your passion in life, then giving your mind some space to exercise is a great way of allowing it to work on that.

One of the biggest barriers to allowing the mind to exercise is thinking that you have insufficient time for what you want to actually do. The constant fear that if you don’t keep clearing the plate of work in front of you, then you will suffer in some way because of that.

How to eliminate the fear

However, remember there are 24 hours in every day – 16 hours after taking into account sleep. And there is an easy way of finding the time in the day for the mind to exercise – let it exercise first, before you do any other tasks in the day.

Just like starting to run, or going to the gym, it is turning up regularly that provides longer term health benefits . Turning up at the ‘mind gym’ for 10 minutes a day to begin with, allows your mind to get into the habit of exercising.

At your first mind gym session, take a pen and piece of paper and simply write down or draw whatever comes into your mind, without judgment, concentration, focus, or any other kind of ‘mindfulness’ – you ultimately want a mind that is in shape, not a mind that is full and out of shape. If you let your mind run around on its own like a child in the playground, the freedom that you give your mind will allow it to work more creatively for you in the long run.

Making mind exercises more playful

If you allow your mind to exercise itself in this way, then over time you will find that it wants to exercise more and become more of an elite athlete. People often confuse ‘thinking’ with allowing the mind to work and the creative process that accompanies that – i.e. thought. ‘Thinking’ requires effort on our part, but ‘thought’ allows the mind to do the work for you in a way that:

decants ideas;
visualises solutions;
joins the dots between things on a page;
creates new products; and
sees patterns that others don’t.

Unfortunately, little time is typically reserved in the workplace for this type of thinking, because the focus is principally on getting the job done and driving sales. Furthermore, ‘brainstorming sessions’ that may be used to conjure up new ideas can result in people getting straight back onto the hamster wheel, pedalling manically and trying to squeeze ideas from their minds. Whilst that might produce something, imagine what the quality of those ideas would be like if you allowed the mind to exercise on its own terms, rather than you exercising it.

In order to be adaptive, innovative and forward thinking, it’s imperative that the mind is allowed to play in its own space and in its own time. Otherwise you’re really just trying to make the mind do something that it doesn’t want to do, which could leave you feeling frustrated.

Benefit from a healthier mind today

If you allow your mind to exercise on its own, then you increase your chances of becoming more creative, innovative, happier and healthier.

Just as an Olympic athlete becomes more aware of what helps and hinders their performance through training and analysis, by giving your mind the time and space each day to exercise through decanting its immediate thoughts onto paper, you will also start to become aware of how your mind can help you to become more creative. You will also become more aware of how to provide room on your plate to explore the things in life that you are passionate about.

Whilst bridging the gap from a flabby mind to a more useful one doesn’t mean that you have to train like an Olympian, a little bit of discipline in the mind gym by starting small and turning up each day will provide a strong foundation on which you can improve the way you think, learn, work and live your life. And ultimately, in a planet full of healthy, well exercised minds, the world might just become a better, safer and nicer place for everyone.