What do we mean exactly when we say “mental toughness?” What is the association between physical exercise and the resilience of your mind? The body and the mind are closely related and one certainly affects the other.
Mental toughness is a measure of your ability to bounce back from setbacks. If you don’t take care of your body you will lack essential cognitive skills such as creativity, the ability to focus and memory recall.
Have you had bad days when everything seemed to go wrong? You decide to go for a walk and in no time you notice that something in you is changing – you feel lighter, you are able to see things from a different perspective and concerns diminish.
1. Walking to achieve Optimal Mental Strength
Walking at a constant, steady pace promotes wonderful changes in your brain. Many studies encourage walking less than thirty minutes a day to reduce certain mental problems, avoid depression and enhance the quality of your life.
The simple constant and regular movement during this half-hour sets our heart “in motion”. You will flood your body with oxygen and in particular your brain. Walking releases tension and will help to bring those calm brain waves into play! These allow us to attain that level of consciousness which allows us to be more receptive to the world.
2. Smile, a wonderful Therapeutic Exercise
You might surprise yourself and even fail to believe when you smile it is therapeutic and will fill you with positivity. Simply smiling will make a real difference to your mental state. You only need to smile and your brain sends you back a torrent of endorphins.
It is as if you reconnect or regain a perspective on reality. This will allow you to disconnect from everyday stress. For this reason, do not hesitate to smile every day. When you feel exhausted, just smile in the mirror. See yourself and perceive what is happening inside of you.
3. Deep breaths 3 times a day
Stress leads to unbalanced and accelerated breathing and prevents the brain from getting the right amount of oxygen that it requires. In addition, any situation of stress or anxiety releases cortisol, which is a hormone that in high doses can negatively impact your mind and body.
To avoid problems with stress be sure to participate in deep breathing exercises.
Three times a day practice your deep breathing for 15 minutes
When you breathe in count for 5 seconds. Hold your breath for 7 seconds and then exhale for 8 seconds
Keep doing these deep breathing exercises and you will see great improvement
4. Stretches in the Morning
Morning stretches will help you to maintain your mental strength as you learn to “relax” your body. In other words, it will provide your body with relaxation, elasticity, resistance, and more.
Get up a little earlier in the morning and start with some gentle stretching exercises. They should focus on your neck area, shoulders, hips and lower back.
5. Lifting Weights
You will find it very therapeutic to participate in simple resistance exercises. The aim with these exercises is to reduce anxiety. To release negative emotions such as worry, apprehension and fear spend around 10 to 15 minutes each day lifting weights.
This moderate-intensity resistance exercise will not only allow you to gain stronger muscles but will also help you better channel rage, frustration, anxiety, and other negative emotions. When you use all five of these simple exercises you will have more agile mental strength day after day! In addition, you will be prepared to face daily challenges.
You feed your physical body with “good food”, you feed your car with “good fuel”, so why not feed your mind with “good thoughts” as well. After research in the 1950s, it was concluded that having a positive mindset would help maintain good physical and mental health, increase longevity, and promote success in personal and professional life.
See “the bright side”
Positive thinking is closely related to the concept of optimism. Someone who sees the world in a positive light and sees the “bright side” will feel healthier mentally and physically than someone who thinks negatively, anxious, or even depressed.
Positive thinking is not a new concept. It is a therapeutic method based on autosuggestion and which aims to make the subject adhere to positive ideas. By repeating positive messages twenty times a day, the individual is supposed to achieve well-being and achieve optimal health.
Better Health
Thoughts can act directly on the body. When you replace negative thoughts with calm, confidence, and peace, you feel good. Additionally, positive thinking can be helpful in overcoming sleep disturbances, muscle tension, anxiety, and fatigue. People who think negatively suffer more from depression and anxiety.
Prevent Stress
Many managers are already followers of positive thinking and integrate it into their businesses: well-being seminars, relaxation coaches, specialized psychologists, etc. The benefits are quite amazing, and one of the major benefits of a positive mindset is that it protects against the harmful effects of stress.
It makes it possible to regulate the consequences and to find the right dosage at work, so as not to be overwhelmed. You learn to know yourself better, to better understand your resources, and to concentrate on the tasks that you want to achieve. In short, we learn to be more efficient and above all, we know how to say stop when necessary.
A more favorable Living Environment
A positive attitude can also influence the way you conduct your life, which in turn has an effect on your health. If you are going through a particularly stressful time, you will be less likely to pay attention to your diet, exercise, and sleep.
Instead, you will be more likely to compensate for the stress by drinking alcohol or snacking on junk food. These lifestyle elements are also risk factors for cancer and other diseases.
Longevity
Optimists live longer and healthier lives. Countless studies prove it. In the 1930s, psychologists at the University of Kentucky were able to determine that subjects identified as the most optimistic had lived, on average, ten years longer than the less positive, and they were in better health. Also, the power of positivity with healing is well documented.
Psychological Well-Being
Positive thinking has a positive effect on the survival of sick people as well as that of healthy people. However, having a positive mindset predisposes to exhibiting behavior that is also more “positive” in terms of health. Indeed, studies show that this frame of mind is accompanied by more virtuous behaviors.
Of course, we don’t get sick just because of stress, our emotions or our thoughts. But, we can now say that many symptoms and diseases are affected by our thoughts and behaviors. Thoughts are of great power. They have always shaped our life. Think positively, and expect favorable results. The situations and circumstances will change accordingly!
There is nothing like achieving the success you want to make you grateful, but eventually the newness wears off and you forget to be grateful. There are so many opportunities to be grateful each and every day and so many reasons to do so. For one thing, people around you will be happier and much more willing to spend time with you. You’ll also be happier yourself and have a more positive attitude. You’ll also find that everyone is more willing to help you when they know that you’re grateful for everything that you have and everything that you receive.
People Who Feel Entitled
You have probably encountered people who feel entitled. They somehow believe that they deserve to have success without working for it, even though all of the other successful people in the world have had to work their butts off to get where they are. These people are always negative, they whine and complain about any work that they have to do and believe that the world should be handed to them on a silver platter. If you are one of these people, stop! If you just know people like that make sure you avoid ever falling into that trap because it is a pit of negativity that is very difficult to crawl out of.
Be Grateful for Your Opportunities
Be thankful for the opportunities that you have. If you live in a developed country, think of all the people around the world who don’t have the opportunities that you have. Think of people who not only don’t have access to the Internet and the ability to start their own business online, but they don’t even have access to clean water or electricity. The opportunity to build a business and achieve that much success is nothing to be scoffed at. If you have that opportunity, you are a very lucky person and you should be grateful for it.
Also, you should be grateful for the teachers that you have in the information that you’re able to acquire, from the Internet or whatever sources you are using. You should be grateful for the teachers that you have, that they have the knowledge to teach and that they are willing to teach you.
There actually are successful people out there who don’t subscribe to this particular thought model, instead taking the approach that the more people they shared the secret of their success with, the more competition there will be, which will apparently somehow devalue their own success, even if it’s not the same industry. However, most successful people are really grateful for those who help them get where they are today.
You’ve probably heard of Tony Robbins. Tony is a motivational speaker, author and very successful individual. Even with as much success as he’s had, and all the things that he has done to create this environment for himself, he is still immensely grateful to the people who helped him get where he is today. In a recent interview with success.com Robbins said that he is still grateful to his earliest mentor, a man named Jim Rohn, who motivated Tony Robbins when he was very young.
Follow Tony’s example and be grateful because there are benefits; not only the ones mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter, but also some pretty amazing benefits for your business itself. Science can’t seem to find a metric to measure, but people that are grateful for all the opportunities that they had and all of the people who have helped them, are more likely to be successful than those who are not, and are usually several times more successful.
Practice Being Grateful until You Get it Perfect
It’s okay if you don’t feel that you’re at the point where you can be very grateful. Like anything else, being grateful takes practice. You might actually have to think hard about what you have to be grateful for when it comes to your online business, or you may have to wait until you actually do have something to be grateful for. The point is, start changing the way that you think. This grateful attitude goes along with everything else in this book. You are just being grateful because you should, you’re being grateful because it changes you as a person; it makes you a better person and it magnifies your success.
Start a Gratitude Journal
One of the things that you can do to become better at being grateful is to start a gratitude journal. A gratitude journal is when you sit down at the end of the day and write down some of the things that you’re grateful for. You can use your computer, you can use a piece of paper and a pen or even a smart phone app if you prefer. Just as long as you spend a little time each day thinking about what you have to be thankful for, writing it down and using it to further your success.
Ways That You Can Show Your Gratitude
One of the things that you can do to give back is use whatever assets that you have gained from being successful to help someone else. If you’re an Amazon affiliate, and you’re getting your first check from Amazon for just over $100, if you can afford it donated to charity, or take it down to your local soup kitchen to help buy groceries or even outsource some of the things that you need for your business so that other people can make money too.
If you can show the world that you’re grateful, the world will keep giving you opportunities and information to help you be successful. It sounds hokey, like some sort of new age philosophy, but it truly is the way this thing works and if you talk to anyone who has achieved a decent level of success they will tell you that positive attitude, gratefulness and a willingness to learn are all keys to success.
