Mental Health: For Snowflakes or Champions?
When I first heard the term “mental health” years ago, I was young, brash and probably too confident of myself. I remember thinking it was for weak people who could not cope up with harshness of the reality. I felt it was for those special snowflakes who cannot take a rejection or push through hard times. It was for people who needed safe spaces and support groups, and I felt too strong for all of that.
But over the years, I have started looking at world class champions, entrepreneurs and people who seem to push through unusual odds, face intense public rebuke and scrutiny and yet find the mental resolve to succeed. And I realized how fragile was, a unflattering opinion of my work or my being could sometimes bother me for days, affecting my behavior in other arenas. These champions, however, can get their minds to do extra-ordinary things and things like public defeats, rejections, negative press, years of failure don’t seem to send them on a downward spiral or long wallows of self-doubt. This made me realize two things:
The world champions and business leaders can control the mind more often than most people. They are not bogged down by too tired, too bored, can’t focus, not appreciated, harsh criticism etc.). For some it comes naturally, but for most it is a skill they have developed knowingly or unknowingly.
My mind sometimes felt beaten - there are times when I felt completely worthless, crippled by own inadequacies and unable to see any of my gifts. I hate that feeling. But I have realized that this is normal - this happens to all of us, I am not unique in this experience but we need a plan to get out of this, FAST. We need mental caves to re-construct our reality after failures and rejections.
With this premise, I dove into understanding mental health and concluded that it can be broken into three aspects. Aspects analogous to training my physical body for triathlons and marathons.
Mental Strength: How hard of a problem can your mind do? I think this is what education aims to teach us, it slowly teaches us from simple problems of finding colors and shapes to doing complex physics, derivatives and writing thesis on very large and complex topics. Its like any other muscle, you want to see how heavy can it lift. If you see a very complex problem, do you give up at sight or do you warm up and get into it and even if you can’t do it that day, you slowly build towards it. We must train our minds to not run away from every hard problem - but solve some of them and build mental strength. If you have a lot of muscle strength, most normal exercise don’t fatigue you, mental strength should yield similar benefits.
“In short, mental strength is how hard of a problem you can solve”
Mental Endurance/Stamina: This is how long can you go solving problems. Much like endurance in physical sports, this is our ability to perform at a certain level below our max capacity but for sustained periods of time and do it very often. If you have not worked for 6 months and you go to work for 8 hours, you will find yourself extra ordinarily tired. Trust me, I once took a 6month+ break after the acquisition of my first company and my first full day of work felt like I had just run a marathon and I passed out by 8pm that night (I usually sleep at 2am). Mental stamina is important. It can easily and quickly be built.
“In short, mental endurance is how long can you stick with a problem”
Mental Recovery: Just like any other muscle, mind needs recovery and both active and passive recovery. While, sleep aids passive recovery - doing things we enjoy, being with people we feel connected to, pursuing hobbies all helps recover the brain. It is extremely important to have this. This is the most critical parts - because you want to train for faster recovery. Some people takes years or decades to recover from a failed relationship, failed business, or a personal loss. Some bounce right back, we need to train our mind to recover fast, we need to understand what it needs and we need to give it. This isn’t easy, as once you spiral negatively, your mind doesn’t recover quickly or at all. So you need to build insanely strong frameworks on how you can bring your mind back and put it on path of recovery and performance.
In day to day life, I have affected three changes to ensure I am doing this better
For mental recovery - I meditate - 15 mins active meditation each morning. I try to work out 30 minutes each day, it helps me feel positive. I also try to tune out any self help sources, tune out any stupid thoughts that remind me of my inadequacy etc. I am also focussing on building an alter ego in my mental cave, which is disjointed from here and now, which doesn’t get too excited for any success and neither does feel too crappy for any failures - it just always holds steady. This is hard, but this is important, I need these mental caves to escape to hide from the world, recover and play at my highest level.
For my mental strength: I realize this only happens by learning. We should always be trying to learn something new. I have realized in 90 days, you can learn a lot about one thing - and one should always have a 90 day challenging learning goal. This is critical and right now I am focussed on learning about early stage investing. Learning is the key - you should always be learning - learning at an exponential level.
For my mental endurance: I personally thrive when I do different things, some people thrive if they do the same thing everyday. [you can do different things during a day and still compound it over days]. I am setting myself more and more ambitious goals to make this happen.
This post is to me understanding mental health and how to leverage it to my desire. Desires are good things in case you were wondering.
