🧠 Pillar 2/4: Elevate Your Mental Game

Read time: 3 mins 

In this week’s dose, I dive into my 2nd pillar of wellness, Mental.

(Did you miss last week’s Dose on my 1st pillar? Read it here.)

🗣️ Quote of the Week:

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." - Rumi 

Your experience of life is based on how you VIEW life. Not from trying to perfect everything around you. 

🧘‍♂️ The 2nd Pillar: Mental

The Four Pillars Of Wellness:

Week 1: Physical
👉 Week 2: Mental
Week 3: Emotional
Week 4: Spiritual

When I first started my journey to recover my mental health, I put mental & emotional well-being into one bucket - I didn’t know any better.

And while they are inextricably interconnected, I’ve come to learn distinct differences that helped me learn how to work through challenges when they arose.

First, let’s outline how the 2 are different…

Mental is about mindset, personal growth, cognitive function, resilience, discipline & consistency, limiting beliefs, our internal narrative.

Emotional is about self-awareness, emotional regulation, understanding triggers, stress management, emotional expression.

Emotions are a product of a cascade effect starting with our thoughts - which come from our perspective, or the lens through which we’re viewing life.

Oftentimes, we recognize our emotions first before we can begin to identify the thoughts that are driving them. And ultimately driving us into a survival state.

For my pillars, I put Mental before Emotional because it’s where all of our constraints & self-imposed limitations exist.

It’s the dam upstream preventing freedom, love, and acceptance from flowing into our lives.

Let’s explore…

Pillar 2: Mental

• Focus: Personal Growth, Discipline, Consistency, Non-attachment
• Actions: Visualization, mindset coaching, committing to consistent activity over extended period of time, exploring beliefs (or what we believe to be “true”), detach from outcomes
• Goal: To dis-identify with the egoic mind, develop a growth mindset, enhance cognitive function, foster continuous personal development, accepting what is, self-accountability, everything is neutral (meaning is only created by thought)

My playbook:

Keep a consistent morning routine 7 days a week (make bed, meditate, visualize, read, cold shower, workout, etc)

• Change your mind, change your life.
• No better way to do this than by starting your day with INTENTION
• This helps me prime myself for how I want to show up every day

Challenge my comfort zone regularly: cold plunges & Jiu-jitsu

• The mind seeks comfort - its nature is to find the path of least resistance. But growth only happens through challenge
• Sucks in the short term, amazing in the long term
• BJJ has been an incredible way to improve my problem-solving skills under pressure

Reduce social media to under 30 mins per day (most days it’s zero outside of engaging on LinkedIn)

• Social media is shown to drain our dopamine and keep us coming back for more - like crack addicts.
• It leads to something called tech apnea which changes our breathing patterns and drives us into a fight-or-flight type of state leading to stress, anxiety, overwhelm, worry, etc.
• Reducing social time has given me more mental clarity and OFF of autopilot

Stop watching TV

• This isn’t black & white, but I stopped turning on the TV to “decompress” every night. Instead, I’m highly intentional with what I want to watch - if anything.
• I noticed TV was a short-term bandaid for my mind needing to relax. But TV doesn’t eliminate stress, it just hits the pause button on it and numbed me out for a bit. I noticed the stress would be there waiting for me when I’d turn it off.
• I watch TV less than an hour a week now, and when I do it’s a sporting event or a movie.
• I’ve become WAY more comfortable with silence - in fact, I actually crave it now.

Meditation (also in Pillars 3 & 4 because it’s the foundation of my practice)

• Started with 5 minutes a day in November 2020.
• Now I do 30-60 mins in the morning and 30 mins in the evening
• My practice: check in with my body, spread my awareness all around the space I’m in, invoke a feeling of love/gratitude/presence and visualize from there. I end with my intentions for the day.

Daily journal

• Check-in: How am I feeling? What sensations do I notice in my body?
• Where am I still attached?
• What outcome, person, or thing am I waiting for to happen before I allow myself to feel happy/okay/like I made it/etc?
• Who am I placing judgment onto?
• Where in my life am I resisting WHAT IS?

Read 20 pages a day

• I love non-fiction.
• Typically read 2-3 books at a time on different topics so if I’m not feeling a certain topic one day, I always have options.
• I get a lot of my content or meditation ideas from what I’m currently learning.

My MAIN objective with this pillar is to execute on ONE truth → when you change your perspective, you change your whole life.

I know that I’m always one small shift away from things being unlocked and new doors opening in my life.

This is why I love getting coaching so much now.

Resources:

Books: Extreme Ownership, Atomic Habits, Psycho-Cybernetics, Essentialism, Discipline Is Destiny, Breaking The Habit Of Being Yourself

Tech:

One Sec App limits social media access by requiring me to breath for 10 seconds before opting in to open my app. It shows the stats on how many times I tried to open the app in 24 hours, and makes me answer WHY I’m logging in. All of this creates enough friction for me to OPT OUT of logging in.

Insight Timer App is free meditation app. I recommend checking out Sara Blondin’s free tracks

Next week, I cover my playbook for Pillar 3: Emotional.

PS If you missed last week’s Dose on my 1st pillar, read it here.