MENTAL HEALTH: 5 practices to develop a HEALTHY MIND!

Mental health is very important! I already spoke about this on my last post, so today I want to share with you some practical advice about how to cultivate a healthy mind!

When you want to improve something in your life, it’s good if you can acknowledge what’s the problem first, so you can have clear goals. And I can tell you a few things about your mind that can help you with that.

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s imaginary, and your mind is hardly ever in the present moment! It tends to go either to the past, or to the future… and too much past might lead to depression, too much future might lead to fear and anxiety! If you want to have peace, you have to focus on the present moment!

Eckhart Tolle says that we have an addiction that we are not even aware about it, to think! As I know that most of our thoughts are repetitive, and very often negative, I look at them as habits!

Addictions or habits, whatever way you chose to perceive your thoughts, you cannot break free from them and cultivate a healthier mind if you don’t do anything to change! Your mind is like a muscle, you need to exercise it!

So, if you want to improve your mental health, you should focus on training your mind to be in the present moment, to defeat your negative thoughts and to change the broken record inside your mind, your thought patterns… and here are 5 practices that can help you to do that!

Breathing Exercises

We don’t realize this, but our breathing has a lot of power! Pay attention when you experience a negative emotion, as a way of suppressing your feelings, there are good chances that either you hold your breath, or you breathe only with the upper part of your lungs! Everything is connected, your mind, your emotions, your energies and your body, what happens in one affects the other!

In First Aid, hyperventilation is seen as an emotional response, and the way to handle it, is to help people to control their breathing because it will help them to control their emotions as well!

I’ve been to India to learn Pranayama, which is the conscious practice of breathing exercises, and I was surprised to find out that some of them can even lower or increase your blood pressure!

You can simply practice conscious breathing by counting the time you take to inhale and exhale, for example, inhale in 4, exhale in 8! Or you can practice more advanced techniques like the alternated nostrils and the ocean breath.

Do some research about Pranayama, I’m sure you will find a breathing exercise you like and that will help you to calm down your mind! Just pay attention how they can affect your blood pressure in case you already have this kind of problem!

Physical Exercises

Usually, people think that physical activities are beneficial only for the body, and that’s not true! There are huge benefits for the mind as well! Remember when I said that your mind is like a muscle that needs to be exercised?

To run a marathon, besides physical preparation, you need to have mental strength, discipline, determination and focus, so basically, you will be exercising your prefrontal cortex as well! I’m not telling you to run a marathon, but it’s a good idea to have goals for your physical activities so you can train your mind as well!

When I studied theatre, one of the first things the teacher said was “your body, the house where you don’t live”… I don’t know if you noticed that when people are lost in their thoughts, they look far away, and it’s visible that the mind is not inside the body!

Physical activity is a great way to bring your mind into your body, and to train your focus in the present moment, because if you don’t manage to do that, will be very hard to learn and practice any kind of physical activity!

Read Books

More than 90% of your thoughts are repetitive, and most of the time they are negative! To change this, you need to break the pattern, and a good way is to do a “download” of new ways of thinking!

Reading can help you a lot with that, and I’m not talking about reading romance or fiction, I’m talking about reading books that can help you with your problems, self-help books! The knowledge contained in them will help you to shift your perspective about the things you struggle with.

Besides, when you read, you enter an altered state of consciousness, the more relaxed you are, more the information sinks into your subconscious mind, which will help you to reprogram your mind faster!

And it is also very important that you read books that you identify with and that speak your language, the bigger the connection you feel towards the content, more impact it will have on you!

Practice Gratitude

To practice gratitude is another great way to reprogram your mind. As most of your thoughts tend to be negative, to exercise a positive perspective will help you to change the pattern and establish new connections in your brain!

But please, don’t keep saying “thanks for this, thanks for that” in a mechanical way, feel it! Make a list with everything that you are thankful for in your life, and when you practice gratitude, feel it in your heart! To do this 5 minutes a day can make a huge difference in your life!

You will know you became good at it when you can feel grateful even for the things you dislike. That means you are exercising your power of choice about how to perceive things and react to them, instead of being ruled by your subconscious mind!

Mental Exercises

Meditation is not about emptying your mind, this is a misconception! Meditation is about being in the present moment, going inside yourself and observing your thoughts!

Most of your suffering comes from your thoughts, so if you want to change that and have more peace, you need to develop a very strong inner observer to monitor, argue and defeat the thoughts that make you suffer!

Meditation is not the only mental gym that you can do, anything that teaches your mind to spend more time in a relaxed state, will be a good training!

On my post about how to connect with the universe through your mind (click here to read), I explained the brain waves and how they are related to the states of consciousness. Stress and anxiety only happen when you are in a normal awake state, when your brain is operating in Gamma and Beta waves.

Alpha and Theta waves are known as trance states, you go through them every day, you just don’t pay attention! It’s a relaxed and focused state where you lose the perception of time, the same you feel when you read, watch TV or do some sort of artistic activity.

So now that you know that, choose any kind of activity that you can practice consciously these trance states because stress, fear and anxiety do not exist when your brain operates in Alpha and Theta waves!

There is a sound technology that might help you with that as well, it’s called binaural beats or brain sync, which are songs that can induce your brain into any state of consciousness that you desire. You can find them on the internet, so just put your headsets on and chose the frequency that you want your brain to operate!

I really hope these 5 practices can help you to gain control over your thoughts, so you can cultivate a healthier mind! And if you have other practices that might help other people as well, please share with us in the comments!