Achieving mental wellness: Lessons from High Performance Sport
Canadian Sport Centre Manitoba – Stress, anxiety, fear and vulnerability are things that we are supposed to feel, but they can become overwhelming, especially when we aren’t equipped with the right tools to deal with them.
To be our best selves and deliver our best performances, we have to be well first. Our mental health, like our physical health, needs building and nurturing. Here are four elements integral to mental wellness.
1. Accept who you are
You can’t change your genes. Just like a runner might be best suited to a certain distance, each person is genetically predisposed to respond to high-stress environments in a certain way. This isn’t to say that we can’t modify the way we respond – humans do have the capacity to modify their physical and mental parameters with the right kind of work
In the same way an 800m runner can become a good 1500m runner with the right training, maintenance, and recovery, each of us has the ability to train our brains to respond a little differently than they otherwise would in difficult situations. Our brains need training, maintenance, and recovery the same as any athlete who is striving for greatness.
Modifying your parameters starts with accepting how you respond. If you’re feeling scared or stressed, own it! Accept how you naturally react to your environment, and practice how you want to respond.
Find or create an environment where you can accept yourself unconditionally. Accepting who you are is important, whether you’re working on physical or mental resilience. None of us is physically or mentally strong in every single way – but each of our strengths and flaws are a part of who we are.
2. Do more over time
the “progressive overload” approach
If you ask someone who is starting a weights program for the first time ever to lift 200 pounds, they probably won’t be able to do it right away. Of course this makes sense – they haven’t been trained to lift a significant load, and expecting them to lift it is unreasonable. Why, then, do we regularly expect ourselves to deal with huge stress loads we haven’t trained ourselves to handle?
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