Mental hygiene? Probably more important than dental hygiene.
I'll give you 4 ways to maintain your daily mental hygiene.
I'm Dr. Paul Jenkins.Ca clinical psychologist and mental hygiene is one of my specialties.
If you'll do all 5 of these tips, I guarantee your mental health will improve.
First of all, make a decision to do this. Let's talk really quickly about that word
--decision. I want you to compare it to the word incision and the word excision and the
word scissors. These all have the same root which means to cut. If I go to the dermatologist
to get something removed, he makes an incision. First cuts into my skin and then he makes an
excision where he cuts something out of it. What is a decision? A decision is cutting something
off. You decide something. You cut it off. Interesting. So, what does that mean
about making a decision about your mental hygiene? You're going to cut off the other alternatives.
It's no longer a possibility to not do this. Part of what you get to cut off is your old habits.
I'm remembering what Dan Sullivan said about discipline. He said, "It's not about discipline,
it's not self-discipline. You're already 100% disciplined to your current set of habits." So,
some of the old habits are what we get to cut off in order to move forward with our mental hygiene.
Obviously, an important part of mental hygiene is your brain. Now, your brain is a physical organ
in your body and it does require maintenance. So, part of your mental hygiene is to maintain
the equipment of your brain, your physical brain. There's some important things that go
into this particular step. Get enough sleep. The research shows that sleep is extremely important
to your brain and maintaining the health of the actual organ. Sleep is important for renewal and
rejuvenation and also purging some of the old stuff that needs to be cleared out. So,
get enough sleep and we're talking probably on the average 8 to 10 hours for most people.
It might be as low as 6 depending on your age and health but you've got to get that good sleep in.
While we're on the physical maintenance of your brain, diet also extremely important. Eat a
well-balanced diet. I'm not a nutritionist so I'm not going to give you all the details about that.
But you know the basics here and you probably can identify right away some things about your
diet that could be improved. You probably know where I'm going next. Physical exercise. Regular
physical exercise. And I'm seeing in most of the things that I read on this particular topic.
3 to 5 times a week, you need to engage in good aerobic exercise where you get the heart rate up.
You want to break out into a sweat a little bit. Work that body. This is really important to your
brain. There's going to be some obvious benefits for other aspects of your health. But remember,
we're talking about brain maintenance here. And finally, while we're on the brain maintenance,
your brain needs regular periods of meditation, solitude, prayer. Something that allows you to
quiet all of the noise and reconnect with your purpose. It's interesting that that feels to be a
more psychological intervention but really it has to do with the physical functioning of the organ
in your head. So, take care of the equipment. An important part of daily mental hygiene
is gratitude. Practice gratitude. But here's the catch: You practice gratitude about what
it is the way it is without changing anything. The way it is right now. Not gratitude for what
it could be or how you could change it or how it could come about in the future. I'm talking about
the way it is right now. And there's important reasons for that. It's really easy to get sucked
into some negativity when we start to see our current circumstances as being unfavorable. Well,
at the end of the day, our current circumstances are neutral. It could always be better, it could
always be worse. Practicing gratitude allows you to see the good that already exists in abundance
in your life right now without changing anything. And that changes the game when we're talking about
mental hygiene. I like to call this mental hygiene because it rhymes with dental hygiene and you're
doing that every day. I hope you are. If you're not, we've got another conversation to have.
You brush your teeth every day, right? This is dental hygiene. Guess what? Your mind is so much
more important than your teeth. And your teeth are pretty important. But mental hygiene is something
we don't often pay much attention to. Let's make a commitment for daily practice of this. In fact,
I'm going to invite you right now to spend at least as much time on your mental hygiene as
you do on your dental hygiene. Are you in? Let's say 10 minutes a day. Can you commit to 10 minutes
a day to maintain the most important part of you? Your mind? And here's how it works: Daily
positive input. What are you putting into your mind? I guarantee if you leave it to default
and trust the media, either mainstream or social media, you pick whichever one,
if you want to trust the media for the input into your mind, you're going to run into some trouble.
Have you noticed how negative a lot of it is? Daily positive input. What are you
listening to? What are you reading? What are you watching? Spending time here Live On Purpose TV?
Great way to do your daily positive input. Commit to do it at least as much as you commit to your
dental hygiene. Let's help each other out on this too. In fact, would you go to the comments
and just make a comment about what you are committing to do for your daily input.
Daily positive input. Go to the comments. Let's see if we can get some ideas flowing here. We are
(as human beings) social creatures. Even if you consider yourself to be an introvert, connection
with other people is important. You might just do it differently. Especially when we're dealing with
situational factors like social distancing, it's important for us to come up with ways to engage
with other people. Make this a regular part of your mental hygiene. Find ways to connect
to network, to mastermind, to serve. These are ways that you get outside of yourself.
And psychologically speaking, it's a really important factor in managing our mental health.
Let's get connected. I love hanging out with you here at Live On Purpose TV. I would even love
more to hang out with you at Live On Purpose Central because we can interact there. We can
talk to each other. You can ask me questions. Come over and we'll help you with your mental hygiene.
go.liveonpurposecentral.com.