Mental Fitness Mondays: Create your Mental Fitness Exercise Routine
Activities That Give your Mind and Brain A Boost
Creating Your Mental Fitness Exercise Routine
Over the past few weeks, we’ve explored what it means to be mentally fit. Today, I want to take that one step further and get you thinking about creating a mental fitness exercise routine that works for you.
I don’t mean press-ups and lunges (well, maybe a few…).
I mean activities that give your mind and brain a boost.
Start by Checking Your Muscles
First, identify which of your mental fitness muscles are strong and which are a little underdeveloped or overused.
The Four Core Muscles are:
1: Self Care
2: Self Organisation
3: Self Development
4: People Skills
The aim is to maintain the strength of the stronger muscles, while gently building up the weaker ones.
In past blog posts I've covered the supporting muscles, which include things like:- Creativity
- Empathy
- Self-regard
- Focus
- Social confidence
- Or your ability to rise to a challenge
The beauty of mental fitness is that working on one muscle often strengthens others too. For example, writing this blog post helps my Creativity, but also builds my Focus, Self-regard, and Motivation muscles.
Designing Your Routine
Let’s say you want to work on:
- Social confidence
- Focus
- Emotion regulation
Your mental fitness routine might look like this:
- Morning: Start each day with 2 minutes of mindful breathing (to support emotion regulation)
- Planning: Spend 5 minutes reviewing your priorities and planning your focus
- At Work: Say good morning to everyone you see, and aim to make at least one contribution in every meeting to build social confidence.
You’d run this routine every workday for a few weeks and reflect on whether it's making a difference.
Too Easy? Too Hard? Adjust the Challenge
If that routine feels too easy, ramp it up:
- Add physical exercise (yes, those press-ups and lunges count!)
- Volunteer to lead a meeting, not just contribute
If it feels like too much:
- Try 1 minute of breathing instead of two
- Note just one top-priority task for the day
What matters most is building something you’ll stick to.
Four Tips for Building Your Mental Fitness Plan
1: Make it yours.
Your mental fitness journey is personal. Create a routine that works with your life — no comparisons needed.
2: Give yourself a baseline.
If this were physical fitness, you might see how far you could run in 5 minutes.
For mental fitness, start with a simple subjective score out of 10. “How mentally fit do I feel today?” We have detailed and personalised Mental Fitness Reports at Real Clear that can help with this, drop us a line if you’d like to purchase one.
3: Consistency over intensity.
One minute of focused breathing everyday benefits more than 20 minutes once, then never again.
4: Review after a few weeks.
Run your routine for a while, then give yourself another score. What’s changed? What’s improved?
Most importantly — enjoy it. See your mental fitness routine as me time, and an investment in yourself. The more fun and rewarding it feels, the more likely you are to keep going.
Here’s a coaching question for you:
What’s a tiny mental fitness activity you could build into your life on a regular basis?
