6 Ways to Keep Your Mind Healthy

Hello, I'm Brian Tracy and today I want to talk to you about how to keep your mind healthy throughout your entire life. Your mind will make you rich or poor depending on the uses you put to it. I want you to take a moment to answer the following question. What are you doing today to keep your brain healthy and active? If you're like most people, you are more than willing to spend hours each week focusing on developing a strong and flexible physical body, but fail to devote any time to actively seeking out ways to improve your mental fitness. Cultivating a keen and active mind is key to unlocking a more satisfying and meaningful life in every area. Maintaining a healthy mind is essential for improving your productivity, strengthening your personal and professional relationships, and finally realizing your best self. Building your brain and keeping your mind healthy is critical, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Here are six actionable suggestions that can help you get started today making your mind as sharp as a razor. First, read as much positive material as you can. Your brain craves new ideas and stimulation and reading is one of the best ways to explore them. While there are endless topics you can explore by reading, it's necessary to keep the majority of the material as positive and inspirational as possible. You must really enjoy what you're reading. Continue with exposing yourself to reading material which is pessimistic or causes you to become agitated like lots of stuff in the newspapers today will have an overall negative effect on your mental state. This means instead of obsessing over depressing news articles, pick up an inspiring biography or a non-fiction book in your field of interest. Next, exercise. Study after study has proven that there is a direct correlation between physical exercise and mental well-being. Exercise can help to reduce stress and alleviate feelings of depression, along with boosting positivity, aiding self-esteem, and even improving cognitive thinking. The good news is that even moderate aerobic exercises like walking or jogging or swimming can have a tremendous effect on the way you feel mentally. All it takes is 30 minutes of exercises a couple of times a week to start to see results. If you can't squeeze a full 30 minutes of exercise into your schedule, don't worry about it. Even doing aerobic exercises for as little as 10 minutes at a time is really beneficial. Next, practice affirmations. By using affirmations on a daily basis, you can counteract some of the overwhelming negativity in the world around you and create a more optimistic outlook for yourself. Your subconscious mind makes everything you say and do fit a pattern consistent with your self-concept, your master program. Research has shown that through the simple act of making positive statements about yourself to yourself, you can reprogram your brain to overcome unhealthy habits and increase your productivity and control harmful emotions. You can find many affirmations online, but the most powerful ones are those you create by yourself. Think of an area of your life that you would like to change and then choose an achievable outcome that you want to reach. Frame your desired outcome in a short present tense statement and repeat it to yourself throughout the day. Let me give you a powerful affirmation of all is the affirmation, I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. I learned that fully 40 years ago and I was just remarkable. I was shocked. I never heard it before and the instructor had everybody in the room say it and today I have everybody in my room say it all over the world in now 50 or 60 languages. I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. The more you like yourself, the more you like everyone around you, the more you like your work, the more you like your activities, the more open-minded and optimistic you are. Try it. Another one that you can say is, I'm the best. I'm the best. I'm the best. I always tell my children that they're the best and soon they start to say to themselves, I'm the best. I'm not afraid of anything. I can do anything I put my mind to. And finally, which I really love is the words, I love my work. I love my work. I like myself and I love my work. Get yourself pumped, almost like mental exercise. Get the blood moving. I like myself. I love my work. I like myself. I love my work and you'll be astonished at how much better you feel and how much better you do your work. Just give it a try. My rule throughout my career has been that you only need to try one of my recommendations once to find out if it works or not. You don't have to practice for six months. Just do it once and you'll experience the change. And then you'll start to do it over and over again because once you experience the change, you will be motivated to do it again. My first instructor in personal development said, with affirmations, your future is unlimited. I never forgot those words. I wrote them down and I rewrote them and I read them and reread them. With affirmations, talking to yourself in a positive way, your future is unlimited. Develop good habits. Are your habits holding you back and causing you to feel bad about yourself or are your habits pushing you forward and causing you to feel great about yourself? Almost everyone has at least one bad habit that he or she wishes that he or she could quit. Whether it's procrastination or self-doubt or the propensity to blame others when things go wrong or badly, harmful practices are a significant drain on your mental health. Despite the negative impact of these self-destructive habits, overcoming them can often be a real struggle. One method many successful people use or find helpful is replacing a bad habit with a good habit. So instead of just committing to stop fearing rejection in social situations, work on developing an exceedingly gregarious and outgoing personality by setting goals and working every day toward them. An important point about setting goals is this, is when you set a goal and you start working toward it, not only do you feel like a winner when you achieve the goal, which you will do if you don't give up, but you feel like a winner every step of the way. You feel happy and positive and good about yourself every step of the way. Fifth, eat healthy foods. Maintaining a healthy mind necessitates having a healthy diet and lifestyle. Throw out the junk food in the cupboard and stick to eating real foods. Many people experience positive mental health when they eliminate saturated fats and sugar from their diet. Finally, set goals with deadlines and work towards them. This is my favorite of all. Standing still, not making any progress is almost worse than failing when you do start off. At least if you tried to meet the challenge and failed, you probably learned something valuable about yourself. Whenever you make a mistake of any kind, simply ask yourself, what can I learn from this experience? What can I learn that will help myself to be better in the future? Keep your mind focused on the positive part of what you just did and the negative part will just kind of disappear. The fear of failure is the biggest single enemy of personal success for you or me or anyone else. It's often petrifying enough to cause you to avoid completing projects or even having the confidence to start one in the first place. A positive way of overcoming this mental self-paralysis is to create smart goals. A smart goal is a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bounded. If you have a long-term project, use what is called the checklist manifesto. You take the long-term project and you break it down into a list of smaller, easier-to-finish tasks. You'll organize the list by what you do first, what you do second, what you do third, and then you begin on number one. Once you break out all the tasks you need to do to complete a project, identify the most important tasks and start on those. Make sure that you set deadlines for each task as well as for the completion of the entire project or goal. Your mental health is critical to leading the life that you deserve. Start making the changes that you need to improve it today. Now, I'd love to hear from you, so my question today is, what do you do to keep your mind healthy? Leave a comment below and I'll be sure to follow up with you. Thanks for watching and remember, if you want to change your future, take action and take action now.