Ever seen a rotten tomato? Does anybody in his right mind eat a rotten tomato? I don’t think so. Nobody would want to eat a rotten tomato because it would make you sick, but when it comes to the mind, we eat and feed our minds with rotten, dirty, poisonous thoughts every single day. Some of the examples are when we allow what people say about us or tell us get to us, or when we watch useless TV programs that add no value to our life and existence, or when we listen to songs that have no valuable impact on our lives and so many other things we do that don’t benefit us in any way.
You see! the thing is, when we ingest all these rotten thoughts they make us sick. We get depressed, anxiety sets in, rage becomes the order of our day, we get overwhelmed.
Our society feeds us with a lot of things that make us sick in the mind and body. They feed us with a lot of thoughts that gets us emaciated. They are there around us, everywhere we go we see them and make contact with them.
A great man once said that;
it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society
-jiddu krishnamurti
We are sick and yes, we are so sick that our society cares more about oral hygiene than mental hygiene. We brush and floss everyday and some even do this twice a day to keep our teeth nice, fresh and clean but what about our mental hygiene? What do we do about it? For most of us…NOTHING.
But if I were to ask you this simple question…would you rather lose all your teeth or lose your mind. Which would you pick? I am pretty sure you would prefer to be toothless so as to keep your mental health and if that is the case, then why do we treat the mind like it doesn’t matter? Why do we treat the mind like it is a garbage dump site? We need to start treating the mind like it is supposed to be treated. We need to start giving it more attention than we do.
John Milton said that;
The mind is its own place. It can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven.
Napoleon Hill once said that;
thoughts are things and powerful things at that.
Everything you see around you right now was first a thought before it came into existence. The world is a product of the mind and so if our minds are unhealthy, what do we create? An unhealthy world.
When our government keeps on changing just laws without focusing on the mental health of the people, it’s like putting bandage on a broken leg or trying to stop an overflowing sink by throwing towels on the floor. Yea you are going to clean up the water but you will be needing an infinite amount of towels to do just that until you get down there under the sink and fix the pipes, because that’s where the problem started.
So I am saying today that we all need to fix our mental health because that’s where our problems start.
Imagine if every school held classes on mindfulness or how to deal with depression, anxiety or loneliness and imagine if these classes where made mandatory like every other core classes. The world would definitely be a better place filled with productive minds and we will see a whole lot of positivity flying around in the world.
I will be leaving you today with a simple mental health practice you could do on your own to improve your mental health. If you combine these techniques with proper sleep, exercise, nutrition, sunlight and good friends, you might just start floating off the ground... LOLZZZ.
You can’t talk about mental health without talking about brain health. All those activities I mentioned, according to John Madina in his book called Brain Rules, they help to create a healthy happy brain.
I call this technique which I wana share with you today, the smiling, mindful breathe, this is because it combines the three most powerful tools that we have around us which are smiling, mindfulness and breathing.
SMILE: A simple smile can relax your whole nervous system. According to the Facial Feedback Hypothesis, the facial muscles have the highest impact on our emotional state. When you smile, even when you are unhappy, the smile tricks the brain into thinking you are actually happy about something resulting in your smiling mood.
MINDFULNESS: mindfulness goes hand in hand with meditation. Is your mind running your life? Do you believe every single thing that you think? The more thoughtful and objective you are to the thoughts, that comes in and out of your field of awareness, the less you will be overwhelmed or trapped by them. People who practice mindfulness, report higher levels of everyday happiness and fewer problems with regulating emotions.
THE BREATHE: if you think the breathe isn’t important, go five minutes without breathing and see what happens. Your breath is your life force. When you breath deeply, you send oxygen to your brain which makes your thinking become clearer. You fill your body with more vitality and you improve blood flow and overall health.
Now to practice these you can start by closing your eyes and beam a genuine smile for about 15 minutes. After that, you relax your smile a bit and take deep spacious breathes. Do this for another 15 minutes and them practice the last step. Close your eyes and think about NOW. Just focus all your attention on what’s going on presently, not on the past or future but just now. This invariably will become a mode of meditation for you and the more you do it, the better you become at it.
Doing all these will definitely help improve and maintain your mental health
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