How to Successfully Manage Your Mindset Using 3 Simple Habits
Photo by Blacksalmon / Adobe Stock
The ability to set our minds to something is the starting point for any type of behavior change. What is often overlooked is how we are creating a strong foundation for managing our mental states.
What is mindset?
One of the most popular books on this topic is Carol Dweck’s, Mindset: The New Psychology for Success. It’s an informative read for anyone looking to learn more about mindset. Her 40 years of research reveals two types of mindset prevalent in society, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Learning where your are in relation to these concepts is helpful to give you insight into your overall mindset and areas you may need to work harder in than others when refining it for specific applications.
In her interview with the Atlantic, she explains “Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait.”
It’s important to know that we always have control over how we set our minds. Even those with growth mindsets still have to work at it.
Generally mindset is the established attitudes we hold, and the set of beliefs and ideas we have about ourselves and the world. These directly influence our focus and ability to create a performance, behaviour, or habit.
It might be a physical activity I’m performing or trying to learn, a work project or my writing practice in general. The mindset I bring to my task is key to how much motivation and energy I can sustain through the practice of doing it.
Beliefs drive our mindset.
Our belief system is knit together to support our current behaviours. When we try to change our current behaviour, we have to review our beliefs for those that oppose or run contrary the new habit or behavior.
Starting with the belief structure allows you to see which ones need to change to support the new behaviour.
A recent example of this for me was trying to change my exercise and tennis routine. I needed to add high intensity training into my schedule to start improving my footwork. I decided to add three HIIT workouts to my already full weekly schedule. I found a timeslot that would work and set my mind with a start date. The start date came and went. I tried again the following week and failed to commit again.
It turns out I had a contrary belief running. That belief was that I could only do a limited amount of exercise each week in order to play tennis daily without injury. I believed that adding these exercise days increased my risk for injury. Each time my start day rolled around, I found reasons not to start. This allowed me to protect my current fitness level so I could keep playing tennis, which I love.
My desire to improve my game was also true, so I needed to shift this belief to set my mind to support the new exercise schedule. To do this I reframed my belief to be that adding the exercise slowly, while monitoring my results, would reduce my exposure to injury. I edited the schedule, adding only one extra session a week with a commitment to watch and adjust if needed. Now my mind was aligned to support the new behavior.
Mind Care
One thing I’ve found fascinating on my journey through personal growth and mindfulness practices over the years is that as a society we’ve spent more time and money designing practices to change our physical state than we do our mental state. We monitor the food that we’re eating, the exercise that we’re doing and the environments that were placing ourselves in.
We don’t seem to be as thorough when it comes to our minds.
In the last decade, mindfulness has entered the mainstream as a wellness practice. With the pandemic, discussion around mental health and mind state has accelerated. All the restrictions are causing us to experience our mind states in new ways. With our external activities restricted we’re unable to manage our mind states in the way we used to.
We lack the practices to deal with this experience and shift our mind states at will. While there are many techniques to do this, you need to make sure your foundation is strong to see results.
Photo by Artur / Adobe Stock
We can start by shifting the way we care for our mental state. To look at it the way we look at our physical body health. To do this, there are three main areas to consider.
Consumption — what are you feeding your mind?
This includes media — social media, TV, news influences, and advertising. What are the information sources you repeatedly put your mind in front of? The habit of giving too much of our attention to these sources can build negativity, overwhelm and drain our energy.
Another area is influence. Who’s around you all the time, your workmates, work environment, family, and friends. What are the regular topics of conversation? How are you creating variety and controlling your exposure to the information and sentiment that influence you?
A simple exercise is to track your consumption for 7 days by creating a list of your areas of consumption (media, news, influencers, family, friends, work) and track how much time you spend in each (e.g., your amount of screen time, time with family etc.). Your scores will amaze you.
Often media and news sources can have a negative tone. So can the influencers in our lives. This can reinforce our tendency towards negativity bias.
Re-balancing consumption levels can help us gain back mental energy and improve our sense of wellbeing.
Exercise — how are you exercising your mind?
These include things like reading, doing puzzles, meditation, or any type of creative endeavour. Anything that will get you out of your usual mind state and stimulate the areas in your brain you don’t use regularly. This allows you to refresh your mental energy by firing your brain in new ways on a regular basis.
Is there an opportunity for you to introduce an exercise or practice? Do some research and try a new mind “exercise”. Track your experience and notice how much mental energy and stimulation it gives you. Do you notice a difference in your mind space after two weeks?
Physical care — how are you taking care of your mind?
This includes sleep and types of food you’re eating. Also knowing how much energy your mind needs for your day-to-day work or activities.
Sleep is an important area, with plenty of literature on how sleep impacts our mental health. Sleep helps our brain process toxicity. It’s also important for learning, helping our brain form the neural circuitry to consolidate new information.
The way we feed our bodies impacts our brain function. Recent studies show how the food we eat makes a difference in brain performance and health.
A holistic mindset about your mindset!
If you’re struggling with your mindset, start by creating a balanced foundation.
From here you can successfully leverage mindset practices that will help you introduce new behaviors or habits. These are also great practices if you are simply finding you don’t have enough focus, or you’re mentally exhausted.
There are plenty of techniques you can learn to change your mind states. Without a strong foundation these practices will be less effective. When you’re not getting enough sleep or have high exposure to negative influences, it’s difficult to sustain a change in your mindset. These factors will override your technique every time.
Remember to adopt a holistic mindset about your mindset, like you do your body. Make a habit of checking in with these three questions: what are you feeding your mind? How are you exercising it? How are you taking care of it? This will give you the foundation to work with you mindset in sustainable ways.
