When things don’t go the way you wanted it to be, do you have the capacity to continue?
You see, most people when experiencing discomfort, their default setting is just to let go and give up.
Want to set a different default setting? A default setting that will bring out your untapped potentials?
So what do you need to do? Here are some basic steps that you can easily apply to immediately develop your mental endurance:
1. Improve Sleep
Yes, sleep is an often overlooked, but critical component of mental and physical health. In order to develop your mental endurance, you must improve your sleeping routine.
Sleep deprivation can easily disrupt concentration, not to mention other cognitive functions, such as memory and attention.
Here are two helpful tips to establish a sleeping routine.
Keep electronics out of your bed
I know you know this already, that the more we use our phones during bedtime, the more we find it hard to sleep. But still, a lot of us are not doing this. The blue light from glowing electronic screens suppresses your body’s production of melatonin, an important hormone for sleep. So as much as possible, keep your electronic device out of bed.
Mind what you drink
Drinking too much of any liquid before bed may lead to bathroom trips during the night, which can also disrupt your sleep. Avoid taking lots of fluid before bedtime.
2. Try to Meditate
Meditation and mindfulness practices can offer multiple benefits. One is it helps improve your concentration and gives you the ability to think properly. Meditation doesn’t just mean sitting silently with your eyes closed.
Yoga, deep breathing, and many other activities can help you meditate. Meditation makes you calm and gives your brain a signal of focus to things that you need to prioritize first, thus it helps strengthen your mental ability.
3. Make time for exercise
If you struggle to find time to exercise, try to think of fun ways to work it in throughout the day. If you get your heart rate up, you’re exercising. Ask yourself:
- Can you walk your kids to school?
- Can you get up 20 minutes earlier every morning to fit in a quick jog around your neighborhood?
- Can you walk to the grocery store instead of drive?
If you can, try getting exercise right before you really need to focus or when taking a mental break.
4. Create Structure
Design your day where you can use your mental energy on solving problems that really matter and still accomplish tasks with little to no thinking required at all.
You may start with preparing a meal plan for the week, designating a specific time for checking email, and some other things that you can create a structure within your daily routine.
To sum it up, you’ll only develop the muscles that you work on with. The final tip will be, practice, practice, practice. Make it a natural habit to perform the things you repeatedly do in practice, including those mentioned above. Then developing mental endurance will be natural for you.
Was this helpful? Which of these are you currently doing or wanna try?