In today’s fast-paced world, it can be challenging to stay mentally strong with everyday tasks or responsibilities piling up around you. Find a balance between your mind, body and soul can help sift out the unnecessary clutter in your mind and make room for the more important things in your life, such as family, work and self-care.
There are two ways of looking at stress: as a push of adrenaline-pumping positivity or a burden on your mental state. The key to staying mentally strong is by listening to what your mind and body are telling you.
You will learn how to recharge your energy, how to time manage your life, and how to find a balance between your mind and body allowing you to deal with your stressors instead of them controlling you.
Here are 6 of my best lifestyle changes to stay mentally strong when life gets busy.
Get Sufficient Sleep
I cannot stress this enough; sleep is the most underutilised FREE resource we have! Our bodies need rest to replenish and rejuvenate, to rebuild a stronger mental capacity and for overall well-being. It is the ultimate bio-hacking method.
Stress is a natural biological response to life experiences and everyday responsibilities and can be put into over-drive when life gets busy. It affects your brain functions which can cause poor quality sleep, lack of concentration and memory problems.
Various brain functions rely on good quality sleep; including cognition, concentration, productivity and performance. Getting enough sleep can improve your problem-solving skills and enhance your memory.
These functions are all vital aspects when you are trying to stay mentally strong when life gets busy.
You can learn about it more in-depth in this Healthline article.
Manage your life instead of it managing you
Take a few minutes and write down all of your tasks and responsibilities. It does not matter how big or small they are, write them down.
Now you have them written and in front of you, prioritise them and create routines and daily habits that work towards automating, batching or streamlining them. Live smarter, not harder 😉
I explain how to be productive instead of crazy busy in this post. Check it out!
Sometimes we are guilty of having a busy life purely because of our lack of time management skills. Learn how to manage your time better, and you will start to notice that you have more time to spend with your family, friends and yourself.
Identify your stressors by cultivating self-awareness
You can’t eliminate stress, but you can learn to manage, reduce and avoid your stressors by cultivating self-awareness and identifying the cause.
The key to staying mentally strong is having control over how you react to a stressful situation. It is no secret that when life gets busy, our stress levels climb, and we become anxious, easily irritated, and overreact in situations.
To gain control and stay mentally strong, you must first identify the cause and cultivating self-awareness is a vital part of the process.
I won’t go too in-depth into cultivating self-awareness to identify the cause of your stress as I explain it in full detail in this post.
Once you go through the process explained in this post, you will have learned your stressors, allowing you the opportunity to find techniques and methods to gain control over to stressors.
Keep fit and eat a balanced diet
Keeping fit and healthy is one of the most important tips I can give you. These include eating a balanced diet and performing a daily exercise. A strong body equals a strong and resilient mind.
When life gets busy, do you notice that the first thing to get put to the side is exercise, and yet it is the key to staying mentally and physically healthy?
A walk around the neighbourhood or a 30 minute at home full-body workout is not impossible to fit into your day. You do not have to get all sweaty to be active, so it is more than possible in the morning or after work.
No gym membership required! Use 5kg dumbells, booty bands, or perform bodyweight exercises. If you are not training to compete in bodybuilding or bikini comps, then you don’t NEED to go to the gym to keep fit. NO MORE EXCUSES! Find a bodyweight exercise routine you enjoy and get to it!
Taking control over your health needs to a must not a should.
Eat a balanced diet. Why do most people lack a colourful and nutritionally dense diet? I put it to most people either not having a few easy go-to recipes, thinking you need to eat something different every meal or not taking the time to prepare for the week.
I am sure we have all heard of meal planning and prepping, but somewhere down the line, we decided it wasn’t for us, or it was ‘too hard’, which I find ironic because if we all followed a meal plan, we would have tones of free time on our hands.
Not to mention, we would save our mental energy and decrease decision fatigue by not wasting time on trivial daily tasks such as what to eat and wasting 2 hours every day cooking and cleaning.
We are told by our peers, social groups, and social media that we need to eat something different every day, we are convinced eating a healthy diet is expensive. It is only expensive when you eat out or “try a new diet” every other day and have to get rid of all your processed packaged food for nutritionally dense foods.
The effects of eating a diet lacking nutritious foods cost us not only our health, now and in the future – hello expensive morning and night-time medication I could have avoided if I ate my fruits and vegetables – but our pocket also.
Imagine waking up in the morning and NOT feeling sluggish, NOT feeling so overwhelmed with life’s stressors because you have the energy and focus, purpose to take on the day.
To keep up with the kids, keep up with the constant washing loads and household responsibilities because you have the mental clarity and focus.
Eating a balanced diet and performing daily exercise is a crucial part of staying mentally strong and winning the day! If you aren’t at 100%, then you can’t give 100%.
READ:
- 5 Mindset Shifts To Repair Your Relationship With Food
- Improve Your Body Image & Find Balance With These 5 Mindset Shifts
Make time to recharge and implement self-care practices
When life turns up the heat, it is essential to make time to recharge. Put aside 10, 20 or 30 minutes a day to implement self-care practices.
You might use this time to perform a self-care routine, yoga, explore your thoughts with meditation, read a book or try to start a new hobby.
Implementing self-care practices into your busy schedule allows you to become more productive by realigning with your focus and recharging your energy levels.
Journal writing 3 things you are grateful for
Journal writing is an incredibly useful skill to adopt when it comes to building a mentally strong mind. Regularly writing in your journal channels your inner, more profound thoughts and helps clear the clutter and prioritise your ideas and thoughts by organising your mind.
Finding a balance between mind, body and soul is key to staying mentally strong when life gets busy. When your mind and body are balanced, you feel good, and when you feel good, you realise that it is worth being kind to yourself.
When you eat a ‘junk food’ diet and lack daily physical activity, you are harming yourself and affecting your quality of life and those around you.
Take it day by day, one small lifestyle change at a time, and you will feel, do and be better.
Have you made any lifestyle changes lately? Will you try any of the suggested lifestyle changes? Were these tips useful in any way?
Please leave a comment below or email me at krystal@the-wellness-blogger.com if you have any tips you would like to share. I love hearing from you.
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Nice article. Writing down goals is a life changer.
Hey Roshanda, I totally agree. I used to get overwhelmed because I’d hear people going on and on about writing them down but no one ever said WHERE to write them down. Turns out, writing them down is enough for them to start taking priority and action will follow.