Mental Diet: What It Is, What Are Its Benefits, And How To Do It
Nowadays, it is known that it is very important to have good eating, sleeping and hygiene habits. However, it is essential for human beings to have healthy habits or healthy diets (very common) that allow them to enjoy good and balanced mental and psychological health.
In this article we will learn what the mental diet is ; It will be explained what habits and psychological processes are necessary to promote its practice in order to maintain our mental and psychological health.
The mental diet is a self-care exercise based on the regulation of the thoughts that a person generates themselves in order to promote well-being in your health. Through it, the cognitive thoughts that we want to sustain are established in order to promote those that are positive and discard the negative ones, in simple words it would be taking charge or taking action on what we think. In other words, the mental diet refers to a psychological exercise that will allow us to generate benefits in our physical, mental and psychological health if we put it into practice frequently.
Through the mental diet, emphasis is placed on the idea of not giving much importance to the negative thoughts that may appear in our minds. It is impossible to stop generating negative thoughts but what is sought is to identify them with the purpose of giving them little importance, putting other more positive and favorable thoughts before them.
The mental diet is highly recommended by mental health professionals, as it will allow us to make changes in our thinking habits. To understand how the mental diet works in our body and our health, it is necessary to understand that we are and become the result of what we think.
Furthermore, the mental diet turns out to be favorable for our health in general, since generates positive results in terms of modulating stress and anxiety. However, it is true and very common that at first it is difficult to put it into practice, but through patience and perseverance we can incorporate it into our lifestyle.
The mental diet turns out to be very important, because through it we will be able to promote mental, physical and psychological health. Likewise, through it it is easier limit the influence that negative thoughts have on us and we are going to give more importance to thoughts that lead us towards a constructive attitude. We must invest time and effort to be able to modify negative and positive thoughts, because in this way we will experience profound and positive changes in our way of thinking, feeling and acting.
There are mainly 4 benefits that the practice of the mental diet gives us. Below we will see each one.
1. Promote a better relationship with yourself
The most important and fundamental relationship you will have throughout your life is the relationship with yourself. At the end of the day, it is oneself who will be there for oneself 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. It happens that many times this relationship does not turn out to be positive, since we tend to live with an internal voice that constantly reminds us of negative aspects of ourselves such as our mistakes, the things we do not deserve, our failures, etc. Through these reminders we are made to believe that we will not achieve anything, making us feel incapable. However, we have the power to reverse everything mentioned above through mental diet, creating healthy habits of thought, which will allow us to have a better relationship with ourselves, increasing our self-concept and self-esteem.
2. Promotes positive emotional states
The negative thoughts that we tend to generate about ourselves allow unhealthy emotional states to appear. The appearance and maintenance of high levels of anxiety, frustration, fear or sadness is very likely if we constantly generate and maintain negative thoughts about ourselves, since these emotional states end up being the result of our way of thinking. Therefore, it is important to promote positive thoughts that generate healthy emotional states through mental diets. If we start select which beliefs bring us good things and which do not, It will drastically change the way we feel.
Every time we face an adversity, obstacle or problem, we use an internal dialogue. This allows us to process and interpret what is happening around us and helps us decide what type of action to take.
By using the mental diet we can make this internal dialogue optimistic, empowering and motivating, which will allow us to have a greater level of confidence in considering ourselves capable of moving forward in the face of adversity. Through this type of mental content, resilience is promoted and emotional self-regulation is achieved in the most stressful or complicated moments.
4. Promotes the achievement of our goals
If we really want to achieve goals and desires, it is essential to be our own mental coaches. We must motivate ourselves and foster optimism, confidence and security in ourselves. In this way we can guide ourselves during the process of our goals, modifying our course if necessary. The guidelines mentioned above turn out to be very important so that our mind does not start to wander without being clear about our objectives and does not make us believe how complicated it could be to achieve our objectives or how far we think they are from being able to achieve them.
How to apply the mental diet?
Carrying out the mental diet is not as complex a job as it seems, however, it is important to be patient and persistent in maintaining it. Next, the series of steps to follow in order to apply a mental diet will be presented.
1. Identify your predominant thoughts
It is important to identify the predominant thoughts that tend to be most frequently in our minds. In general, these thoughts are part of sentences about ourselves, others and the world around us in absolute terms. Some of them could be: “I am cowardly and shy”, “I don’t think I can make it”, “everything goes wrong for me”, “people are bad”. It is essential to analyze the type of thinking that occurs to us when we face specific situations and what we say to ourselves in these situations. Finally, we could write it down in order to show if they really fit reality.
2. Establish appropriate or positive thoughts
The second important step is to establish adequate and appropriate thoughts (positive thoughts), those thoughts that will really nourish or favor our mind from now on in order to promote our health. Some of these positive thoughts could be: “I am valuable and capable”, “life offers me many good things”, “I am skilled”, “the people around me are good”, “I am capable of achieving my goals”. These ideas must take on greater relevance in our minds, they must take precedence and they must undermine the other negative thoughts that we have initially identified.
3. Implement the mental diet as part of our habits
It consists of implementing the mental diet as part of our habits. That is, we will begin to favor and enhance functional, nutritious or positive thoughts so that our adequate mental and psychological health lasts. We can choose the habit of repeating in the morning when we wake up or even before going to rest. The fundamental thing is to apply them on a daily basis as a pattern of behavior. When we start to have negative thoughts we must decide not to give importance to them and replace them with positive thoughts.
4. Be firm, constant and persevering
It is important to be firm, constant and persevering when putting the mental diet into practice as healthy habits. This step turns out to be the most difficult, since many people find it very difficult to acquire new healthy habits at their pace of life. However, if we remain constant for a week, favoring and giving greater relevance only to the most nutritious or positive thoughts, We will notice a big difference, because our mood will improve just as our motivation and our interpersonal relationships will be more satisfactory.
7 day mental diet
For some people this plan turns out to be very simple and for others it is not. Basically, it consists of not installing or harboring a single negative thought in our mind for the next 7 days. Although negative thoughts may appear in our minds, The goal is not to get hooked or give relevance to any of them. That is, we have to put into practice during those 7 days of the week the 4 steps (identify predominant thoughts, establish positive thoughts, implement the mental diet as a habit and be firm, constant and perseverant) that have been mentioned above.
