How to unfrazzle yourself and build mental fitness with 5 minutes a day - Antonia Dingle
/How to unfrazzle yourself and build mental fitness with 5 minutes a day
Motherhood can be a frazzling time. It’s exhausting trying to keep all the plates spinning, and doing your best to meet the physical and emotional needs of your small human(s). And that’s before you’ve considered your relationship, your job, or a sodding pandemic. No wonder we can feel a little unravelled from time to time.
Mental fitness – regularly and consistently exercising our mental muscle to improve and maintain our mental health – is a crucial asset of modern motherhood that is often overlooked. We are not told we should work on our mental fitness in preparation for, or once we become a mum. We don’t know how to do this. No one really talks about it. And yet mums have one the highest incidences of mental ill-health in the UK.
Through Glow Your Mind I support and empower burned out, stressed out mums to prioritise building their mental fitness, giving them the resources to manage the mother-of-all-juggles with more ease, less anguish, more self-love, less guilt, more joy and fewer meltdowns (from you that is… if only I could do something about your toddler’s tantrums too).
I do this by teaching simple practices with a solid evidence-base for improving mental health, resilience and wellbeing, and for reducing symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression and overwhelm. All you need is 5 minutes a day to starting using them.
So, do you have 5 minutes?
Try these 3 exercises. Each one takes 5 minutes or less.
Press pause using 7/11 breathing
When you’re having a particularly stressful or overwhelming moment:
Pause
Inhale for the count of 7
Exhale for the count of 11
Repeat 5-10 times until you feel calmer.
This simple breathing technique deactivates your sympathetic nervous system (your fight or flight response) which is in charge when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed, and activates your parasympathetic nervous system (your rest and digest response), shifting you into a calmer state.
It’s also great to use with kids when they’re feeling upset or anxious, as it is easy to explain and works quickly.
Be thankful
Grab a notebook and write down 10 things you are grateful for. They can be tiny details of your day, right through to the big things in your life.
This is a simple, well-known practice, but don’t underestimate the power of being thankful. Gratitude helps to counter hedonic adaptation - the fact that as we get used to things in our lives (a pay rise, a new job, a relationship) the satisfaction and joy they bring us gradually wears off. Research shows regularly practising gratitude fosters significant improvements in mental and physical health and wellbeing.
Love yourself
In times of struggle and difficulty, one of the best mental fitness exercises is to be kind to yourself, rather than being hard on yourself. Yet in those moments this can often feel unnatural and difficult.
When you notice you are struggling with something:
Check in with yourself – how are you feeling? What do you need?
Respond to yourself with kindness, love and support, as you would do to a good friend.
A helpful mantra to use on a difficult day is:
“I am doing the best I can right now, and that is good enough”
Saying this to yourself helps shift you out of self-critic mode, and into self-coach mode. Being self-compassionate in this way when things are difficult is proven to boost mental fitness, resilience, self-acceptance, and overall wellbeing.
Taking 5 minutes for your mental fitness helps bring calm and balance to your day. With the loads we carry as mums, training our mental muscle isn’t a luxury; it’s essential to ensure we can do all-the-things without the overwhelm, and importantly, with a bit more joy. Although I appreciate even finding 5 minutes can be hard sometimes.
At Glow Your Mind I go by a principle of ‘Make It Easy’. Do what you can, when you can for your mental fitness. Do it whenever you can grab those 5 minutes – first thing in the morning, sitting on the loo with the door locked, on the walk back from the school drop off, last thing at night before you go to bed. You don’t have to do it every day. It’s ok to take a break and then come back to it. Enjoy it. Do it imperfectly. But do start.
Bio
Antonia Dingle helps frazzled mums build their mental muscle, and develop the mental resources to manage the mother-of-all-juggles at Glow Your Mind. Sign up to her newsletter The Nudge to receive mental fitness inspiration and motivation. Follow Glow Your Mind on Instagram.
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