If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that change can happen at any moment whether we are prepared or not.
The last couple of years have provided us with plenty of opportunities to build our mental agility muscle. If you’re struggling with the challenges of uncertainty, here are three key strategies that will help you keep your head in the game.
Although we may be unaware of it, every decision we make in a day from the time we wake until the time we go to sleep depletes us. Throughout the day, we burn through our mental energy reserve with every decision we make. By the time we make it to the lunch hour, we’ve already made a series of important decisions, including choosing what to eat, what to wear, how to get where we need to go, and what to work on first. Making decisions day in and day out—whether they are as easy deciding what to put in your morning coffee or as difficult as navigating unpredictable air travel delays—can be exhausting and overwhelming.
When we’re especially stressed, we are more susceptible to decision fatigue, a state of mental overload that can impede our ability to continue making decisions. In other words, the more decisions we have to make during the course of a day will lead to fatigue, and it will become more difficult for us to make decisions. In order to combat this phenomenon, we should find ways to routinize our daily lives as much as possible: Set it and forget it. Pre-plan your wardrobe or pick a “uniform” and stick to it. Wake up and go to bed at the times every day. Establish mealtimes with pre-fixed menus. By reducing the number of small decisions we have to make throughout the day, we lighten our cognitive load and create space for more mental flexibility.
The foundation of resilience is mental agility, which is our ability to be flexible and pivot when needed. Mental fitness is important, because we are always going to encounter new barriers that require us to find new ways to work around them. What we’ve learned from the pandemic is that we may not be able to do the things we typically enjoy doing, so we have to be creative and improvise by building a menu of options. If you can’t go to the gym due to lockdown restrictions, what do you do then? It will be different for different people, but when we are confronted with something that we can’t do, start making it a habit to compile a list of things you can do instead.
Any good strength and conditioning coach will tell you that building muscle requires periods of rigorous work followed by periods of rest and recovery. If workouts fail to incorporate a good recovery routine, athletes run the risk of injury due to overtraining. We have to pace ourselves and be consistent. Much like physical fitness, building mental agility requires lots of practice and rest, to ensure that you don’t burn out. Experiencing long-term adversity, such as the cascade of crises we’ve experienced over the past few years, is physically exhausting and psychoemotionally draining. Enduring these stressful times can feel like rigorous work to our minds and bodies. When looking to increase your mental agility, make sure that periods of rigorous work are followed by periods of rest, self-care, and recovery.