Mental health - we don't have a choice.

I want to pay attention to mental health and how to sustain it through different routines.

#mentalhealth #meditation #spirituality www.alejandroescandon.com

Life is getting more sophisticated for everyone. Although, at the same time, information, technology, research, knowledge, science are constantly changing. A clear example of this is sports. The world's number one tennis player the 80's was not even at half the level of the best three tennis players in the world nowadays.

Why? It is because of evolution and sophistication of different variables. Mind, training, technic, materials, nutrition and other practices have changed brutally since then. Djokovic’s diet has not animal protein, is a plant based diet supported by ethical and moral reasons about animals, climate change (CO2) and of course other healthy benefits. It is just an example on the new routines and habits that professionals are involving in theirs life. The outcome is much higher performance.

Coming back to the header of this article, mental health studies are evolving at high speed and we cannot ignore it. We need to work on it, we need to react, take action of it. Flexibility and adaptability are some of the most important #softskills for the next decade, and they will have an active role in all this context. 

The possibilities that our mind is offering to us are just awesome. Mind is connected to our body and they are constantly interacting about millions of things. Every second, even when we are sleeping our brain and body have an intense interaction between each other.

Spirituality, meditation, mindfulness, plant base diet, yoga, exercise, active listening to our body, breathing technics... Options are there and the performance and the results of them are evident.

Our mood, character, thoughts, behaviors are influenced by our habits and they are connected with nutrition, exercise and sleep. It means that we can push our own performance, train our mind, body and health. 

I had a burnout, but now, after six months, I can only feel grateful about it. My life at work had become to sacrifice my self for others since long time ago, and everything just exploded. The result of it was stress, lack of confidence, negatives thoughts... my mind was not working anymore and my body was reacting with tiredness, skin irritations, sleeping problems, no motivation, loneliness... I would not wish this feeling to anyone.

Since then, day by day, I started to read and practice on the following topics and the results are awesome:

-Spirituality: We don't have a choice. People and the world need to be more spiritual. So, what is exactly? There is not a specific definition but Its qualities are full of meaning. Love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, responsibility, harmony... They will develop our inner peace and they will be the the core and the blocks of our happiness.

-Meditation and mindfulness: It is a powerful tool to train our attention, our mind, our consciousness, our thoughts. Results will increase our self concept, well being, perception, peace.There are thousands of different exercises, just pick the one that will fit better for you and start to work.

-Diet: We are what we eat! Just as simple as that. We need to be reeducated about our eating habits. It's not complicated , we just need to be more conscious about it, we don't need to go to the extremes. We already know that refined sugar is not good for us, we know that meat will cause us an enormous effort and waste of energy in the digestion ( not talking yet about the environment or unethical modern methods of factory farming ), but yet we still consume both in excessive quantities. I still love meat, but what i am trying yo do is reducing considerably my consumption. On the other hand, foods derived from plants e.g. veggies, grains, nuts, seeds, legumes and fruits are good for us, so we just need to add them in more quantities to our diet.

-Yoga: It's a practice that will workout your body and your mind. It is physical, mental and spiritual. And it will have an indirect impact in your diet because you will understand better to your body and you will notice things that you haven't noticed before (digestion is one of them). Yoga is  amazing to  develop our breath. No-one in life has told me how to breath properly, how to exercise it, how to practice it, and we need to do it , we need to know how to do it. So, let’s just practice it!

The world is changing very fast and applying these practices in our routines , creating these variables into habits, we would transform a better world for everyone (spirituality), we would increase the quality of our inner life (health) and the most promising, we can develop and train our mind set (mental health).