Physical and Mental Fitness

You need to exercise to maintain your physical health. At the same time, you need to exercise your mind to keep your mental health. One without the other is pretty much useless. Your quality of life requires both halves of this equation. Physical fitness plus mental fitness equals total health. That’s just how it works. Like anything else worthwhile, you have to work at it.
You don’t need expensive gear to get in physical shape.  A good pair of running shoes is pretty much all that you need. Just go for a walk. While mental health is a bit more complicated, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get mentally fit, either. You can play mental games online, but mental fitness is more than playing games like that website that claims to train you brain. You only need to do things to stretch and exercise your mind, just as you would stretch and exercise your muscles. Reading a good book will help. Listening to an audiobook while walking or running counts towards your mental fitness regime. Anything that makes you think works.

You just have to keep this thought in mind: a healthy body doesn’t always mean a healthy mind. You need to exercise your mind to keep it in the peak of health. To that end, you need to challenge your mind. Take an online class through Coursera or some other websites. Find something you are interested in and learn more about it. You need a healthy mind as well as a healthy body to have a good quality of life. I’m not claiming that you can avoid diseases like dementia or Alzheimer’s by exercising your brain. I don’t think you can. I’m saying that you can prevent the decay of your mind if the seeds of those diseases are not already present. I’m saying that you can postpone the inevitable aging of your brain in a manner similar to postponing the debilitation of aging in your body by simply exercising your mind. Crossword puzzles, math puzzles, a good book, and other  things that require you to think are all you really need to maintain your mental health.

While mental puzzles to exercise your mind are helpful, you don’t have to do complicated puzzles to stay mentally fit. All you have to do is let your imagination out to play, read a nonfiction book about a subject that interests you. Stretch your mind with new ideas. You don’t have to spend a lot of money either. Visit your local library and check out books on topics that interest you. Watch documentaries that interest you. Surf the Internet and learn what’s out there. There’s a lot of knowledge out there. All you have to do is look for it. Seek it out and your brain will reward you by letting your mind be healthy.  You could even just sit there and describe the world around you, that’s enough. That’s really all you need to do.



Posted in General Opinion

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s



Join 239 other followers

%d bloggers like this: