Mental diet: what is it, 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 both healthy habits or healthy diets (very frequent) that allow them to enjoy good and balanced mental and psychological health.

In this article we will know what the mental diet is; It will be explained what habits and psychological processes turn out to be necessary to promote its practice in order to maintain our mental and psychological health.

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What is the mental diet?

mental diet is a self-care exercise based on the regulation of thoughts that a person self-generates in order to promote well-being in your health. Through it, the cognitive thoughts that are desired to be sustained are established in order to promote those that are are positive and discard the negative, in simple words it would be to take charge or take action on what we think. In other words, the mental diet refers to a psychological exercise that will allow us generate a benefit in our physical, mental and psychological health if we put it into practice in a frequent.

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 in order to give them little importance by putting another more positive and favorable thought beforehand.

The mental diet is highly recommended by mental health professionals, as it will allow us to make changes in our habits of thought. To understand how the mental diet works in our body and our health, it is necessary to understand that we are and we become the result of what we think.

In addition, the mental diet turns out to be favorable for our health in general, since generates positive results in relation to the modulation of 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 life regimen.

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Oara what is the use?

The mental diet turns out to be very important, because through it we will be able to promote mental, physical and psychological health. Also, it is easier with it limit the influence negative thoughts have on us and we are going to give more importance to the thoughts that lead us towards a constructive attitude. You have to 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 Act.

There are mainly 4 benefits that the practice of the mental diet gives us. Next we will see each one.

1. Promote a better relationship with yourself

The most important and fundamental relationship that you will have throughout your life is the relationship with yourself.. After all, it is oneself who will be 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 usually live with an internal voice that reminds us very constantly negative aspects of ourselves such as our mistakes, the things we do not deserve, our failures etc Through these reminders, it makes us believe that we will not achieve anything by making us feel incapable. However, we have the power to reverse everything mentioned above through mental diet, creating habits healthy thinking, which will allow us to have a better relationship with ourselves, increasing our self-concept and esteem.

2. Promotes positive emotional states

The negative thoughts that we usually generate about ourselves allow unhealthy emotional states to appear. It is very likely the appearance and maintenance of high levels of anxiety, frustration, fear or sadness if we constantly generate and keep negative thoughts about ourselves, because these emotional states end up being the result of our way of thinking. For this reason, it is important to promote positive thoughts that generate healthy emotional states through mental diets. If we start to select which beliefs bring us good things and which do not, It will drastically change the way we feel.

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3. Promotes coping with adversity

Every time we face an adversity, obstacle or problem, we make use of an internal dialogue. This allows us to process and interpret what is happening around us and helps us decide what kind of action to take.

Through the use of the mental diet we can make this internal dialogue optimistic, empowering and motivating, which will allow us to have a higher level of confidence in considering ourselves capable of getting ahead 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, changing 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 goals and do not make us believe how difficult it could be to achieve our goals or how far we think they are from achieving them get.

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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 persevering 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 are most frequently in our minds. In general, these thoughts are part of statements about ourselves, about others and about 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”, “people are mean”. It is essential to analyze the type of thinking that comes 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 the right and appropriate thoughts (positive thoughts), those thoughts that are really going to 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 able to achieve my goals". These ideas must take on greater relevance in our minds, they must prevail and 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, nutritional or positive thoughts in order to ensure that our adequate mental and psychological health endures. We can opt for the habit of repeating in the morning when we wake up or even before going to bed. The fundamental thing is to apply them on a daily basis as a pattern of conduct. When we start having negative thoughts we must decide not to give them importance 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, because many people have a hard time acquiring 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, as well as our motivation and our interpersonal relationships will be more satisfactory.

7 day mental diet

This plan for some people 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 mind, the purpose 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 persevering) that have been mentioned previously.