by David Gersten, M.D. • February 2010

Your Mental Fitness Program

Thirty years ago Canadian sports psychologist, Dr. Peter Jensen, wanted to find a way to destigmatize mental training. If an Olympic athlete was seeing a psychologist to improve his mental game, he had to face comments that implied he must have a mental problem. So, Dr. Jensen coined the term “Mental Fitness Techniques” (MFT) and then told high-level athletes that they need Physical Fitness, on the one hand, and Mental Fitness on the other.

The four main mental fitness techniques are: meditation, mental imagery, use of the breath, and mood words. I have found that helping to set up a patient’s mental fitness program dramatically increases their chance of success, whether their problem is mental/emotional or physical.

More than 60% of the patients in doctor’s offices have stress-related illnesses, and very little is done to address that fact. If people leave my office, go home and practice their MFTs, their stress levels will drop by 50% rather quickly. When people begin practicing MFTs, they are empowered, for they make those techniques their own, can use them anywhere and any time, thereby developing a solid mental game plan for living.

Setting Up Your Mental Fitness Program

Mental Fitness Techniques help to:

1. Develop Mental Home Base, the internal place one comes back to after the mind has wandered for days, weeks, and years.
2. Keep people centered;
3. Bring peace of mind;
4. Improve the speed and clarity in making decisions;
5. Re-direct habitual thoughts, as well as desires for an addiction;
6. Decrease stress;
7. Decrease physical pain;
8. Deepen connection to God, Self, others, and nature;
9. Enhance peak performance.

I begin the initial MFT session with a 30-second exercise I call “Thought Watch.” The purpose of Thought Watch is to calculate the speed of a person’s mind. Most people have 5 random thoughts in 30 seconds. The average number of random thoughts is 5,000 per day, 35,000 per week, and 1.8 million per year. By age 60–70, people have churned out approximately 100 million random thoughts.

The mind is the source of the endless train of thoughts, whereas the intellect is involved in wisdom, discrimination, and problem solving. The mind drives everyone crazy, so the most important initial task in setting up your Mental Fitness Program is to develop a way of slowing down the mind, thereby gaining greater peace of mind, and developing Mental Home Base. Because our minds generally run our lives, we often feel at the whim of our thoughts. The mind creates quite a storm. Mental Home Base is the inner place you return to over and over again, leaving the storm of the mind, and holding onto something inside that grows more and more powerful. Here are the four main MFTs.

Mantra Meditation

There are many forms of meditation, but I have found mantra meditation to be ideal as part of our mental game plan. The mind works with names (words) and forms. A mantra works with the mind’s usual mechanisms to help to re-direct and train the mind. The kind of mantra used in your MFT is created by using whatever your name for God or Higher Power is. There is no correct name, but the ideal mantra has three to nine syllables. Common mantras are: Loving God, Heavenly Father, Divine Mother, Infinite Intelligence, and Creative Power. For those who don’t believe in God, I ask them to think of the most positive thing, idea, or place on earth. Nature mantras can be used. Examples are: Pacific Ocean, Niagara Falls, or any other place in nature that you love.

Let’s use “Creative Power” as a mantra to explain how to use it. As you inhale, silently say, “Creative.” As you exhale, silently say, “Power.” Don’t try to change your breathing. Just let the mantra follow your breathing. Now, I suggest you get a piece of paper and write down every idea that could be used as your mantra. There’s no time like now to do this.

Here’s my prescription for using a mantra:

1. Spend five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening practicing your mantra with your eyes closed.
2. Throughout the day, when you are not engaged in focused activity, return to your mantra (eyes open). When you’re walking from your parked car into a store, you have 30 to 60 seconds to recite your mantra. If you’re grocery shopping, you can “stay in your mantra” while shopping.
3. Write your mantra on 3 X 5 cards and place them around your house: on doors, mirrors, refrigerator and other places. Every time you see your mantra, repeat it a few times.

I avoid burdening people with Mental Fitness Techniques that require a lot of time. People are busy, often in a hurry, and feel squeezed for time. The mantra will become your mental home base, the place you come back to over and over again. If you repeat your mantra a few times every hour, you will interrupt the endless train of thoughts, giving yourself numerous mini-vacations. Repeating your mantra just 2 or 3 times helps build your mental home base. At first, your mind might drift for hours or even days before you remember your mantra. Keep returning to the mantra. Your stress levels will drop, sometimes within a few days.

Use of the Breath

To keep things simple, I teach two kinds of breath techniques. Most people in the western world are shallow breathers, breathing only from our upper chest. If you don’t have experience with deep breathing, place your hand on your waist, and take a breath from your diaphragm. Imagine that your lungs are like a balloon that you want to fill from the bottom first, and then the top. Now, take a deep, abdominal breath, and look at your hand. If you’re moving your diaphragm, your hand will move 1 or 2 inches.

The other breath technique that everyone should know is 4-4-8 breathing, in which you slowly inhale to the count of 4, hold your breath to the count of 4, and slowly exhale to the count of 8. That breath takes about 20 seconds. Conscious use of the breath is the fastest way to access the mind-body connection, regulating stress and energy levels. A single 4-4-8 breath will leave you feeling more peaceful.

Here is how to begin integrating conscious use of the breath into your life:

1. If at all possible, do one 4-4-8 breath every hour on the hour.
2. Every 15 minutes take 1 or 2 deep, abdominal breaths.

That means at 15, 30, and 45 minutes after the top of the hour. Remember, this kind of breathing is normal breathing.

When you begin to breathe consciously and repeat your mantra as often as you can, you will interrupt the buildup of stress that goes on every day. Many of us live our lives as if everything we are doing is do-or-die, and most of what we’re doing had to be completed yesterday! Every hour, unknowingly, our mind churns out 600 random thoughts, adding to the pressure that we experience as stress. If you begin your workday at 8 or 9 am., around 3 pm., stress starts to catch up with you. In the workplace, around 3 pm people dash for coffee and a candy bar. They do that because years of stress wears out the adrenal glands, and with adrenal stress, cortisol (our main adrenal stress hormone) drops around mid-afternoon.

By breaking up the endless thought patterns that create stress, we remain in the moment, and give our adrenals a chance to function at 100%. Every repetition of your mantra is a mini-vacation. Likewise, every time you consciously take a normal, deep breath, or a 4-4-8 breath, you are stopping the flow of thoughts and the buildup of stress. If all you take from this article is your mantra and regular, deep breathing, your life will change profoundly.

Mood Words

Mood words are verbs, which are best illustrated by a sports’ analogy. Let’s say the sport is sprinting. When the sprinter has her feet in the starting blocks…and before the starting gun goes off, she can say the word “blast,” sending that word through her entire body. That mood word will help her blast out of the starting blocks.

A long-distance runner does not want to use “blast” as a mood word. In a marathon, when runners hit the 15- or 16-mile mark, the going can get very difficult. Moods words—such as float, glide, sail, fly and soar—will help them maintain a winning mental and physical state.

The main mental task for nearly everyone I see is stress reduction. The mood words of a long distance runner are helpful with stress, worry, and anxiety. “Float” and “glide” are the most common mood words people are drawn to. To get started, practice with “float.” Close your eyes, silently say, “Float,” and send the word through your body ——slowly and gently.

Mood words are part of the salt-and-pepper, the flavoring, of a mental fitness program. Unlike the mantra, which you’ll want to repeat as often as possible, you might want to use your mood word 5 or 10 times a day. Just use it when you feel like it. This is part of the program that I leave entirely up to my patients. I do not want to help set up a mental fitness program that feels like a burden. Play with your mood word.

Mental Imagery

Although we’re looking at mental imagery as the last MFT, it is the vastest. Mental Imagery is an entire field, one of only three alternative therapies that some insurance companies, like Blue Shield of California, will pay for, the other two being chiropractic and acupuncture. There are thousands of imagery techniques. For the initial MFT session, we use only one imagery technique. You are probably familiar with visualization. Mental imagery can involve all five of our senses, visualization being one of those five. As with mood words, an imagery technique that helps decrease stress is usually part of a mental fitness program. Many people find the ocean to be the most peaceful place they can think of. Here is one relaxing imagery technique, called “The Wave.”

Imagine you are at the beach, lying on the warm sand. Look at the beauty of the ocean. Listen to the waves. Smell the ocean air. Feel your body lying on the sand. The waves are rolling in and each one comes closer and closer to you…until they start to wash over your body before they roll back out. As each wave falls away from you and returns to the sea, tension, anxiety and stress are removed. Feel each wave gently pulling tension out of you.

As you are preparing for sleep, spend 5, 10, or 15 minutes with the Wave Imagery. If you fall asleep while doing this, that’s fine.

Putting It All Together

You now have the individual MFTs. In an initial MFT session we set up the basics. However, we can combine MFTs to add to the power of the program. One way to put it all together is by creating a one-minute imagery ritual.

1. Close your eyes and take one 4-4-8 breath.
2. Repeat your mantra for 20 seconds.
3. Move into the Wave Imagery for 20 seconds.
4. Before opening your eyes, use your mood word, “float.”

This is a powerful mini-vacation. In the beginning, I help people structure these techniques into their life. You can do a one-minute imagery ritual every hour on the hour. You can also do it before bed, but when you get to the imagery part, spend more time.

Your personal mental fitness program is as powerful as the effort and intention you put into it.

Tailor it to your needs and your life. The benefits will go far beyond stress reduction.

David Gersten, M.D. practices Nutritional Medicine and Integrative Psychiatry out of his Encinitas office and can be reached at 760-633-3063. Please feel free to access 1,000 on-line pages about holistic health, amino acids, and nutritional therapy at www.aminoacidpower.com and www.imagerynet.com.