A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak on a panel, and the topic was the importance of mental health. So, the host asked me the first question, and she said to me, “Maya, do you think mental health is important?” And I sat there thinking, “Surely there’s only one answer to this question, which is yes, full stop.” But she was looking at me thinking, “You need to say something a bit more clever here.” And so the only response I had was, “Well, would you ever ask me if physical health was important? Probably not.” And I could tell I was getting a little bit frustrated because after seven years working in this industry, I keep getting that question. And so, after this event, I took some time to reflect. Why is this the case? And it made me think that when we’re young and we’re at school, PE is compulsory in our curriculum. Physical education. We get up, we get into our sports kit, and we go and play something. I know some of us probably try to get out of it, but we grew up knowing that physical activity is very important. But not only that, we knew how to practice it. And so today, that’s why we still go to the gym, we still know to go for runs. But when it comes to mental education, it’s being completely neglected, and we are seeing the consequences of that today. So reflecting back on it, I then empathized why we do get this question a lot. And actually, I think it’s great what conversation this has been. It’s raised awareness, and it’s brought so much good to the world. But I think we’ve got a little bit stuck. We are stuck just talking about mental health. But the true power lies in being able to do something about it. So hi, my name is Maya Reicher, and I have stopped talking about mental health. Today, I’m going to share with you the concept that has completely reframed how I think about the mind, but also it’s been the idea that has allowed me to manage and very create a resilient and strong mindset through some of the most difficult and darkest times of my life, but also some of the best times of my life. And that concept is mental fitness.

Now, it’s not some revolutionary new thing. It was actually well conceptualized in 1964, and since then, also in 2010 and 2013. But no one knows about it. No one’s practicing it. We have no idea what it is. And I’m really excited today to share that with you. And I still get people, people come to me saying, “Oh, Maya, like I never even heard of mental fitness until I came across your work.” Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, like all she’s done is change the word health to fitness. It’s not some genius thing here, right?” I agree. But that tiny change has honestly made such a significant difference in my life, and I think it can do the same for others too. Let me explain.

Why mental health? It is a state of being. We all have one. If you’ve got a mind, you’ve got a mental health. It can be good, it can be bad, but it tends to be quite static. Mental fitness, on the other hand, is the active maintenance of a good mental health. It’s when you have the tools and the knowledge that you can draw upon so that you can manage your mind in different situations. So, it’s dynamic, it’s empowering, and it’s action-orientated. And it’s also worth mentioning that mental illness is when your mental health is so bad that then you will seek professional help. And a useful way to look at this is if we think about physical health. So, if you’ve got a body, you’ve got physical health. It can be good or bad. But you’re only physically fit if you are going to the gym or you are going to Pilates. Maybe you are watching your diet. That is when you are maintaining your health. And in the same way, when you become physically ill, so you might get injured or develop an illness, you will then seek professional help.

And I really liked this and resonated with it because it reminded me that if we invest in our mental fitness, we can really improve our mental health. Those tiny actions mean we can stay just two steps ahead. And I think when I sometimes talk to people about this, I just get eyes rolling and, “Oh, this is too overwhelming.” When I think about my mind, it’s just all a bit too complex and quite hard, right? I think most people overcomplicate mental fitness. And I’ve spent the last few years uncomplicating it for myself. And I’m going to do that today. Now, in order to make this effective, I’m going to keep with the analogy of physical fitness. I think it grounds it in something tangible but also familiar.

And so when we are thinking about getting physically fit, we tend to focus on five key areas. We have consistency. Now, you don’t get abs of steel overnight. Everyone knows that. You go to the gym regularly and you do the reps. You keep training. We have diet. When we are working on our body, you will tend to eat cleaner and you will take out those toxic foods and drinks. Cardio. We’ve got to build the stamina in our body. So, we will run, we will cycle. Rest. How do we make sure our muscles recover? We make sure we get sleep. Maybe we do ice baths, stretch. And then we have strength training. So, lifting those weights. And this is about building those muscles so they can be lean and they can do their job. But also, you are preventing further injury.

And so we can map this quite well onto mental fitness. So, let’s start with consistency. I used to only really care about my mind when I was upset or when I’d already burnt out or it was just that little bit too late. But now, I invest in my mental fitness every day. Just that one little thing. I keep doing those reps on it. Diet. When we think of diet, we tend to think of food. But what is the thing we consume the most in our world? Content. We wake up, we watch the news, we go on Instagram. We then feel quite anxious. And it’s having a toll on our minds. And so now, I will watch what I feed my mind. I won’t look at the news, even that’s about the people, the conversations I’m having.

Cardio. If you don’t use your brain, you will lose it. So, I ask myself every single day, how am I actively engaging my brain? Whether that’s through reading, listening, writing in my work life. Rest. Our minds are very active, and it can be so hard to switch off. And so, I will make sure to unplug after 9:00 p.m. I will get adequate sleep. Maybe I will meditate so that I can calm down my thoughts. And then we have strength training. So, how can we build and shape our brain so that it can think, feel, and perform the best it can? But also, be preventative. Help us navigate the challenges of life so we can better deal with them. And for that, I love to use visualization.

Now, some of these I think are a little bit more obvious than others. So, you could probably leave today already taking action. When it comes to, you know, maybe unfollowing some people on your social media or maybe not watching the news. Maybe you do a couple of minutes of meditation. But there’s one I want to focus on just a little bit more. And that’s because when I talk to people about these five areas, that last one, strength training, so weightlifting for the brain, people neglect it because they don’t know how to do it and they don’t know why it’s important. And I’d argue it’s the one aspect that’s actually been the most impactful for me.

Okay, so when we think about strength training and weightlifting, what does that mean? The point of it is that you are tearing the muscles so that you can rebuild them, so they are stronger and they can work for you better. But you are also thinking a few steps ahead so that you can prevent injury and illness. So, when we look at this in terms of the mind, strengthening the mind means you are strengthening the neural connections in your brain and creating new ones. And the cool thing is, that is possible. And so, it can directly influence how you think, feel, and perform. You can change your mental health.

Now, the interesting thing is that past the age of 25, it becomes a lot harder to do. But it’s still possible. You just have to be more aggressive and intentional with the training. And so, the brain will physically change and rewire when you physically perform or learn an action or a task. So, let’s say I’m learning to play the piano. Because I’m moving my hands in a new way and I’m reading new music and I’m listening to new songs and melodies, it will start creating these new pathways in my brain. And the more I repeat that, that then becomes wired. So now I’ve learned a new skill, and my brain has literally changed.

The thing is, we can’t obviously physically experience everything all the time. Frankly, it’s quite impossible. But also, what happens when your beliefs get in the way? So, let’s say you have a fear of public speaking and you don’t feel very confident about it. It’s going to be very difficult to just come on a stage and do a presentation in front of thousands of people. So, you can see how physical practice and experiences have its limitations. But there’s another way we can retrain and rewire the brain so it becomes stronger. And that is a technique called visualization.

Now, visualization is a highly specialized skill where you are creating vivid mental imagery, emotions, and environments in your mind before they have happened. And I just became so fascinated with this technique. So much so that for the last 10 and a half years, I just obsessed over it. I learned as much as I could, I researched as much as I could, but more importantly, I practiced every single day.

Now, I will say I am not a neuroscientist, nor do I have a PhD in visualization if that’s even a thing. But what I do have is a decade of extensive experience where I’ve seen firsthand how mind-blowing this tool is for your mental health. And I’m really excited to share that today because not enough people know about it. And what I would say is in the mental health space, we just keep talking and talking, and we go around in circles. And it’s like, “This could help,” or “Conceptually, this might.” But what better way to learn than to just do it?

And so, every single day, I have visualized. Every single day. And the reason I first started is because life threw a pretty hard curveball at me. And I was diagnosed with colitis when I was very young. And so, I was dealing with an incurable irritable bowel disease. And so, I was using visualization to learn how to walk again, to help me with my pain, but to be able to manage my mind, to give me that strength and resilience to keep going. And today, I will use visualization for many different areas of my life.

But I want you to be able to do that as well. And so, visualization is often used in settings like medicine, in psychotherapy, but also in sport. And in 2013, the Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, they found that visualization triggers similar neural and behavioral patterns in the brain to if you are physically doing something. So put very simply, your brain is pretty dumb. It doesn’t actually know the difference between vivid imagery and then you actually doing something.

So let’s go back to that piano example. If I was just mentally rehearsing, moving my fingers, playing new music, reading that sheet music, the same regions of the brain have been activated. Now, that’s pretty cool. And it’s significant because what it means is that visualization can also change the brain. You can strengthen it, you can rewire it. And that’s why a lot of athletes will use visualization. They use it before their games, their matches. And I get to work with a lot of Olympians in my work. And every time I speak to them, they say, “Maya, this was like 90% of what I did because it made them stronger. It meant they could perform better.”

So that when they went out there and they were under very high pressured situations, they were able to balance their performance and well-being. And a famous example is Bob Bowman, who is Michael Phelps’s coach. And he explains that Michael Phelps would visualize every single day, every stroke, him winning, things going wrong. But what it meant is in the process, he was building that muscle. He was getting so unstoppable. And he was thinking better, he was feeling better, he was performing the best he could.

Now, I get it. Not all of us are training for the Olympics or going for gold medals. But we all have our own versions in our life. And so, whether you are going for your goals and wanting to learn a new habit, maybe you want to get more confident. If I just said to you, “Be more confident,” it’s pretty hard, right? But if you visualize it, how do you walk, how do you act, what do you say? You start rewiring it. And then you can start becoming that person.

And a good example is me. So when I do these talks, I used to get very anxious and very nervous. But three weeks before this talk, I have been visualizing how I want to walk, what I want to say, what I’m wearing. Even just five minutes before backstage, I was doing the exact same thing. And because I’ve done the reps again and again and again, it’s not that I don’t get nerves, but I can stand here and know that I can do it. And I can feel confident, I can feel calm, and I can perform the best I can.

And so, visualization has been a tool that I’ve relied on for so many areas of my life, through the really dark ones, but also through the best ones. How can I maintain that? How can I become more of who I want to be? And if we go back to this idea of mental fitness, it’s a tool that I have in my back pocket that I can keep using each day. And so, we can be proactive. We can take our mental health back in our own hands. It doesn’t have to be this unattainable thing that we can’t handle.

And so, if I think back to what if we did learn this in PE at school? What if we were learning visualization, mental fitness? I do really think we would live in a very different world. But I don’t think it’s about dwelling on the past. I actually think we live in a very exciting time right now because we have tools like this. And it’s never too late to learn them.

So, I’m going to leave you with this. Stop only talking about mental health and instead shift it to doing something. Shift it to mental fitness. Whether you leave the room and you unfollow 10 people (hopefully not me, but other people that don’t serve you), or you spend two minutes just before bed taking time, doing a few breathing methods. But if you really want to think, feel, and perform like the best you can, then don’t neglect that strength training, creating those neurons, and make visualization your favorite gym buddy.