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This guide isn’t finished, and it probably never will be. Mental fitness and hygiene is a moving target, evolving as we learn more about ourselves, our minds, and what truly helps us thrive. I’ll keep expanding and refining this over time. If you’ve got ideas, insights, or practices that have made a real difference for you, please reach out. Send your thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
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What you do about the way you feel will directly determine your success. Talent, intelligence, capability - those are table stakes, but they’re not enough if you don’t use them well. In the words of Erwin McManus, “talent is a hallucinogen”.
Take Farza for example:
He had multiple years of runway and shuttered his startup because, in his own words, he was "out of love and out of joy".
Or take a friend of mine, a solopreneur with a great business. He’s worked at 10% of his capacity for the last five months because of burnout - for a man that’s the sole bread winner in his family, that’s a huge hit to take, not to mention the effect on his business.
There is also the problem of performance anxiety where bringing into the conscious mind the things that you can do with unconscious competence can actually get in the way of their performance. Steve Magness talks about this in his new book “Win the Inside Game”. This is the reason why that old quote exists: "People stupider than you are succeeding because they are too stupid to doubt themselves.”
We are embodied - minds within and part of bodies - and therefore need to service the entire system for it to work well. Getting the mental side of the game right is key for long-term success.
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Take a moment and rate your mental fitness and hygiene (I know I haven’t explained what these are yet) on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best.
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Think of mental fitness as the level of preparedness that your mind has to deal with stress.
Everyone has a baseline level of physical fitness - some will naturally be “ripped” and everyone else will be jealous of them - and some will need to work harder to get those veins popping and the pecs juicy. Some people can run a marathon from today to tomorrow, and others take weeks and months of training to get ready.
The same is true of mental fitness - some people will naturally have a more resilient baseline, allowing them to roll with the punches without so much as pausing to think about it, whilst others will need to train to be able to handle the same rejection or uncertainty.
Neither mental or physical fitness are built overnight. Just like one gym session is not going to get us ready to sprint for the bus when we need to or lift something heavy when we’re moving house, one session of breathwork or meditation is not going to improve our ability to adapt to the stress and chaos of everyday life, especially not as it accumulates over time.
So a mental fitness routine, then, is a set of actions and mindset shifts we can take on a regular cadence to bolster our mental fitness baseline and ready ourselves to weather the storm when it ultimately comes.
And it will come.
Mental hygiene is the way that we keep our minds clean and fresh from the regular accumulation of mental “grime” each day.