If you’re not physically fit, you’ll feel physical stress when you climb a steep hill.
If you’re not mentally fit, you’ll feel mental stress -- anxiety, frustration, or unhappiness -- as you handle career, relationship or personal challenges.
Take dieting, for example. Approaching the end of the year, we take a good look in the mirror. The insight that eating better and exercising more makes us feel better helps us to adopt a healthier diet.
But once that initial motivation wears off, it becomes harder and harder to resist the junk food or late-night snacks we resolved to quit. Without mental "muscle", we lapse back into our old routine.
So how do you build mental muscle? Is it even possible?
We used to believe that human brain development ended after early childhood. That’s why we think of children like sponges for learning. Conventional wisdom says that once we reach adulthood, we can’t learn as quickly or as easily, and our personality becomes “fixed”.
The great news? Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience prove that the brain is not fixed, but “plastic” (actually it is ELASTIC) -- it changes continuously throughout an individual's life. We lay down new neural pathways, the proportion of grey matter in our brains continuously changes, synapses strengthen and weaken.
Even BETTER news? There is a specific shortcut to getting your brain to become more elastic and grow in positive and opportunistic ways.
