The Mental Fitness Game Changer (Transcription)
Hi everybody! This is Dr. Ron Kaiser with your May 2014 audio pod cast from the mental health gym. Today I would like to talk about a concept that I developed a few years ago called “The Proactive Positive Explosion”. It was really based upon years of working with patients and developing something’s that worked for the greater number of those patients who become increasingly more mentally fit.
They all seemed to have certain characteristics in common as we went through the working process and I really started believing pretty strongly that mental fitness could be brought down to few principles behaviourally on the way to achieving maximum results. Now, after a while I found by just looking at the literature and the research in my field that, I wasn’t unique in this regard that there’re actually had been a considerable amount of research showing that certain principles and behaviours standard lead to mental health and, I know we quite put it together the same way that I did but, the researches there, as well as, the experience that I gained in practice. Now the major point of the concept is that if you pro actively make changes in three main areas of your life, three specific main areas of your life and, you continue to make those changes then after a while there is going to be no changing back to an unhealthy mode of functioning.
Your lifestyle will be healthy you will see yourself as committed to emotional fitness and, as you explode in a positive direction, it’s tremendously exciting just like you know an explosion of fireworks or something like that, and then you can’t put the pieces together again to create an unhealthy lifestyle. You will continue to change, it’s the game changer. This is sort of the mental health individual mental healthy equivalent of what now Conclade will describe in his book “The Tipping Point”. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s really a fantastic book to read and it gives us a lot of insight into how at some point a specific brand of sneakers, or jeans or something else becomes the thing , the dominant experience in that field. Some morally in some neighbour hoods at some point you began to get a change in a positive direction through the infusion of new people, with new standards, new goals, new demands of the city or township or police department or so on and, the movement is in a positive direction and it can’t be interrupted. I believe the same thing about the proactive positive explosion. So what are these three areas? And I think that they really need to be pretty specific and the three areas as those of you who have read my blogs and have listened the previous podcast probably can guess one of which is the health and fitness area. By that, I mean things like exercise, healthy eating habits whether it be a diet or the types of foods we chose or certain principles like how much or how little we eat between meals, how much we are willing to tolerate certain types of deserts, things in this nature and also in the health and fitness areas are healthy hobbies like gardening, spending time outside. You know, concerns about not being overly sedentary whether you have to be sedentary on the job or not, making sure that you have interruptions in your day so that you not just being sedentary. So the health and fitness area is one very definite area that I think is important, an important component in the proactive positive explosion.
Second one is intellectual functioning. Intellectual growth is something that’s very important both in terms of being able to advance in our own lives, being able to interact with others and there is a good deal of evidence to indicate that continuing to function intellectually and growing intellectually really is protective against the major and other negative aspects of the aging process.
Now lot of people, like myself can get quite a bit of intellectual exercise and functioning on their jobs. As long as we are working in positions that allow and may be even reward creative thinking, education, things of this nature. Whether we are in that type of job or whether we are not working at all, whether we are retired or whatever it may be, you can get the intellectual functioning also through various hobbies that involve thinking.
So, as another area; reading, creative writing; just the kinds of things that help to stimulate constant thinking, constant growth and curiosity to want to be able to continue thinking and, growing. So you got health and fitness you got intellectual functioning.
Third area is social involvement with others. Now the basic level it’s just a matter of making sure that we are maintaining friendships and staying conscious and reaching out to new people and that involves again proactive stuff not just being able to interact with others when we are thrust amongst them but also making sure that we are calling and keeping tabs on friends not letting friendships linger, in kind of doldrums without interactions or calls so on. And also beyond that is to get involved with groups and involving interests, involving fraternal type organizations, groups built around particular interest or hobbies. Now again, based on the research in the field as well as what I have been able to observe in working with patients you actually get bonus points and you get healthier if some of you have social interactions involve helping others. One of the things that has been widely documental in the research is that when you do good things for others, you get as much out of it as they do. May be not as much depending on how needy they may be for your help but is certainly tremendously satisfying and it goes into your own personal growth and development in a proactive and positive way. So, here we have got, if somebody can stay conscious; of making changes, of building in habits, of growing and attending to their growth in those three main areas; health and fitness, intellectual functioning, social involvement. It becomes the game changer. I have never seen somebody who is actively involved in those areas who hasn’t found it rewarding and who hasn’t continued to make it their part their personality and it really is quite protective against things like depressions and a tendency to be negative as opposed to being pretty excited about being human. In addition, one of the things that I found is that if you are thinking in terms of these three areas it pretty much forces you into some other emotionally healthy activities and emotionally healthy feelings, being able to develop passions about things, being able to be creative as you search out ways to assist others or to increase your health and exercise involvements, being able to be more persistent to be able to demonstrate strength in the face of adversity. There is so much that seems to fit in once you’re going in the direction of the proactive positive explosion. It’s kind of a slow explosion that, do you have to say that because it doesn’t always happen just “Boom”, you know you start doing some of these activities that may not always seem rewarding at the beginning but, somewhere along the line you began to recognize that,
“Hey! Here I haven’t eaten junk in a long time”,
“Hey! You know I must be pretty good if some people are giving me all kinds of positive feedback”, or
“Hey! You know I actually should have payed more attention in school because some of this learning stuff is pretty exciting.
The proactive positive explosion is a way to mental health and for those, hopefully those many of you who are quite healthy. emotionally it’s a way to maintain and build mental fitness, and grow as an individual. It’s tremendously rewarding and I hope that you’re into this, if not, this gives you some guidance and some of the principles that we operate from them, in terms of the mental health gym, and turn things like cold sighting and so on can help you achieve those various aspects of proactive positive explosion. And, of course just like always, if you have some questions, if you some thoughts, comments about it, things to add, things that you are unclear about, please feel free to communicate with me at Ron.Kaiser@mentalhealthgym.com. Look forward to hearing from your and look forward speaking with you again in June.
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