Lifestyle and Mental Health

Here’s How to Increase Cognitive Flexibility and Emotional Maturity with Five Habits.

We can’t live a healthy and happy life without consciously managing our thoughts and emotions.

The Significance of Mental Flexibility and Emotional Maturity for Health and Well-Being

Dealing with our thoughts and emotions can be very challenging if we don’t know how to manage them. Life becomes miserable in the absence of conscious control of our thoughts and feelings.

Daily thoughts and feelings determine our behavior and habits. Our habits, attitudes, and daily practices define our success or failure in life, as I documented in this story titled 10 Ignored and Tiny Habits Made a Big Impact on My Health and Happiness.

Over the last five decades, I have paid significant focus and attention to improving my cognitive flexibility and emotional maturity.

My goal was to be unflappable in the midst of challenging situations. I understood that setbacks, especially in the form of rejections, never leave us alone from a very young age. All of us, small or big, face setbacks daily. Setbacks are inevitable in our lives.

I neutralized and turned setbacks and rejections into opportunities by gaining cognitive flexibility and regulating my emotions intentionally.

After a while, setbacks became pleasant challenges for me. The result was living and producing in a flow state using the whole brain.

This essay introduces five practical tips that can help us achieve a flow state in the workplace, home, or social settings.

Before presenting these five points, I want to briefly define cognitive flexibility and emotional maturity based on my studies and experience in cognitive science.

They are both critical for our physical and mental health. While one focuses on thoughts, the other deals with emotions.

Cognitive flexibility (a.k.a. mental flexibility) is the ability to adjust our thinking when facing multiple variables in an event or situation. In short, cognitive flexibility is to observe, understand, and assess our thoughts before they turn into emotions.

Emotional regulation is consciously observing, understanding, assessing, and managing our emotions timely. The opposite state of emotional regulation is called emotional dysregulation, a condition in which people cannot describe, understand, or manage emotions effectively.

By constantly regulating emotions, we can gain emotional maturity. I provided three tips to regulate emotions.

Cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation are interrelated. Cognitive flexibility is essential for emotional regulation. And emotional regulation is needed for a flexible mind.

These two techniques allow us to think and act on our feet, even during challenging situations. Here are the five points to increase cognitive flexibility and emotional maturity.

1 — Developing a Growth Mindset with Optimism

When I was studying psychology in my undergraduate years, I learned that there were two distinctive mindsets: growth and fixed.

The literature indicates that those with a growth mindset achieve more, get healthier, and become happier. They approach life with hope and optimism. Accordingly, optimists seem to live longer than pessimists.

I needed to gain a growth mindset with optimism toward life. The good news was we could develop it with effort. Our knowledge, capabilities, and positive experiences can create a growth mindset.

I had to watch my habits. The critical success factor was eliminating destructive habits and replacing them with serving ones.

In every situation, seeing the big picture, accepting the cases, conditions, people, and their positions as they are, believing in a solution to every problem, and taking personal responsibility for my circumstances, I made good progress in gaining a growth mindset.

Consequently, setbacks started turning into pleasant challenges. I gained a more optimistic outlook.

2 — Practicing Mindfulness in All Walks of Life

During my postgraduate studies, I learned the importance of focus, attention, memory, task switching, and problem-solving as part of our cognitive capabilities.

Nevertheless, even though many of us inherit these capabilities, not everyone uses them to the total capacity.

It is possible to develop these capabilities of the neocortex as we do our muscles. Early education by parents and schools helps them improve to a certain degree, but we still need significant effort to achieve the desired state.

I tried many ways to improve my cognitive skills. However, nothing helped me as much as mindfulness practices in all walks of life.

The critical skill was learning to live in the moment even while thinking about the past or future. It sounds paradoxical, but it is possible to be aware of the now while assessing a past situation or planning the future.

The best tool to improve my mindfulness skills was the regular use of meditation, serving as a training tool for the brain while reducing stress and anxiety.

In addition, some types of meditation helped me increase self-love, empathy, and compassion towards others.

Improving my sleep for a healthier body and mind and reducing elevated cortisol for a better stress profile were bonuses of regular mindfulness and meditative practices.

Meditative practices also allowed me to challenge my bodily activities, such as cold exposure and cold showers, and eliminate detrimental habits like smoking.

3 — Scheduling Fun Activities and Making the Commitment

Our primitive brain never stops about worrying, even if there is nothing to be concerned at a specific time.

If left unattended, it manufactures problems, creates hypothetical scenarios, and increases our anxiety. It is the role of our survival system with good intentions. Amygdala hijacks are real and experienced by many people.

However, our new brain (neocortex) can challenge false beliefs created by the old brain. So, the new brain is at our disposal. Apart from logically challenging the old brain, another effective way, from my experience, is to schedule fun activities.

The purpose is not to give idle time to the old brain to worry so that the old brain thinks there is nothing to be concerned about when having fun deliberately.

We all enjoy different things. However, some of us neglect fun activities and occasionally enjoy them due to our busy lifestyles.

Over the years, I developed a method for myself and my loved ones by scheduling fun activities. Then, unless an emergency occurs, we commit and stick to the schedule.

Some busy people see fun activities as a waste of time. Nonetheless, when the body and the brain enjoy activities, they serve us better for our creativity and productivity.

Paradoxically, the more fun I had, the more creative and productive I felt. Having deliberate fun does not mean a hedonistic tendency. It means enjoying every moment of life with gratitude, even if some situations sometimes feel painful.

In addition, by doing daily chores mindfully, walking outside, observing nature, smiling or laughing deliberately, exercising with music, dancing with joy, having conversations with loved ones non-judgementally, reading our favorite books, and singing while problem-solving, we can enrich the quality of our lives.

4 — Neutralising Jealousy and Replacing Envy with Admiration

Some emotions create pleasant feelings and some unpleasant ones in the body. They are all crucial.

Rather than rejecting or suppressing emotions, we must acknowledge and understand their meanings because all emotions tell us important messages from our inner world.

A crucial emotional regulation technique is finding ways to convert unpleasant emotions into pleasant ones. It does not mean rejecting or suppressing.

Instead, it means transforming them consciously using our neocortex (thinking brain). We all desire to live with good feelings, and we have an inherent capability to regulate our emotions using our thinking brain.

Envy is one of the unpleasant emotions. When we feel envious of a person or situation, we experience uneasiness, displeasure, and resentment.

This feeling usually occurs when we see better qualities in others.

Or we feel jealous when others take our precious possessions. Even though they are different emotions, envy and jealousy are related and can create similar feelings.

First, understanding the root causes of envy and jealousy might shift our mindset. The growth mindset that I mentioned in the first item can contribute to achieving this goal.

As envy and jealousy happen at the subconscious level, we need to use the conscious mind to understand its causes. After assessing the situation, we might turn envy into the closest emotions, such as admiration, appreciation, and gratitude.

This emotional regulation also requires developing social intelligence. By deliberately converting envy to admiration, affection, respect, or appreciation, I significantly improved my social connections, making me more collaborative. Collaboration increased my creativity and productivity.

5 — Feeding and Fasting in Specific Windows

I left nutrition to the end as it mainly covers the physical domain. Time-restricted eating contributed to my metabolic and mental health.

Even though eating sounds like physical activity, it also has emotional, mental, and spiritual effects. We are what we eat.

The brain gets energy from food. The quality of our nutrition affects our hormones and neurochemicals.

These biochemicals also influence our thoughts and emotions. Have you ever checked how you think and feel after a hefty meal or craving food?

Reducing quantity and increasing the quality of nutrition have become one of the best mechanisms to improve my metabolic and mental health.

Time-restricted eating (a.k.a. fasting) was the critical tool for me to achieve this goal. Consuming my food in a specific window and remaining fasted at other times, my body had a chance to rest, digest, and heal.

In addition, long-term fasting can change the biochemistry of the body and brain, creating alternative energy known as ketones for the brain.

As a signaling molecule, ketones, especially BHB (β-hydroxybutyrate), provide clean energy to the brain, reduce inflammation, decrease oxidative stress, and increase BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor).

Conclusions and Takeaways

As thoughts and emotions are constant and happen at a subconscious level, we need to manage them consciously.

Otherwise, they control and manipulate us, making our lives miserable. Most of our problems occur due to destructive thoughts and unpleasant emotions.

I offered two conceptual tools to achieve this goal: cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation. They are distinct yet interrelated.

Cognitive flexibility requires emotional regulation and vice versa. For example, it is impossible to have a flexible mind without regulating our emotions.

By achieving cognitive flexibility and emotional maturity, we might get a chance to work and live in a flow state, bringing serenity, calmness, bliss, and joy to our lives.

Based on my experience and observations of healthy and happy people, here are seven tips that we might consider, customize for our needs, and make them lifestyle habits.

1 — Acknowledge thoughts and emotions without suppressing them.

2 — Consider being more tolerant of others by focusing on their good parts.

3 — Stay optimistic and keep hope with an open mind.

4 — Neutralize jealousy and replace envy with admiration and appreciation.

5 — Consider skipping a meal and eating more nutritious food in the next meal.

6 — Act mindfully and consider performing meditation regularly.

7 — Try to reach a flow state with mindfulness and enjoy work and chores.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

Here’s What You Need to Know About Constructing Your Cognitive Reserves As Early As Possible.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

You may find more optimistic and empowering stories like these on EUPHORIA, where I share my insights and life lessons. My focus is on cellular, mitochondrial, metabolic, and mental health + JOY. Here is my collection of Insightful Life Lessons from Personal Stories.

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