Psychosomatic Health

How to Sharpen the Mind for Lasting Health and Happiness in 3 Practical Steps

Optimize well-being and life satisfaction by maximizing neuroplasticity rewiring the brain with healthy lifestyle habits.

Body, brain, and mind interact to create psychosomatic health.

Life consists of more uncontrollable entities than controllable ones. However, by focussing on the controllable ones, we can put ourselves in a better position to create desired well-being and life satisfaction.

This requires changing our behavior with awareness of our thoughts and emotions. To achieve desired results, we would be better served to invest our energies in entities that we can control, as opposed to not putting our energies into those we cannot.

All aspects of our existence are intrinsically integrated into the bodily and cerebral systems. Thus, my holistic approach to health and happiness includes physical, biochemical, hormonal, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects.

I include various aspects of life under three broad categories. As far as my opinion and experience are concerned, having a healthy brain and body provides a healthy mind and emotional profile.

While people use the brain and mind interchangeably, they are two different constructs in my perspective. Using the computer analogy, I see the brain as hardware and the mind as software.

Although this analogy appears oversimplified and generalized, it illustrates the distinction within my article’s context.

Additionally, I find it helpful to increase the capacity, strength, and flexibility of the body and the brain to produce better-serving thoughts and emotions. Some people call these capabilities brain hacks or lifehacks.

The thoughts and feelings impact our behaviors, ultimately affecting our health and happiness. The body and the brain battle with internal and external stimuli constantly.

While we observe or feel some effects of this complex process, most of the activities happen at a subconscious level.

It is impossible to understand the intricate details of the subconscious mind running the show for our survival and well-being. However, it is possible to filter stimuli using our conscious minds.

Therefore, I use the verb “sharpen” to increase the capacity and flexibility of the mind using various approaches.

I classify these approaches into three broad categories based on my perspectives and experiences pertaining to the complex relationship between body and mind, also referred to as psychosomatic health.

My goal is to share practical tips to sharpen the mind using natural ways.

I focus on two critical realities to make my points. Firstly, our subconscious mind diligently controls the body and the brain to maintain homeostasis. Secondly, the body and the brain are plastic.

They change according to internal and external stimuli. An awareness of these two realities can empower us to influence our subconscious minds to produce desired results.

For example, we can grow our muscles, shrink fat cells, and make our bones denser. Likewise, we can improve brain chemistry and make connections stronger. The scientific term for this is neurogenesis.

The body of knowledge has substantial evidence on the neuroplasticity of the brain. From my experience and literature reviews, both the body and the brain can be incrementally improved with conscious effort.

Having covered some theoretical background in this brief introduction, I’d like to focus on a practical approach to sharpening the mind using healthy lifestyle habits that have been tried and tested by myself and millions of others for years.

As this is a broad and intense topic, I make an effort to simplify it as much as possible. Here are the three approaches to sharpen the mind for a healthy body and brain that might increase happiness if customized based on our needs and goals.

1 — Physical and Biological Resilience

Our cells create the physical and biological components of our body and the brain. It is so complex that millions of scientists using multiple science branches are still trying to make sense of it.

However, we made excellent progress in understanding our health and well-being fundamentals.

The crucial requirements are clean air, water, nutrition, sleep, rest, movement, and having fun.

Lack of one of these necessities, such as air, water, and sleep, can end our survival. And lack of movement, rest, and fun can make our lives miserable or might reduce the quality significantly.

Therefore, while designing our lifestyles, we need to consider each point and plan our lives according to these fundamental requirements. The brain might confuse and create wrong signals.

For example, it might emphasize fun and neglect sleep. However, by listening to the body’s messages in the form of feelings, we can create a better balance.

As mentioned in my introduction, the body needs to maintain homeostasis to survive. Acting against the body’s needs is the common root cause of our health and happiness issues.

We all know these, but it is good to remind us of these five essential considerations:

1 — Clean air and water

2 — Customized and Nutritious food

3 — Restorative sleep and rest

4 — Customized Physical exercise

5 — Having fun deliberately

By creating a healthy lifestyle using these fundamentals, we can rewire our brain, improve neurogenesis, and influence our subconscious mind to serve us better.

2 — Mental Flexibility and Emotional Regulation

Via complex chemical, biological, and electrical signals, the body and the brain collectively create our thoughts and emotions.

An individual can’t understand the details. However, observing our thoughts and feelings allows us to change our behavior and the fundamentals mentioned in the first item.

We know the brain is plastic. Our thoughts, emotions, behavior, and habits constantly rewire it. The cognitive part of the brain is within our control. For example, we can change our behavior by observing our thoughts and emotions.

Leveraging our cognitive brain’s power including attention, memory, task switching, and problem-solving, we can indirectly influence the primitive and emotional parts of the brain.

Cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation are two critical concepts that we need to be aware of. What can we do?

1 — Practicing mindfulness watching thoughts, emotions, and behavior

2 — Constantly learning from our and other people’s mistakes

3 — Working and studying mindfully in a flow state

4 — Staying optimistic by smiling and laughing purposefully

5 — Scheduling recreational activities e.g reading, writing, singing, dancing

6 — Regulating emotions with the above actions to reduce emotional stress

For example, as I mentioned in a previous story when Albert accepted his spiteful emotions and immersed in them, more space was created in his disastrous inner landscape for peace, joy, and love. He felt the most significant impact when he was immersed in his most painful emotions, which directly showed him his true self where peace, joy, and love were hidden.

3 — Meaningful Social and Spiritual Connections

We are hard-wired for social and spiritual connections. We evolved as tribal creatures creating strong relationships with others.

The limbic system (the brain’s emotional center) controls these primitive needs. The physical and psychological ramification of loneliness that is in the mind is well-documented in the scientific literature in various disciplines.

The spiritual aspect of life is complex and interpreted differently by people depending on their culture, belief systems, life goals, and other factors.

My definition of spiritual connection is thinking beyond our identity and connecting with our environment, including people, other living beings, and materials meaningfully.

Meaningful connections and relationships are the keywords as we all create our own meaning in life and related differently. Thus, our spiritual connections and relationships naturally differ.

Here are some practical approaches to this complex domain.

1 — Besides self-love, having empathy and compassion for others

2 — Improving our social intelligence by enhancing our emotional maturity and cognitive flexibility

3 — Accepting people as they are and recognizing their individuality

4 — Respecting the environment and interacting with it meaningfully

5 — Understanding the value of objects in our lives by not taking them for granted

Conclusions

Under these three categories, I provided a few practical points that we can control in our lives. Focusing on these controllable points might put us in a better position to create desired health, well-being, life satisfaction, and lasting happiness.

The body and the brain are connected in a complex way integrating myriad facets of life. The health of the body depends on the mind. Likewise, a sharp mind needs a healthy body. They are inseparable.

Unfortunately, some science branches neglect this reality and pay full attention to the body struggling to understand psychosomatic disorders.

Therefore, in my opinion, due to methodological limitations, numerous science branches are still immature to explain human life and create viable solutions for our health and happiness.

Our greatness comes from understanding and accepting how little we know.

We know that we can increase the capacity of the body and the brain by using our minds. Our thoughts can change our neurochemistry and hormones by creating epigenetic effects such as turning on or off some genes to determine our health outcomes.

While our capabilities are still limited, at least our cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation can significantly affect our health and happiness. When things fell apart, these three attributes brought me back to my feet.

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

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

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