Become more mentally flexible and boost your mental strength

Happiness is not just focusing on the positives all the time.

Happiness is focusing on the positives, but it’s also about dealing with the negatives – and this requires mental flexibility and mental strength (or resilience).

If this is something you think you’d like more of, then check out these 12 simple exercises…

via Business Insider by Gretchen Rubin

Dorothea Brande was an American writer and editor, well known for her books ‘Wake Up and Live‘ and ‘Becoming a Writer‘ (a useful resource for writers, by the way).

In ‘Wake Up and Live‘, she suggests twelve mental exercises to make your mind keener and more flexible. These exercises are meant to pull you out of your usual habits and to put you in situations that will demand resourcefulness and creative problem-solving. Brande argues that only by testing and stretching yourself can you develop mental strength.

Even apart from the goals of creativity and mental flexibility, Brande’s exercises make sense from a happiness perspective. One thing is clear: novelty and challenge bring happiness. People who stray from their routines, try new things, explore, and experiment tend to be happier than those who don’t. Of course, as Brande herself points out, novelty and challenge can also bring frustration, anxiety, confusion, and annoyance along the way; it’s the process of facing those challenges that brings the “atmosphere of growth” so important to happiness. (It’s the First Splendid Truth: to be happy, you must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.)

I have to confess that I’ve tackled just a few of Brande’s mental exercises — #6 and #10 — and only because they come naturally to me, which is hardly in the spirit of the exercises. I have toyed with the idea of trying the others.

Here are Dorothea Brande’s twelve mental exercises. Note: she wrote these in 1936, so you need to adapt of few of them…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE