TEDx Talks
Why Mental Fitness is the new Mental Health | Maya Raichoora | TEDxShoreditch Women
NOTE FROM TED: Please do not look to this talk for health advice. This talk only represents the speaker's personal views and understanding of the brain, visualization, and mental health. Several claims in this talk lack scientific support. We've flagged this talk because it falls outside the content guidelines TED gives TEDx organizers. TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers. The guidelines we give TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/tedx_content_guidelines.pdf
We need to stop talking about mental health, and instead actually start doing something about it. Maya Raichoora- one of the UK’s leading mental fitness and visualisation experts presents a simple yet novel approach to training the mind and improving mental health. One of the UK’s leading visualisation experts, Maya is pioneering a mental fitness revolution. She is the founder and CEO of Remap mental fitness. Working with global brands like Nike, Lego and Barclays- she helps people think, feel and perform like the top 1%. Best known for hosting immersive visualisation events, her story and workshops will leave you feeling inspired, empowered and mentally strong.
At the age of 15, Maya was diagnosed with Ulcerative colitis, an incurable irritable bowel disease. Crippled with physical and mental pain, she was told she had very little hope. After learning and practicing visualisation, the technique saved her life. She is now on a mission to help others. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
[Applause] a few weeks ago I was invited to speak on a panel and the topic was the importance of mental health and so the host asked me the first question and she said to me Maya do you think mental health is important and I sat there thinking surely there's only one answer to this question which is yes full stop but she was looking at me thinking you need to say something a bit more clever here and so the only response I had was well would you ever ask me if physical health was important probably not and I could tell I was getting a little bit frustrated because after seven years working in this industry I keep getting that question and so after this event I took some time to reflect why is this the case and it made me think that when we're young and we're at school PE is compulsory in our curriculum physical education we get up we get into our Sports kit and we go and play something I know some of us probably try to get out of it but we grew up knowing that physical activity is very important but not only that we knew how to practice it and so today that's why we still go to the gym we still know to go for runs but when it comes to mental education it's being completely neglected and we are seeing the consequences of that today so reflecting back on it I then empathize why we do get this question a lot and actually I think it's great what conversation this has B it's raised awareness and it's brought so much good to the world but I think we've got a little bit stuck we are stuck just talking about mental health but the true power lies in being able to do something about it so hi my name is my raichur and I have stopped talking about mental health today I'm going to share with you the concept that has completely reframed how I think about the mind but also it's been the idea that has allowed me to manage and very create a resilient and strong mindset through some of the most difficult and darkest times of my life but also some of the best times of my life and that concept is mental Fitness now it's not some revolutionary new thing it was actually well conceptualized in 1964 and since then also in 2010 and 2013 but no one knows about it no one's practicing it we have no idea what it is and I'm really excited today to share that with you and I still get people people come to me saying Oh Maya like I never even heard of mental Fitness until I came across your work now you might be thinking okay like all she's done is change the word Health to Fitness it's not some genius thing here right I agree but that tiny change has Honestly made such a significant difference in my life and I think it can do the same for others too let me explain why mental health it is a state of being we all have one if you've got a mind you've got a mental health it can be good it can be bad but it tends to be quite static mental Fitness on the other hand is the active maintenance of a good mental health it's when you have the tools and the knowledge that you can draw upon so that you can manage your mind in different situations so it's Dynamic it's empowering and it's action orientated and it's also worth mentioning that mental illness is when you're mental health is so bad that then you will seek professional help and a useful way to look at this is if we think about physical health so if you've got a body you've got a physical health it can be good or bad but you're only physically fit if you are going to the gym or you are going to Pilates maybe you are watching your diet that is when you are maintaining your health and in the same way when you become physically ill so you might get injured or develop an illness you will then seek professional help and I really liked this and resonated with it because it reminded me that if we invest in our mental Fitness we can really improve our mental health those tiny actions means we can stay just two steps ahead and I think when I sometimes talk to people about this I just get eyes rolling and oh this is too overwhelming when I think about my mind it's just all a bit too complex and quite hard right I I think most people over complicate mental Fitness and I've spent the last few years uncomplicating it for myself and I'm going to do that today now in order to make this effective I'm going to keep with the analogy of physical fitness I think it grounds it in something tangible but also familiar and so when we are thinking about getting physically fit we tend to focus on five key areas we have consistency now you don't get abs of steel overnight everyone knows that you go to the gym regularly and you do the Reps you keep training we have Diet when we are working on our body you will tend to eat cleaner and you will take out those toxic foods and drinks cardio we've got to build the stamina in our body so we will run we will cycle rest how do we make sure our muscles recover we make sure we get sleep maybe do ice baths stretch and then we have strength training so lifting the those weights and this is about building those muscles so they can be lean and they can do their job but also you are preventing further injury and so we can map this quite well onto mental Fitness so let's start with consistency I used to only really care about my mind when I was upset or when I'd already burnt out or it was just that little bit too late but now I invest in my mental Fitness every day just that one little thing I keep doing those reps on it diet when we think of diet we tend to think of food but what is the thing we consume the most in our world content we wake up we watch the news we go on Instagram we then feel quite anxious and it's having a toll on our minds and so now I will watch what I feed my mind I won't look at the news even that's about the people the conversations I'm having cardio if you don't use your brain you will lose it so I ask myself every single day how am I actively engaging my brain whether that's through reading listening writing in my work life rest our minds are very active and it can be so hard to switch off and so I will make sure to unplug after 9:00 p.m. I will get adequate sleep maybe I will meditate so that I can calm down my thoughts and then we have strength training so how can we build and shape our brain so that it can think feel feel and perform the best it can but also be preventative help us navigate the challenges of life so we can better deal with them and for that I love to use visualization now some of these I think are a little bit more obvious than others so you could probably leave today already taking action when it comes to you know maybe unfollowing some people on your social media or maybe not watching the news maybe you do a couple of minutes of meditation but there's one I want to focus on just a little bit more and that's because when I talk to people about these five areas that last one strength training so weightlifting for the brain people neglect it because they don't know how to do it and they don't know why it's important and I'd argue it's the one aspect that that's actually been the most impactful for me okay so when we think about strength training and weightlifting what does that mean the point of it is that you are tearing the mus muscles so that you can rebuild them so they are stronger and they can work for you better but you are also thinking a few steps ahead so that you can prevent injury and illness so when we look at this in terms of the Mind strengthening the Mind means you are strengthening the neural Connections in your brain and creating new ones and the cool thing is that is possible and so it can directly influence how you think feel and perform you can change your mental health now the interesting thing is that past the age of 25 becomes a lot harder to do but it's still possible you just have to be more aggressive and intentional with the training and so the brain will physically change and rewire when you physically perform or learn an action or a task so let's say I'm learning to play the piano because I'm moving my hands in a new way and I'm reading new music and I'm listening to new songs and Melodies it will start creating these new Pathways in my brain and the more I repeat that that then becomes wired so now I've learned a new skill and my brain has literally changed the thing is we can't obviously physically experience everything all the time frankly it's quite impossible but also what happens when your beliefs get in the way so let's say you have a fear of public speaking and you don't feel very confident about it it's going to be very difficult to just come on a stage and do a presentation in front of of thousands of people so you can see how physical practice and experiences has its limitations but there's another way we can retrain and rewire the brain so it becomes stronger and that is a technique called visualization now visualization is a highly specialized skill where you are creating Vivid mental imagery emotions and environments in your mind before they have happened and I just became so fascinated with this technique so much so that for the last 10 and a half years I just obsessed over it I learned as much as I could I researched as much as I could but more importantly I practiced every single day now I will say I am not a neuroscientist nor do I have a PhD in visualization if that's even a thing but what I do have is a decade of extensive experience where I've seen firsthand and how mindblowing this tool is for your mental health and I'm really excited to share that today because not enough people know about it and what I would say is in the mental health space we just keep talking and talking and we go around in circles and it's like this could help or conceptually this might but what better way to learn than to just do it and so every single day I have visualized every single day and the reason I first started is because life threw a pretty hard curveball at me and I was diagnosed with colitis when I was very young and so I was dealing with an incurable irritable bowel disease and so I was using visualization to learn how to walk again to help me with my pain but to be able to manage my mind to give me that strength and resilience to keep going and today I will use visualization for many different areas of my life but I want you to to be able to do that as well and so visualization is often used in settings like medicine in psychotherapy but also sport and in 2013 the Journal of Medicine and Science in sports and exercise they found that visualization triggers similar neural and behavioral patterns in the brain to if you are physically doing something so put very simply your brain is pretty dumb it doesn't actually know the difference between vivid imagery and then you actually doing something so let's go back to that piano example if I was just mentally rehearsing moving my fingers playing new music reading that sheet music the same regions of the brain have been activated now that's pretty cool and it's significant because what it means is that visualization can also change the brain you can strengthen it you can rewire it and that's why a lot of athletes will use visualization they use it before their games their matches and I get to work with a lot of Olympians in my work and every time I speak to them they say Maya this was like 90% of what I did because it made them stronger it meant they could perform better so that when they went out there and they were under very high pressured situations they were able to balance their performance and well-being and a famous example is Bob Bowen who is Michael phelps's coach and he explains that Michael Phelps would visualize every single day every stroke him winning things going wrong but what it meant it was in the process he was building that muscle he was getting so Unstoppable and he was thinking better he was feeling better he was performing the best he could now I get it not all of us are training for the Olympics or going for gold medals but we all have our own versions in our life and so whether you are going for your goals and wanting to learn a new habit maybe you want to get more confident if I just said to you be more confident it's pretty hard right but if you visualize it how do you walk how do you act what do you say you start rewiring it and then you can start becoming that person and a good example is me so when I do these talks I used to get very anxious and very nervous but 3 weeks before this talk I have been visualizing how I want to walk on what I want to say what I'm wearing even just 5 minutes before backstage I was doing the exact same thing and because I've done the Reps again and again and again it's not that I don't get nerves but I can stand here and know that I can do it and I can feel confident I can feel calm and I can perform the best I can and so visualization has been a tool that I've relied on for so many areas of my life through the really dark ones but also through the best ones how can I maintain that how can I become more of who I want to be and if we go back to this idea of mental Fitness it's a tool that I have in my back pocket that I can keep using each day and so we can be proactive we can take our mental health back in our own hands it doesn't have to be this unattainable thing that we can't handle and so if I think back to what if we did learn this in PE at school what if we were learning visualization mental Fitness I do really think we would live in a very different world but I don't think it's about dwelling on the past I actually think we live in a very exciting time right now because we have tools like this and it's never too late to learn them so I'm going to leave you with this stop only talking about mental health and instead shift it to doing something shift it to mental Fitness whether you leave the room and you unfollow 10 people hopefully not me but other people that don't serve you or you spend 2 minutes just before bed taking time doing a few breathing methods but if you really want to think feel and perform like the best you can then don't neglect that strength training creating those neurons and make visualization your favorite gym buddy thank you
#Mental #Fitness #Mental #Health #Maya #Raichoora #TEDxShoreditch #Women
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Mental Healthism presented in a new word. (Yes, I meant healthism not health.)
Than you for speech .It is yousfull
Great message thanks
Listening to this while doing needed housework and decorating a window.
Lightly taking physical, mental and emotional exercise! Thanks!!
Ted talks have become "fall asleep fast" content.
Brilliant. More please.
I improved my mental fitness today, by imagining what she looked like without that jumpsuit on. She packaged herself. All I did, was take off the wrapping. We could call it "creative visualization."
Mental fitness, yes, but it's madness.Not for the sensitive people.
Visualization works as a remembering tool (you did the thing you visualize before) or as a creative tool (you create a new image of an activity you didn't do from images of similar experiences you did do before). You can't visualize without a personal reference point.
Thank you for your speech 💬. I enjoyed very much 😊
Fabulous talk Maya; one of the best, on one of the most important topics of our time!
Maya – amazing!
Maya just like your name. Your brain 🧠 is an illusion 😉
it's amazing, I had a bad day yesterday and this video came to my YouTube homepage. Great advice Maya and TED, thanks!
Some people have no visual or other sensory imagery experiences. Check the paper "Imagery agnosia and its phenomenology". But for many visualization is very valuable.
Visualisation enable the new neutron pathway formed to allow you to better fit into and tackle the challenging scenarios that are going to happen to you.
Great talk with loads of interesting insights. I always advocate about mind health and fitness.
Very well spoken
👍
💚👏🏽👏🏽🌾
Fantastic – worth listening to the talk.
That was just fabulous 😍
Worth watching!
Amazing!! So many golden nuggets!!
Amazing!! This has become one of my favorite TED talks!