Coach Blair doing a Turkish Getup at CrossfitYKV this morning. So many mental health lessons to take away from this:
1) Get help with therapy exercises from people that are skilled at them. I had always seen people do these at the gym and I'd tried but failed, so I thought I couldn't do it. But once somebody taught me how to do it and broke it down into steps that I could work on individually, then it became doable and it makes for a good warm up (although I don't do the super heavy weights yet like Blair does). Exercises you do in therapy to cut out compulsions and accept intrusive thoughts or intrusive whatevers are like this, too. If it seems impossible, get somebody that does it well to show you how.
2) Work on support skills to reach your mental health goals. Like Blair said in the video, he hates the exercise but he's doing it to improve mobility. He was only doing this as a warm-up before doing snatches. So many exercises for mental health skills, like meditation, are similar to this. They're challenging on their own but they're really about improving capacity to do other exercises. They may not seem directly related to your goals, but if you don't do them, expect to struggle even more. If you’re struggling with learning how to handle difficult emotions like jealousy or you notice that the tiniest triggers set you off catastrophising in your head, then a practice like meditation can be a great way to work on having experiences and sitting with them before making a conscious choice on how you want to act. You still have to do the very intense work of cutting out old compulsions and making that choice to act differently, but working on skills through consistent meditation practice can help you learn how to do that.
3) See sweaty failure as part of a good workout. Improving your physical fitness and flexibility is challenging and difficult and and sweaty and doesn't feel good when you're pushing into your body's limits. Improving mental fitness and psychological flexibility are the same. We know this when it comes to physical fitness but for some reason, in our society, we still think that improving mental health will somehow be all about avoiding challenges and trying to get rid of feelings we don’t like. But working on mental health is about pushing into challenging experiences. It's about finding those rigid things inside of us and breaking them down in support of doing more of the things we care about.
Enjoy!
Mark
