How often are you resenting the world for giving you so much stress and making you feel in a constant state of ambiguity? Everyone experiences brain fog from time to time. However, if you consistently lack mental clarity, it may have a detrimental influence on your mood, productivity, relationships, and overall well-being.

Mental clarity represents the state of an attentive and focused mind. When your mind is clear, you can focus on the task and ignore most external distractions.

Your perception, reasoning, and memory are all clear, and you feel totally involved and cognitively present. Mental clarity allows us to concentrate on our tasks, remember things, make sound judgments, and be productive. No one can be mentally sharp every minute of the day, seven days a week. Mental health problems like anxiety, depression, or burnout can make it hard to think straight.

Keeping your brain fit can help you develop a positive outlook on life and break bad mental habits. It can have a big effect on your health, relationships, and happiness.

If you want better attention and mental clarity, try switching up your routine and paying more attention to self-care. RELATED: Why Building One Healthy Habit at a Time Helps You Stick with Them.

If you want to enhance your life and gain mental clarity, try incorporating these seven practices into your daily routine. Peter Senge and his colleagues suggest that to listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words.

A good listener tries to understand what the other person is saying. In the end, he may disagree sharply, but because he disagrees, he wants to know exactly what it is he is disagreeing with.

Flexible people are the ones with the most control. They have the capacity to change their minds as they receive additional data. They engage in multiple and simultaneous outcomes and activities, draw upon a repertoire of problem-solving strategies, and know when it is appropriate to be broad and global in their thinking and when a situation requires detailed precision.

They create and seek novel approaches and have a well-developed sense of humor. They envision a range of consequences. For detailed definitions of each, click here.

Flexible people can approach a problem from a new angle using a novel approach deBono refers to this as lateral thinking. They consider alternative points of view or deal with several sources of information simultaneously.

This is similar to looking down from a balcony at ourselves and our interactions with others. It is intuitive, holistic, and conceptual.

Since we often need to solve problems with incomplete information, we need the capacity to perceive general patterns and jump across gaps of incomplete knowledge or when some of the pieces are missing. These activities require attention to detail, precision, and orderly progressions.

Flexible thinkers display confidence in their intuition. They tolerate confusion and ambiguity up to a point, and are willing to let go of a problem, trusting their subconscious to continue creative and productive work on it. Flexibility is the cradle of humor, creativity, and repertoire.

It is our ability to plan a strategy for producing what information is needed, to be conscious of our own steps and strategies during the act of problem solving, and to reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking.

Probably the major components of metacognition are developing a plan of action, maintaining that plan in mind over a period of time, then reflecting back on and evaluating the plan upon its completion.

Planning a strategy before embarking on a course of action assists us in keeping track of the steps in the sequence for the duration of the activity. It facilitates making temporal and comparative judgments, assessing the readiness for more or different activities, and monitoring our interpretations, perceptions, decisions, and behaviors.

It involves being conscious of the need for midcourse correction if the plan is not meeting expectations, reflecting on the plan upon completion of the implementation for the purpose of self-evaluation, and editing mental pictures for improved performance.

Embodied in the stamina, grace, and elegance of a ballerina or a shoemaker is the desire for craftsmanship, mastery, flawlessness, and economy of energy to produce exceptional results.

People who value these qualities take time to check over their products. They review the rules by which they are to abide; they review the models and visions they are to follow; and they review the criteria they are to employ and confirm that their finished product matches the criteria exactly.

For some people, craftsmanship requires continuous reworking. Mario Cuomo, a great speechwriter and politician, once said that his speeches were never done — it was only a deadline that made him stop working on them! To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances.

One of the distinguishing characteristics between humans and other forms of life is our inclination and ability to find problems to solve. Effective questioners are inclined to ask a range of questions.

Intelligent human beings learn from experience. When confronted with a new and perplexing problem, they will often draw forth experience from their past. Furthermore, they are able to abstract meaning from one experience, carry it forth, and apply it in a new and novel situation.

after being hard at work having arrived at results that are perfectly clear. I have to translate my thoughts in a language that does not run evenly with them. Enriching the complexity and specificity of language simultaneously produces effective thinking.

Language and thinking are closely entwined. Like two sides of a coin, they are inseparable. Fuzzy language is a reflection of fuzzy thinking. Intelligent people strive to communicate accurately in both written and oral form, taking care to use precise language, defining terms, correct names, and universal labels and analogies.

They strive to avoid overgeneralizations, deletions, and distortions. Instead, they support their statements with explanations, comparisons, quantification, and evidence.

The brain is the ultimate reductionist. It reduces the world to its elementary parts: photons of light, molecules of smell, sound waves, vibrations of touch — which send electrochemical signals to individual brain cells that store information about lines, movements, colors, smells, and other sensory inputs.

Intelligent people know that all information gets into the brain through the sensory pathways: gustatory, olfactory, tactile, kinesthetic, auditory, visual, Most linguistic, cultural, and physical learning is derived from the environment by observing or taking in through the senses.

To know a wine it must be drunk; to know a role it must be acted; to know a game it must be played; to know a dance it must be moved; to know a goal it must be envisioned. Those whose sensory pathways are open, alert, and acute absorb more information from the environment than those whose pathways are withered, immune, and oblivious to sensory stimuli.

Furthermore, we are learning more about the impact of arts and music on improved mental functioning. Forming mental images is important in mathematics and engineering; listening to classical music seems to improve spatial reasoning.

Social scientists solve problems through scenarios and roleplaying; scientists build models; engineers use cad-cam; mechanics learn through hands-on experimentation; artists experiment with colors and textures; musicians learn by producing combinations of instrumental and vocal music.

Learn to differentiate between destructive and constructive type. Another great way to receive feedback is to find a coach or a mentor preferably both.

Mentor is someone who has already threaded the path you plan to take. He can guide you through it, offer an advice or put things into perspective. The role of a coach, on the other hand, is to help improve and maximize results at whatever a person is already doing.

Some people might be reluctant to have someone point out their weaknesses and tell them what to do. Are you aiming to become a resilient athlete who is able to withstand any pressure?

Be able to jump on any opportunity? Take any challenge life throws at you head on? To feel like we have no control and that life is happening to us. However, when we take the time to think about where exactly we want to be in a bit longer than a year like 5 and 10 years , magic starts to happen.

The simple practice of taking a long term view helps to narrow the focus and start brainstorming ideas how to get there. Thanks to Reticular Activating System point 12 above our brain will start to develop ideas how to make things happen once we make them a priority.

To create a plan think of what you want to achieve in 5 and 10 years and break it down into milestones. The act of breaking down the vision into smaller goals alone can empower to act and achieve more than any other activity.

social media or TV. Peak performance mindset is connected to our physical body, which is impacted a lot by our lifestyle.

Developing good habits is a great way to improve the quality of life and performance. Some of the areas to start that have most impact on performance are optimizing diet , getting more quality sleep , reducing mental stress and exercising more.

Doing the uncomfortable is one of the best ways how to cultivate a peak performance mindset. Get in the habit of forcing yourself to consistently doing things that are outside your comfort zone.

In the long term this practice will push the boundaries, improve mental resilience and bring high performance on a totally new level.

Be it a physical challenge — like finishing an Ironman — or a personal one, challenging yourself is a great way to get yourself in a new mental space. For the best effect step outside of the comfort zone just a little bit, but more frequently. This will push that zone a little further every time.

Just like with the concept of gradual adaptation and supercompensation. Sport might seem as physical activity and, yes, running, swimming or cycling more will improve physical condition significantly. However, just doing that will not get athletes a status of an elite or get them to the Olympics.

Speed, strength , nutrition, recovery and much more. In life it is the same — instead of zeroing in on one particular area, a much better approach is to look at the issue, situation or life as a whole. Engage in different projects, learn new things and develop new skills across a variety of areas.

Over time this will create a much wider viewpoint and help to become more effective as a professional and as a leader. Our performance will always be limited by our weakest link.

Bad experiences of the past or things we keep saying to ourselves over and over again that we start to believe to be true. Having the courage of taking a hard look on ourselves and being honest with what beliefs have been holding us back is a very powerful way of getting to the next level of performance.

When we accept ourselves the way we are, we stop blaming outside factors and complaining. Instead, we focus on what we can do to make the situation better.

What we can do, however, is accept the fact, get in peace with ourselves and change our future. Elite athletes never miss an opportunity to become more mentally strong. They know that when things get tough as they usually do in races that mental strength will keep them from giving up.

It will also let them deliver the best performance no matter what. Mental resilience is, probably, the most important life skill of all. So, the more stresses we expose ourselves to and learn to deal with the less external things will affect us.

Just like Rocky said :. How much you can take and keep moving forward. Specific or tangible result is a good thing and can be a great goal to strive for. However, there are situations where experience is more worthy than any tangible result. Like that time when we entered an overnight kayak adventure race and were pushed to our absolute mental limits.

Experience is a specific event or an outcome that leaves an impression on a person. It can be positive or negative, but the sum of those experiences is what shapes the character.

And the character that we build throughout our life is what lets us achieve even greater things down the road. So, switch focus from results to the process itself.

Learn to invest in yourself and value experience more than results. It will always pay off us down the road. Did you find this information useful? Share the post with others using the buttons below.

Hey there! My name is Andrejs and I am here to inspire, entertain and get you fit for any adventure. I went from being an over trained pro athlete to an endurance coach sharing how to listen to your body and live life to the fullest. And I'm here to help you do the same. Read my story here.