Mental fitness vs. mental health: understanding the difference
Clinically reviewed by Dr. Chris Mosunic, PhD, RD, MBA
Are you looking for ways to clear your mind and improve your mood? Explore the key differences between mental fitness vs. mental health, and 9 tips help you boost both.
When you think about “health” or “fitness,” you probably imagine hitting the gym, going for a run, or trying out a workout class. After all, physical fitness is often framed as the foundation of health, helping you to feel better, grow stronger, and build endurance.
But health isn’t just physical. The same framing applies to your mind, too. Mental fitness and mental health are closely related, but they’re not the same thing.
Mental fitness refers to the process of building inner strength and resilience, no matter what obstacles come your way. Meanwhile, mental health refers to everything from your daily moods to conditions like anxiety, depression, and burnout.
Understanding the difference between mental fitness and mental health—and how they overlap—can help you get the support you actually need when life gets tough. Here’s a clear look at what sets them apart, how they work together, and ways to boost both.
What is mental fitness?
Mental fitness is your ability to think clearly, handle stress, and stay emotionally steady even when life gets hard. It’s a way of conceptualizing your mental and emotional strength, and the habits that help support it.
When you practice mental fitness, you gradually build strength, allowing you to handle larger mental loads over time. But what does it look like in practice? When you feel tense or anxious, you might practice breathwork, take a break to walk around the block, or use grounding techniques. These are small but powerful ways to build mental endurance, and they add up over time.
By learning to be more mentally fit (and flexible), you’ll develop the ability to pause, recover, and adapt — especially when things don’t go according to plan.
What are the differences between mental fitness vs. mental health?
It’s easy to confuse mental fitness and mental health, but they’re not the same. Mental health is the current state of your mind, and mental fitness is what you do to support that state.
Like physical health, mental health exists on a spectrum, and it can be affected by your biology, life experiences, relationships, and environment. When your mental health is compromised, it can show up as anxiety, depression, burnout, or something more clinical that requires professional support.
Meanwhile, mental fitness is a skill-based practice that helps you maintain your mental health. Many people use it to soften everyday stress or just feel more grounded.
Both are important concepts and practices to help you care for your mental wellbeing.
5 benefits of mental fitness on your mental health
Working on your mental fitness can give you a sense of control in the moment, but it also supports your mental health in the long run. Here’s how:
1. Greater emotional regulation: When you consistently practice mindfulness and grounding techniques, you’re essentially training your nervous system. Over time, this can help you be less reactive and cut down on anxiety spirals.
2. Improved focus and cognitive clarity: Mental fitness practices like focused breathing, single-tasking, and even mindful word games can help strengthen your attention span. This can lead to fewer scattered thoughts and less mental fatigue.
3. Boosted resilience in hard moments: When you’re mentally fit, you can recover from setbacks more easily. Practicing techniques like reframing and sensory grounding can help you feel more like yourself again when you’re overwhelmed.
4. A stronger, more flexible stress response: Mental fitness methods that soothe your system in small doses, like a 2-minute body scan, can actually reduce your baseline levels of stress over time. This can make it easier to stay steady during rough stretches.
5. More agency and less shame: Mental fitness can help you shift the lens from what’s wrong with you to what’s possible. That shift alone can open the door to deeper healing.
How to build mental fitness: 9 ways to boost your resilience
Building mental fitness happens one step at a time, and fortunately, some of the most powerful practices can be done in just a few minutes.
Here are nine mindful ways to slowly strengthen your mental resilience.
1. Anchor yourself with your senses
When stress causes you to overthink, tapping into your senses can bring you back to the present.
To help calm your nervous system and stay grounded, do the 5–4–3–2–1 technique: notice five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.
2. Use breathwork to calm your system
Your breath is one of the few systems in your body you can consciously control, and it has a direct impact on your stress response.
Shift your body out of fight-or-flight mode by inhaling for four seconds and exhaling for six. This can help activate your parasympathetic nervous system and calm your nerves.
Related read: 10 types of breathing exercises (and how to practice them)
3. Practice low-pressure gratitude
Gratitude is a mental muscle that gets stronger the more you use it.
Try making a quick list of three small and specific things you appreciated today. It could be as simple as the warm cup of coffee you just had, a group chat that made you laugh, or your sheets being clean.
💙 Get yourself in the thankful mindset by listening to Tamara Levitt’s series on Gratitude.
4. Pause for no reason at all
Set a timer for two minutes and give yourself permission to do absolutely nothing. Just sit, breathe, and be. These types of pauses can reset your stress response and remind your brain that you’re safe.
5. Try a visualization that shifts your mindset
Picturing a peaceful place, like a cozy cabin or a seaside town, can slow your heart rate and ease tension.
If this practice doesn’t come naturally to you, try imagining a place you’ve already been to, or use a guided visualization to transport your mind to a calm place.
Related read: Visualization meditation: 8 exercises to add to your practice
6. Create a “preload” ritual for tough moments
Build a supportive routine you can turn to before meetings, commutes, or other stressful moments. It could be reciting a short mantra like, “I can handle this one step at a time,” or just rolling your shoulders and pressing your feet into the floor.
When you consistently repeat these types of rituals, it helps signal to your body that you’re safe.
7. Play with mental flexibility
Playing low-stakes games, like word un-association or counting down with your breath, can help you shift out of rigid thought loops. They also build cognitive flexibility, which can make it easier to handle change and uncertainty.
8. Check in with yourself like you would a friend
It can be easy to lose track of your own needs. Regularly check in with yourself by asking questions like:
How am I feeling right now?
Is there something small I can do to support myself?
What do I need at this moment?
Acknowledging what you’re feeling can help soften your inner tension.
Read more: 10 mindfulness questions to help you check in with yourself
9. Practice micro-compassion
Mental fitness means showing up for yourself with care and self-compassion, even when you’re feeling stressed. This can help you build emotional durability over time.
You could practice by saying nice things to yourself after a mistake, pausing instead of pushing through, or reminding yourself that it’s okay not to be okay.
💙 Learn to be nicer to yourself by listening to Tara Brach’s Radical Self-Compassion series.
Mental fitness vs. mental health FAQs
Is mental fitness the same as mental health?
Mental health and mental fitness are not the same. Mental health is the broader state of your emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing. It reflects how you feel, think, cope, and connect with others.
Mental fitness is more about the daily habits and practices that help support that wellbeing. It’s the maintenance plan. You could think of mental health as the condition of your inner landscape, and mental fitness as the tools that you use to take care of it.
Can you have good mental fitness but poor mental health?
You can have good mental fitness but poor mental health. For example, you could be doing all the “right” things like journaling and meditating, but still feel numb and overwhelmed.
This doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means that mental fitness doesn’t fix everything. Yes, it supports mental health, but it doesn’t replace important things like therapy, medication, and rest.
Why is mental fitness important?
Mental fitness is important because life is unpredictable, and you need tools that can help you navigate it.
Mental fitness helps you build resilience and clarity so you’re better equipped to handle stress and recover from setbacks. It also helps reduce the impact of everyday stressors before they build into something bigger.
How do I know if I need to work on my mental fitness?
If you’re feeling scattered, low-energy, emotionally raw, or just stretched too thin, odds are that your system could use some reinforcement.
Constantly feeling on edge, zoning out, or struggling to stay present are signals as well.
What are some mental fitness exercises?
A grounding practice like the 5–4–3–2–1 technique is a good mental fitness exercise to help you reconnect with your senses. You can also do deep breathing to calm your nervous system, or take a brief pause to do nothing.
Other good mental fitness exercises are practicing gentle movement and doing short gratitude reflections or visualizations. As a rule of thumb, try to do what feels manageable, and let it grow from there.
Calm your mind. Change your life.
Mental health is hard. Getting support doesn't have to be. The Calm app puts the tools to feel better in your back pocket, with personalized content to manage stress and anxiety, get better sleep, and feel more present in your life.
Images: Getty
