Mental Fitness Formula

Dr. Rea Anne Scovill

Dr. Rea Anne Scovill is a psychologist who has provided therapy for over forty years to families, individual adults, adolescents and children. Her passion has been to translate research-based ideas and professional wisdom into practical applications for schools, families, individual clients and her community.

You deserve a manual for how to cope with your mind, but you don’t need to know all about how it works. Self-help books, therapy programs and psychotropic medications all have the same focal point: the human brain. Your brain’s fight-or-flight response to stress is at the core of your negative feelings. The more disturbing they are, the more intense your impulse to run away or fight them off. You don’t need a modern, costly brain scan to recognize your fight-or-flight reactions. Your tense stomach, furrowed brow or sweaty palms signal how your brain is reacting to triggers.

This website is designed to help you begin managing the wired-in, excessive responses to triggers in your daily life. It doesn’t provide the details or step-by-step approach available in Part I of my book, Claim Your Own Mental Fitness. It doesn’t describe as thoroughly as Part II of my book does how this approach can help you overcome anxiety, anger, addiction, depression, addiction, grief or trauma. It doesn’t cover all that Part III of my book does about how these methods can help you have positive relationships as a friend, acquaintance, dater, spouse or parent.

Through its FORMULA program this website offers you an introduction to the research-based, cognitive-behavioral approach that’s been widely used for over 70 years to help with these issues. The site also offers an intuitive view of your mind that will help you begin to assemble the whole puzzle that is you.

• The FORMULA program to introduce and then remind you of the steps you’ll need to practice for mental fitness.
• Examples of the Twelve Toxic Beliefs and Three Brain Habits that can trigger your fight-or-flight responses.
• An intuitive reframe of the Executive, Monkey and Crocodile parts of your brain into a metaphor consisting of an inner Parent, Adult and Child. The Parent and Child are divided further to allow clarity for self-management. The Parent may be Critical, Nurturing or Wise. The Child can also be an Adolescent. The Adult corresponds roughly to the Executive Brain that needs to stay in charge for mental fitness. The Parent and Child are just useful avatars for how the rest of your brain operates.

Since understanding later posts relies on concepts presented in earlier ones, it’s important to access them in order.  

Exploring the Mental Fitness Formula provides science-based posts that describe how Toxic Beliefs and Child Brain Habits operate in various situations. They demonstrate how to use the FORMULA to revise these for life-long mental fitness. They also integrate this program with the Parent-Adult-Child framework noted above for comfortable and intuitive self-understanding.

This website is designed to help you employ a guiding formula to manage your mind as you go through your days. Doing this is not rocket science. Mental fitness requires a basically functional brain, determination, good training and consistent follow-through. You can’t win a marathon without physical fitness and you can’t run the marathon of life happily without mental fitness.

A good place to engage thoroughly with this program is my book, Claim Your Own Mental Fitness: Manage Your Mind to Overcome Addiction, Anxiety, Anger, Grief, Trauma and Depression and Form Positive Relationships. It’s available at Amazon Books for about $15.00.