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The Daily 1%

What you'll do each day to build your mental fitness.

Mental Fitness Month is built on our Daily 1% Model: 14 minutes a day for five simple exercises - breathwork, mindfulness, gratitude, connection, and visualisation. These daily reps build our mental fitness by strengthening the core skills in our evidence-based framework, from self-regulation, attention and focus to growing self-compassion, flexible thinking, strengthening connections and purposeful action. The goal is not perfection. Some days you might miss an exercise, or complete fewer reps, and that is okay. What matters is showing up often enough to build momentum and carrying these practices into your routine well beyond November.

DAILY CHECK IN

Breathwork

(20 Mental Reps, 1-3mins)

Skill trained: Self-Regulation

STEP 1

Identify what you’re thinking, feeling, and noticing in your body.

STEP 2 (CHOOSE YOUR REP)

Choose the type: Calm (down-regulation) and Energise (up-regulation)

Calming Breaths
→ Inhale once through the nose (~2s), then take a quick top-up inhale (~1s).
→ Exhale slowly through the mouth, as if gently blowing through a straw (~6s).
Energising Breaths
→ A quick inhale through the nose (~1s).
→ Sharp exhale through the mouth (~1s).

STEP 3

Perform 20 conscious breaths and notice the shift.

Over time, breathwork reps train your ability to regulate your nervous system, shifting your mind and body into optimal arousal. This strengthens your prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, engages vagus nerve pathways, and down regulates your amygdala, the emotional brain. The more you practice, the stronger the skill of Self-Regulation becomes, helping you calm or energise yourself when required.

Your "1 Moment"

Every day gives us hundreds of moments to think, feel, or act differently. We won't notice them all, but we only need one. It could be:

When you are running late or feeling stressed, and you pause to reframe the situation and remember what you are grateful for.
On your commute, when you stop scrolling and start paying attention to the world around you, the people, the light, the sounds.
When you pass someone on the street and decide to greet them rather than look away.
In a moment of feeling overwhelmed, when you take a few calming breaths to shift your state.
When you catch yourself being hard on yourself, and choose to speak kindly or take a small action that helps you move forward, even when it would be easier not to.

It's in these moments where change begins. When we act differently, even in the smallest way, we turn knowledge into behaviour. This is where growth happens, where what we practise starts to show up in real life. Every time we make a conscious choice, we strengthen how well we can think, feel, and act. That is how we build our mental fitness.

It only takes one moment a day, and you might find a few more once you start noticing them.