Overview of Mind Fitness Courses
When the World Health Organization (WHO) was established in 1948, it defined health in its charter: “Health is not only the absence of disease and weakness, but also the physical, psychological, and social adaptation to the perfect condition.” To measure a person's health, it must be analyzed from physiological, psychological, and behavioral factors. The Third International Congress of Mental Health in 1946 considered that “mental health is the development of an individual's state of mind to an optimal state to the extent that it does not contradict the physical, intellectual and emotional mental health of others.” In 1964, the WHO defined it: “Mental health refers not only to the absence of mental illness or perversion, not only to the good social adaptation of the individual, but also to the perfection of personality and the full development of psychological potential, and also to the development of the individual's state of mind to its optimum under certain objective conditions” (Holappa et al., 2022). It can be seen that mental health includes two levels: 1) Individuals can maintain a healthy psychological state and can fit in with others and society and 2) individuals can psychologically regulate themselves, give full play to their psychological potential, and actively maintain a state of balance between their inner psyche and the external environment, thus promoting the full development of their abilities. In the Concise Encyclopedia Britannica “mental health refers to the best state of functioning that an individual's psyche can achieve within the limits of its own and environmental conditions, but not to the absolute state of perfection (Kai & Mengjia, 2020).”
Mind fitness education entails using the methods and techniques of psychology, education, sociology, and psychiatry to improve the mental health of students and promote the full development of their personalities through teaching, carrying out related publicity activities and lectures, and conducting psychological counseling and consultation activities. The content system of college students' mental health education includes mental development and mental health, self-consciousness development and education, personality development and education, development and education of learning psychology, emotional development and education, interpersonal relationship development and education, development and education of gender relations and sexual psychology, and career development and education.
There are nine themes of psychological crisis intervention, which are interdependent and relatively independent. In practice, the program is student-centered and emphasizes students' active participation, emphasizing not only the mastery of mind fitness knowledge but also the improvement of students' abilities. It allows them to achieve better self-growth and development. The content of mind fitness education has also been expanded with the development of the times. Now, it focuses on students’ psychological characteristics, with the main task of helping them deal with environmental adaptation, self-management, learning and success, interpersonal communication, friendship and love, job hunting and career selection, personality development, and emotion regulation. With the rapid development of networking, network mental health has also gradually become a focus of mind fitness education in colleges and universities. Therefore, the content and tasks are constantly updated and deepened, which is the inevitable trend of the development of the times. Figure 1 shows the scores of students with different learning companions in terms of learning quality and mental health (Ren et al., 2021).
Figure 1. Students’ learning quality and mental health scores with different companions