About Us
Mental Fitness Definition
Mental Fitness is the lifelong practice of strengthening the six Core Capacities that help us continually become all that we are capable of becoming.
It is not the same conversation as mental health. Mental health is what you do when something is wrong. Mental Fitness is what you do so less goes wrong in the first place. Physical health has doctors. Physical fitness has a gym. Mental health has therapists and psychiatrists, and that matters enormously. Mental Fitness has never had its own gym.
Where mental fitness came from
The term mental fitness was coined in 1964 by Dorothea McCarthy in American Psychologist, as an answer to a public health expert who had written that positive mental health was being ignored and needed a new name, one that would actually engage ordinary people. She proposed pairing it with President Kennedy's national physical fitness program to create what she called a total fitness solution.
Nearly fifty years later, a study out of the University of Wollongong put the concept to an international panel of twenty five experts, who reached consensus on a definition: mental fitness is the modifiable capacity to utilise resources and skills to flexibly adapt to challenges or advantages, enabling thriving. They chose the word modifiable deliberately, because it means the capacity can be trained in the same way physical fitness is trained.
They agreed on four principles. That fitness is a positive term free of the stigma attached to mental health. That it should be understood like physical fitness. That it is measurable. And that it can be improved through regular practice. That last one drew the strongest agreement of anything they tested.
The researchers said mental fitness is measurable and improvable, and then said nobody had built the instrument or the program.
We built both.
McCarthy, D. (1964). Mental Fitness. American Psychologist, 19, 201-202.
Robinson, P., Oades, L. G., & Caputi, P. (2015). Conceptualising and measuring mental fitness: A Delphi study. International Journal of Wellbeing, 5(1), 53-73.
Our Mission
To make Mental Fitness as normal as Physical Fitness. We believe people should train their minds with the same consistency, intention and discipline that society has normalised for physical fitness. Centurio exists to make that possible.
Why Centurio Exists
Most of us have spent years training the body. A gym membership. A running habit. A social sport. Someone holding us accountable when we would rather skip it. All of that effort, and the mind, the thing every single one of those efforts actually depends on, gets none of the same discipline.
We assume it will keep up on its own. It does not, simply because nothing has ever asked it to train.
Physical fitness has a gym, a coach, a habit everyone understands. Mental fitness never has. So we built one.
Centurio exists because the gap between how well we train our bodies and how little we train our minds was never actually necessary. It was just never built. Now it is.