Most people accept that physical health requires maintenance: workouts, recovery, nutrition. But mental and emotional health are often treated reactively, addressed only once stress, anxiety or burnout become unmanageable. The practice of mental fitness challenges the standard. “Mental fitness is about awareness, emotional agility and training your mind to work for you instead of against you,” says Frances Borshell, founder of Estero’s Grounding Spot, a wellness studio billed as a gym for the mind.
The idea has been circulating since the 1960s, but it took the right confluence of factors to bring the conversation mainstream. “With COVID and the massive need for [mental health] resources that came out of it, we started thinking: ‘People work on their bodies, why don’t we make working on our minds commonplace?’” Frances says. She wasn’t alone. In a 2022 article from Howard University’s namesake magazine, GiShawn Mance, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, points to social media’s role in shifting the conversation around mental health from pathology to self-care and awareness—mental resilience, stress tolerance and emotional regulation as practice, not fixed traits.
Grounding Spot provides a physical space—at Coconut Point and around town via the newer mobile unit with meditation pods—to practice long-standing grounding modalities, like yoga, meditation and breathwork, along with life coaching, halotherapy, and recovery modalities like red light and contrast therapies. The practitioners here are coaches and certified instructors, not licensed therapists. The work is preventative, maintenance-oriented and holistic, harnessing exercise, recovery and grounding modalities to tap into the mind-body connection. “Movement, breath, sleep, nutrition and physical state all work together as one system,” Frances says. “Stressful thoughts, for example, increase cortisol, which causes your muscles to tighten and your heart rate to race, which then affects digestion.”
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Recovery practices like contrast therapy fit naturally into Grounding Spot’s model. “It helps train stress tolerance, emotional control under discomfort, health awareness, resilience and discipline,” Frances says. Fitness classes release neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, which improve mood and resilience. Mindfulness-based exercises like meditation and yoga help to cultivate awareness and self-control, a quality recent research has shown to trigger neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to learn, change and adapt.
A cornerstone of the practice is metacognition, the psychological process of observing your own thoughts. When anxiety surfaces, Frances encourages clients to pause, identify the trigger and regulate their breathing, so they can respond to their needs with a sense of objectivity. “Look at the facts rather than your interpretation,” she says. That principle carries over into the club’s guided mindful meditation sessions, where weekly themes rotate through topics such as anxiety relief, self-compassion and internal dialogue. “Often, if you monitor your thoughts, you’ll hear how disparaging you are to yourself,” Frances says. “We work to shift the conversation we have with ourselves, about ourselves.”
The goal, as Frances frames it, is not to resolve anxiety or eliminate limitations, but to develop the tools to handle them.