Life can come at you hard and fast—but how you react is everything.
Becoming mentally strong is a powerful skill because it allows you to overcome the inevitable setbacks in life and maintain your peace of mind, focus, and motivation while everyone else loses theirs.
While I still have my moments, there are several key things I’ve eliminated in my life to help me build more mental strength—especially when I had so little to begin with—and feel more confident, self-assured, and stable when shit hits the fan.
If you avoid them, I’m confident your mental strength will rapidly grow too.
1. Suppressing Emotions
As counterintuitive as this sounds, if I want to overcome a frustrating situation faster, I should actually lean into my emotions. Instead of distancing myself from them or alienating them, I need to bring them into consciousness, embrace them, and integrate them.
Once I do, rather than seeing those emotions as something separate and something “bad” and contemptible, I see them as a part of me—and if it’s a part of me, I can control them rather than them controlling me.
Yet what are we taught instead? Anger is bad, sadness is bad, depression is bad, etc. — so we learn to fight it, ignore it, or bottle it up, which makes everything much worse.
“As long as you fight a symptom, it will become worse. If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence — the very moment you get in touch with yourself — growth begins, integration begins.”
— Dr. Fritz Perls
As Dr. Ken Wilber explains in Spectrum of Consciousness, the way to move forward is to “deliberately and consciously try to increase your symptoms” so you can fully experience them:
“If you are depressed, try to be more depressed. If you are tense, make yourself even tenser. If you feel guilty, increase your feelings of guilt—and we mean that literally!”
That way, you acknowledge your Shadow and can consciously see that you are doing it to yourself—as a result, you are free to stop.
2. Coddling Yourself
When we deal with setbacks, many people run toward others for help. We call our friends or parents so we can rant, cry, get things off our chest, and have them calm us down.
But as Dr. Meg Jay explains in The Defining Decade, constantly asking others to calm you down might help in the moment, but it robs you of the opportunity to calm yourself down. This is called “borrowing an ego”—externalizing control and letting someone else do the hard work:
“We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own. We don’t practice soothing ourselves… We don’t learn how to calm ourselves down, and this in and of itself undermines confidence.”
The same goes for constantly needing to “heal.” Yes, for a big crisis, you need time to grieve and feel upset, but if you constantly need to do that for minor day-to-day stuff (ex. the random crap that happens when you live in a congested city), that’s not self-care—that only holds you back.
Instead, let yourself deal with uncomfortable feelings and emotions by yourself. Build the resources to handle difficult times on your own. Become your own support system.
Ultimately, the mark of a mentally strong person isn’t someone who never gets angry, sad, upset, etc. (which is impossible); the mark of a mentally strong person is someone with a short “refractory period.” When bad things happen, they feel negative emotions, but they can quickly process them and move on.
3. Needing To Be Right All The Time
Here’s an easy way to get a lot of people upset: Disagree with them.
That’s all it takes. Simply oppose their opinion in a respectful way and watch them squirm in their chair, get agitated, and lose their calm.
But that’s not being mentally strong: That’s being easily bothered by other people’s opinions. The same goes if you always need to prove yourself, seek approval, or get validation — you’ll always be controlled by others. You’re giving them power and influence over your own emotions, security, and worthiness.
And when you do that, it’s impossible to have mental toughness.
Yet you don’t overcome it by arguing, fighting, or finding better facts to prove your point; you do it by giving up the need to be right, have people agree with you, tell you you’re “good,” give you applause, etc.
Stop trying to convince everyone how right you are and how wrong they are. Also, don’t hold your opinions so tightly. Being unattached to them will help you become mentally tough in the face of criticism—you won’t take it personally and you’ll feel less emotional (which actually helps you debate better).
“For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe.”
— Larry Eisenberg
4. Avoiding Discomfort
To be mentally tough, you need to toughen yourself first. And the only way to do that is to let yourself get some bumps, bruises, and scrapes in the journey of life. How?
Train yourself to do difficult things regularly.
Have tough conversations. Try things you’ve never done before. Ask out someone you’re attracted to who you think is “out of your league.”
The more you fail, the more comfortable you’ll be with failure and the negative emotions that result. And as you fail more, you acclimate to those emotions and your body can better regulate them. Over time, you can train yourself to handle whatever comes your way.
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”
— Seneca
5. Listening to Fictional Stories
Often, when we get upset in life, it’s not because of what actually happens, but because of what we think happens. We create these elaborate stories in our minds about the situation and then we react to that.
For example, someone might think their boss is purposely trying to hold them back because they’re jealous of their abilities when, in reality, there’s zero evidence to support it.
But the more we listen to our fictional stories, the more erratic our emotions become because we’re believing a distorted reality. (In fact, many stories we tell ourselves come from our programming, not the truth.)
Stick to what’s real and true. Challenge your assumptions and avoid adding your opinions to the situation, which can help you successfully manage the difficulties in life.
“Even in regard to tragic conditions, and the most adverse environment, we can usually manage to be happier, if not completely happy, by not adding to the misfortune our own feelings of self-pity, resentment, and our own adverse opinions.”
— Maxwell Maltz
6. Having a Fixed Mindset
A fixed mindset believes that all of our abilities, skills, and traits are fixed and unchangeable. “You either have it or you don’t” and failure becomes damaging because it reflects on who we are. As a result, we look for moments to feel superior and avoid those that make us look incompetent, unskilled, etc.
The opposite is a “growth mindset,” which believes that all of our traits are changeable—we can get better at virtually anything, no matter how much we might struggle at the moment.
Having a growth mindset helps give you mental strength because you won’t be so affected by failures, mistakes, or obstacles in life. Instead, you reframe them into positive challenges and opportunities to learn new skills, master yourself, and grow.
7. Losing Your Purpose
Without a burning goal, passion, or purpose in life, it’s much harder to feel inspired and motivated, especially during the inevitable tough times that everyone deals with. Why?
Because there’s nothing pushing you forward. There’s no reasoning behind your setbacks, suffering, and pain. They’re just things that happen to you, rather than things that happen for you for a reason in your journey.
It’s the difference between being an aimless soul who’s the victim of whatever comes their way versus a driven adventurer on a mission to achieve their life goals and who’s willing to overcome whatever obstacles, “bad guys,” or setbacks come their way.
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
— Viktor Frankl
Having a purpose gives you the context to help you overcome difficulties.
Never lose that purpose and meaning. Keep it in your mind on the days you’re struggling or feeling unenthusiastic.
When I encountered miserable moments during my travels with the pandemic, I regularly reminded myself just why I came here and why I left in the first place.
And it always gave me hope and inspired me to keep going, no matter what.
I hope it helps you too.
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