3 Quick Tips for Increasing Mental Toughness
Increasing your mental toughness is possible.
Elections, pandemics, and relationship dramas, our life can feel like we are in troubled waters all the time, and every day we try to maintain our composure for all these events.
Failing to do so can make you end up depressed or anxious, but resisting these difficult events is possible.
Being mentally tough or resilient can help us navigate through all these difficult experiences.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is adapting to difficult life events and adversity. A person with resilience faces challenges in life and grows from those challenges instead of getting stuck with the problem he faced.
Can I do anything for My Resilience?
We might think we are not as strong as some of our friends or colleagues but resilience can be built. As resilience includes certain mindsets and behaviors, you can change those to transform yourself into a resilient person who can withstand the everchanging winds and obstacles we call life.
1. Reach Out To People
As our days get busier and busier, we are prone to just stay at home. This can quickly become a habit and you might feel intense isolation.
Isolation is highly correlated with low resilience¹, so if you want to increase your resilience, prioritize meeting with friends. Their support can help you resist many challenges².
2. Help Others
You know the positive feeling you get from helping others. You feel better about yourself and feel more connected to the other person. Prosocial behaviors or altruism doesn’t only help with feeling better but also have a protective effect against stress.
There are fascinating studies that suggest altruism could effectively decrease stress’s impact on people’s well-being.³ ⁴ Altruism can help our resilience and allow us to have better emotional stability. Altruism is also important in children’s wellbeing too. Researchers from Greece suggested that children’s altruism was correlated with their resilience. ⁵
3. Intense Exercise
There are very few feelings compared to the euphoria I get after going for a run. It lifts my mood and I feel energetic throughout the day. You definitely heard exercise is good for your health, so I won’t reiterate that. But for being mentally tougher, exercise’s effects are crucial. ⁶
How Intense Should I Exercise?
As a study from the UK suggests, exercise was highly correlated with high resilience. ⁷ Although doing exercise at your preferred intensity is still helpful ⁸, the researchers suggest higher intensity exercises have a stronger correlation with resilience. ⁷
Building resilience is possible with enough effort and time, and there are many actions we can take to increase our mental toughness. In this story, I mentioned some of the broad actions you can take to build up your mental toughness.
If you would like to read a more in-depth article on building resilience, you can check my article below.
Sources
1.Jakobsen, I. S., Madsen, L. M. R., Mau, M., Hjemdal, O., & Friborg, O. (2020). The relationship between resilience and loneliness elucidated by a Danish version of the resilience scale for adults. BMC psychology, 8(1), 131.
2.Khan, A., & Husain, A. (2010). Social support as a moderator of positive psychological strengths and subjective well-being. Psychological reports, 106(2), 534–538.
3.Raposa, E. B., Laws, H. B., & Ansell, E. B. (2016). Prosocial Behavior Mitigates the Negative Effects of Stress in Everyday Life. Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 4(4), 691–698.
4.Poulin, M. J., Brown, S. L., Dillard, A. J., & Smith, D. M. (2013). Giving to others and the association between stress and mortality. American journal of public health, 103(9), 1649–1655.
5.Leontopoulou, S. (2010). An exploratory study of altruism in Greek children: Relations with empathy, resilience and classroom climate. Psychology, 1(5), 377–385.
6.Southwick, S. M., Vythilingam, M., & Charney, D. S. (2005). The psychobiology of depression and resilience to stress: implications for prevention and treatment. Annual review of clinical psychology, 1, 255–291.
7.Lancaster, M.R., Callaghan, P. The effect of exercise on resilience, its mediators and moderators, in a general population during the UK COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a cross-sectional online study. BMC Public Health 22, 827 (2022).
8. Callaghan, P., Khalil, E., Morres, I. et al. Pragmatic randomized controlled trial of preferred intensity exercise in women living with depression. BMC Public Health 11, 465 (2011).
