How Building Mental Toughness Can Make You Happier
Coaches apply the term ‘mental toughness’ to elite athletes all the time. And it isn’t too surprising: it’s the combination of confidence and emotional resilience that sees you through life’s obstacles and keeps you calm under pressure. It’s an attribute of any athlete who won a gold medal.
Mental toughness isn’t just for athletes, though.
Psychologists have studied it in students. Medical experts have studied it in relation to chronic pain. They have found that building mental toughness can make everybody happier. You can check out a few things that will make you happier here.
Building Mental Toughness
Protects Your Performance Against Negative Circumstances
A study by The National Center for Biotechnology Information published in 2017 found that mentally tough athletes resisted crummy coaching styles. Likewise, your performance needs buffering from the junk that life throws at you. Being able to perform under stress will definitely contribute to your happiness.
Lets You Learn From Your Mistakes
We all mess up sometimes. Bouncing back afterwards is critical to happiness.
Mental toughness puts your mistakes in perspective. Confident and resilient people don’t dwell on what they did wrong. They note what they can do right next time.
Leads You To Excel
Mental toughness separates the stars from the merely average. Being the best at something requires putting in extra effort, which will feel daunting at first. Mental toughness makes it possible for people to push themselves through the initial fear.
Anybody reading this blog can imagine how happy excelling at something would make them. The long hours and work will feel worthwhile once you’re the top dog.
Is Associated With Good Mental Health
Science Direct did a study and found that mental toughness was a pretty good indicator of psychological well being in students. Psychologists surveyed a large number of university students. They found that those who scored high on a mental toughness tended to report a general sense of well being.
Another study by The National Center for Biotechnology Information of athletes found something similar. The sports psychologists even ventured that mental toughness could lead to better psychological functioning.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Confidence and perseverance are the biggest components of mental toughness, and those are both signs of psychological wellness.
Helps You Break Unhealthy Habits
All of us have some bad habits that make us miserable, but breaking these habits is hard. Mental toughness lets you keep trying until you’re rid of them.
It Feeds On Itself
Confident and resilient people keep going until they achieve their goals. People who achieve their goals feel more confident. This confidence gives them more resilience when struggling to accomplish their goals.
Wash, rinse and repeat.
Buffers You Against Stress
When you build mental toughness, you armour yourself against stress. You will find your tolerance for obstacles growing, and your frustration with everything abating.
Gives You A Sunny Outlook
Mentally tough people look on the bright side. It is both an integral part of mental toughness and a result of that toughness.
For one thing, it makes life’s obstacles a positive. Every stressor is a chance to build mental toughness.
Seeing the world in this light will become a habit as you build mental toughness. You will also practice putting problems in perspective, and telling yourself that you are capable. You can imagine how pleasant this will make life seem.
Gets You Where You Want To Be
People who don’t build up mental toughness wind up dreaming vaguely about the life they want to live. People who do build it up can actually get themselves to work towards their goals. They can earn that promotion or sell that unit.
Each step towards toughness shapes your life, taking you one accomplishment closer to your ideals.
Teaches Goal-setting
Every study of positive attitudes has found that goal-setters are happy. Working towards goals give people a sense of purpose, and just setting them can give a person warm feelings. This is why practically every self-help book has some thoughts on goals.
Building mental toughness goes hand-in-hand with setting concrete goals. It’s both part of the process and the result of getting tougher. As you get tougher, goal-setting will become easier, and all the positive parts of goals will follow.
Promotes A Better Life All Around
We all need a degree of mental toughness just to live. Life is always handing out setbacks, and we are often given no choice but to power through. Building mental toughness lets us do that with aplomb.
Even when we aren’t facing difficulties, we need to accomplish things to feel complete. New achievements put a glow on our lives and make hard times fade away.
You will also feel more confident about yourself. This will give you an authentic and long-lasting joy in all aspects of your life.
Start Building
Fortunately, building mental toughness is well within your grasp. It’s like a muscle: it grows with use and certain practices add to it. Also like a muscle, the process of building it is part of the joy.
Now you have the motivation to build mental toughness every day!
Author’s Bio:
Matthew Snider is a writer, a personal development junkie and a regular blogger at Self Development Secrets. Matt, with his one quarter Asian descent, did not start out as a writer, but he says, “the love for a subject is the most important aspect of writing. The readers want to read something written by someone who understands them.”
