I’m sure anyone reading this, at some point, if not many times, has most likely wondered what the point of life is. We live, we die. We experience joy and happiness, but also great pain and suffering. I’m no different, I think about this constantly. Life is a great mystery. It’s completely meaningless, yet it’s also packed so full of meaning. A paradoxical conundrum. However, I’ve noticed that as I train my mind and build more and more mental toughness, life seems to get better, which is why I think we all need to develop mental toughness in our lives.
The further I go down the road of developing mental toughness, the more peace I experience in my life. And it’s not a coincidence. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The tougher and more resilient I become, the less things bother me, which means I don’t get worried or flustered like I used to, which means I have more peace and joy as a result.
Life is full of pain and suffering, and we can either fall victim to the circumstances that bring about the pain and suffering, or we can learn to develop a mental toughness that keeps us from falling victim in the first place.
Take this quote by Charles Bukowski
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
– Charles Bukowski
Most of us live an easy life. It may not be the case everywhere on the planet, but the majority of the 8 billion people living today have more ease and comfort than any generation before. And yet, there are more people on medications to relieve stress, anxiety, depression, and a whole host of other mental health issues than ever before.
Could it be that we have things so good, that life comes to us so easily, that we have to create problems for ourselves which show up in the form of a mental health crisis?
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf
How many of us have grown up in the Good Times era as a result of our forebears going through the Hard Times era to deliver peace to the upcoming generations? How many generations of hardened men and women has it taken to get us to where we are as a society today?
Yet, as one of the most comfortable eras ever, with clean water, abundant food, and resources, medical treatments readily available, we are an extremely unhappy society.
We are almost begging for something difficult to enter our lives, and since nothing truly trying does, we begin to create issues out of frivolous things.
In 2020, the CDC published an article stating, “During 2015–2018, 13.2% of adults aged 18 and over used antidepressant medications in the past 30 days.”
The US population was 326.8 million people in 2018 when they were finishing the study, which means that out of the 326.8 million individuals, 43.1 million were on antidepressants.
And this is just for people who have actually gone to a doctor, psychiatrist, etc., and had medication prescribed to them. This does not include all those individuals who suffer from some form of depression but have not sought help for it.
I imagine the percentage is much higher than what the study finds as I know people dealing with some level of depression, yet are not on medication.
Now, this is not a push for you to go get medicated to fix your issues because not everybody needs to go that route, but there may be someone reading this who could benefit from medication for a little while.
However, I believe there are other ways to overcome whatever mental health challenge you may be facing, but I’m not a doctor so don’t take medical advice from me. Use what I discuss in conjunction with any other forms of help you may need to get.
Why Mental Toughness?
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
– Thomas Jefferson
The reason we need to develop mental toughness is because everything begins in the mind. Conquering your biggest fears begins in the mind. Overcoming obstacles you never thought possible begins in the mind.
Giving in to failure, quitting, and giving up begins in the mind.
I’ll say it again, “Everything begins in the mind.”
There is nothing that we do that does not begin in the mind. Doing something as simple as walking from point A to point B begins in the mind, whether you are conscious of it or not.
Every day we have unconscious processes taking place that we don’t even realize we’re doing because it’s become second nature, yet it’s all originating from our mind.
Since this is the case, developing mental toughness should be one of our prerequisites before embarking on our life’s journey.
This is why many cultures developed what we call Rites of Passage. Usually, these rites of passage were designed for the young men of the community as a way to test them and bring them from a place of adolescence to manhood.
It could involve a psychedelic experience, being sent to live alone in a forest for a while, fighting other members of the tribe with some weapon that mostly inflicts extreme amounts of pain, but in some cases, death. It might be getting sent out to fight a lion, and you either come back with scars to show or you don’t come back at all.
Women go through their own rites of passage during childbirth. Essentially one of the toughest and most painful things a human can experience. You ladies are tough!
As a result, the intensity of these situations can often lead the person to realize how much stronger they actually are than what they originally thought.
Perceptions about what they can or cannot accomplish can be broken as they endure their respective trials, resulting in someone who no longer looks at life the way they did before.
“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
-Sir Edmund Hillary
In everything we do, it isn’t the outside that makes or breaks us, it’s what we’ve got going on internally. Our mental toughness ends up defining who we are. Are we someone who breaks under pressure, or are we someone who gets stronger under pressure?
“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.”
-Richard Bach
Learn to Develop Mental Toughness
We can learn to become mentally tough throughout our lives. Some people learn when they’re young because of unfortunate situations they’ve had to live through. Others learn as they grow older after dealing with life’s ups and downs.
It doesn’t matter how or when this occurs, all that matters is that you start learning how to develop the mental toughness needed to overcome your current circumstances.
“The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you.”
– William Jennings Bryan
Sometimes, you just have to dive into whatever it is that’s holding you back and see what happens. You might be mentally tough in some areas and weak in others.
Everybody is tough in some respects, but what do you do when you come up against something that seems tougher than you?
You either fold or push through. That’s all you can do. If you push through, you gain another notch of toughness you didn’t have before. It doesn’t mean it makes the situation easier. You might have disliked the situation so much you want to run the next time it happens.
Don’t talk yourself out of it, unless maybe it’s life-threatening or could land you in jail…
Try to push through the awkwardness of the situation. Say what you need to say, or do what you need to do. The more you practice, the easier it gets.
You can ramp up the speed of developing your mental toughness by incorporating your own stressors that cause you to have to deal with uncomfortable situations.
These can be things like:
- Cold showers/ ice baths
- Working out
- Cardio exercises
- Weight lifting
- Fighting (Some form of martial arts where you have to face an opponent)
- Doing things to face your fears (Holding a snake or spider, skydiving, public speaking, etc.)
- Standing up for yourself and saying what you think and mean
- Extended times of meditation
The more you incorporate ideas such as the above into your daily life, the tougher you’ll become. You just have to know yourself and how you work. You have to know where you’re weak and find ways to challenge yourself in those areas.
If you have trouble speaking up, start speaking up in certain situations with friends. Say something during a work meeting, even if it’s not controversial or you don’t think you’ll have to defend your position. Just say something, anything. Give the team praise for a job well done or thank someone for something they did for you.
Speaking up in public like this can be very difficult for a lot of people, so if that’s you, make a decision to do it.
Lifting weights can be another great way to build mental toughness, because the heavier the weight gets, the more you have to get your entire being involved to move the weight. Sometimes, you have to give everything you’ve got to get the weight from A to B.
The more you do it though, the more you start to believe in yourself because you start to see that you are stronger than you were before. You have a visual representation of you growing as a person and doing something you didn’t think possible.
That’s why you have to continually push yourself out of your comfort zone. Embrace the hard. Embrace the difficult.
I wrote about David Goggins in a past article titled “What is Your Story?”. He detailed his struggles as a child through adulthood and how he overcame difficult situations and developed mental toughness in his book, “Can’t Hurt Me”.
It’s an inspiring story about how he went from a scared little boy to one of the toughest men on the planet. He’s competed in ultra-marathons, at one point held the world record for the most pull-ups in 24 hours, and went through some of the toughest military training America has to offer.
Throughout his journey, he had to overcome obstacle after obstacle, and eventually got to the place where he realized, the only person he was competing with, in any of these endeavors, was himself.
The same goes for you too. When it comes down to it, the only person you have to compete with to overcome your current fears and insecurities is yourself.
It may seem like the person on the other end of the difficult conversation is the one you have to overcome, but in reality, it’s your own mind. We often make these situations we find ourselves in seem larger than they are, which causes us to worry about how it will play out.
Worrying doesn’t do anything to change the situation or what needs to be done. If you run from it, then you’ll just have to face it again later down the line, so why not deal with it now?
Learn to develop mental toughness and watch as peace begins to enter your life. As you work to develop this mindset, you let go of worry, doubt, and fear, which opens you up to feeling and experiencing other things.
I’ll end things with this quote as it sums up this message perfectly:
“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less-than-perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.”
– Mark Victor Hansen
Be sure to share this with your network of friends and family. If you made it to the end, I appreciate your time, and thank you for reading.
Much love to you all,
Josiah
