Mental strength has more layers to it than most people realize. If you’re someone who doesn’t feel mentally strong, or you’ve been through a lot of trauma and harm in your life, you may not feel as though you have the ability to be mentally strong. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Your mental strength is about much more than how tough you are. There are many other elements to it that people don’t talk about nearly as much. Let’s look at some of them.
1. Mental strength isn’t about never feeling weak.
Most people think that being mentally strong means you never struggle, break down, or feel weak. In truth, strong people allow themselves to feel those feelings, but they don’t let those feelings control their choices. Instead of running from them, they turn and face the unpleasant emotions and allow them to pass through.
Too many people struggle with accepting the feelings of vulnerability and weakness that may come their way. They fight it, try to defend themselves, and try to keep that weakness at bay. That’s a direct route to unhappiness. On the other hand, if you welcome those feelings, you can sit down and process them. Once you process them, you can let them go and get on with your life!
2. Mental strength is not being “positive” all the time.
As Psychology Today shares, toxic positivity and constant optimism are weaknesses. True strength is a willingness to acknowledge pain, uncertainty, and disappointment without needing to sugarcoat reality. When something bad happens, you always have people saying, “Look on the bright side” or “What’s the silver lining?” The truth is that sometimes things are just terrible, and that’s the way it is. No rhyme or reason.
No one wants to feel bad, but negative emotions are healthy when you work through them in healthy ways. Negative emotions are your brain telling you that something is wrong, and you need to change that something. Suppressing those feelings or trying to make them “okay” is the wrong approach, because you’re basically ignoring whatever problem is causing them.
3. Mental strength is not about isolation or independence; it’s about resilience.
The image of the strong, lone individual on their own personal journey is a common trope when one thinks of strength. That trope comes from marketing, where the idea was to make it a gold standard of what it means to be an independent American, in control of their own destiny! That’s where you get images like the rough cowboy alone on the range from.
However, strength is not isolation or independence. There is nothing weak about relying on other people and needing help sometimes. Sometimes, the greatest act of resilience and strength you can take is asking for help. It takes a lot of strength and self-awareness to recognize that you can’t do everything by yourself, and it’s okay that you can’t.
4. Mental strength does not mean being emotionless or cold.
Toxic masculinity teaches that mental strength is not showing emotion or remaining stoic at all times. Many think toxic masculinity is a criticism of all masculinity, but as WebMD tells us, it focuses on those aspects of masculinity that are harmful to men. An unhealthy society punishes men who do express their emotions in a variety of ways, including mockery, questioning their manhood, and telling them to “man up,” even when they’re torn apart inside. There were really only a few times when you wouldn’t get mocked for crying, like if a loved one died, but even then, you could still catch flak for it.
And what’s the result? We have a bunch of bitter, angry men who don’t know how to express their negative emotions healthily because they have bottled them up. And speaking as someone who’s been on that path, I was the kind of person who tried not to show emotion at all. The result is that I got very good at it. However, that introduced a new problem in that I got so good at it, I stopped being able to feel those emotions. My brain just kind of shut it down. I had to go to therapy to relearn how to feel emotions.
It’s so stupid. People with real mental strength feel deeply, and they manage their emotions instead of avoiding them.
5. Mental strength is built from failure, not success.
You don’t become mentally strong through your successes. Failure teaches you much more because you have to deal with so many more difficult emotions while trying to figure out what to do about the failure. You have to deal with the sadness, anger, frustration, or whatever else it is you may be feeling in that moment.
In doing that, you can eventually come to realize that failure isn’t actually so bad. Failure is often just a step on the path to success. A failure teaches you what didn’t work. Next, you should figure out what you can learn from that failure, so you can start looking for an alternative solution. The more you do this, the more you realize that failure is not an end unless you stop when you fail.
6. Mental strength is not something you either “have” or “don’t have.”
There’s an incorrect belief that mental strength is either something you’re born with or not. The truth is that mental strength is more like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Even if you don’t feel like you’re a strong person, and maybe you aren’t, you can still lift those weights to toughen up.
Talk therapy is a great way to do that. Exposure therapy is, too. That is, putting yourself in positions of discomfort to help strengthen yourself. This is a common practice in the philosophy of Stoicism, to subject yourself to discomfort to harden your mind to not only that discomfort but also other problems that come your way. For example, some people take cold showers, sleep on the floor, eat plain meals, or only allow themselves to drink water.
All of that gets very frustrating, very quickly, so you are challenged to find ways to keep your cool. The people who seem mentally strong probably went through some significant stuff to get to that point.
7. Mental strength is not control; it’s adaptability.
Mighty is the oak with deep roots that stands tall against the forces of nature, until those forces of nature are so strong that they break the tree and cause it to fall. Compare that to bamboo, which is flexible. It moves in the wind and weather and can survive conditions that the rigid oak can’t. Why? Because it adapts by moving. Bamboo defuses some of the tension of the external environment by adapting to the changes.
That is, the wind blows, and the shoots move with the wind. Life is the same way. You have to adapt, roll with the punches when the punches come or the wind blows. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself stuck in bad positions that are unhealthy and harmful for you. At some point, you have to be willing to say that a particular situation isn’t working and move on to something else. Alternatively, you may need to find a different approach altogether. But, to do that, you have to be okay with letting go.
Final thoughts…
What can we take away from this article? Well, even if you don’t feel like you’re mentally strong, you can exercise your mind to toughen it up. It’s not a one-and-done activity; it’s something you commit to doing over the long term. As you grow, adapt, and learn how to accept and take life as it comes, you should find you have much less anxiety about the future and yourself.
The important thing is not to give up. Keep working on it, even if you need to do it with a therapist.
