Mental Toughness & Iron Will: Build the Skill

This is the fifth chapter of seven in discussing about Mental Toughness and Iron Will. It's going to be another long read for you, folks.

Chloe recently found herself in a new relationship. Zack seemed great, but he lived a very different lifestyle than Chloe. Chloe was very involved in her local yoga studio. She believed that eating mindfully and practicing yoga on a daily basis was important. Zack didn’t share the same beliefs; he was a video game developer who spent a lot of time working on his products and nothing else.

Over the first few months of their relationship, Chloe began attending classes at her local yoga studio less frequently. Zack always wanted her to spend the night at his place, and it was a long drive back to catch the 6:30 a.m. class. Since she was spending the night at Zack’s more frequently, she also ate a lot of meals with him. He was a real carnivore and one of his favorite things to do on a Friday night was get some burgers from a local food truck and test out one of his newly released games.

Chloe loved the indulgent feeling that came from relaxing on Zack’s couch.

Eventually, Chloe found herself gaining weight and she began to feel less balanced. She felt less patient, and she began to experience mood swings. It was around the six-month mark of their relationship that Chloe realized something needed to change. She had strayed far from her practice of mindful eating and she realized she hadn’t been to a single yoga class in almost two weeks. Chloe decided she needed to stop making excuses.

Of course it felt great to eat burgers and sleep in, but doing so on a regular basis was taking a toll on her mental and physical well-being. She vowed to get up on time to attend yoga classes and cook with Zack more frequently. By choosing to avoid the trap of instant gratification, Chloe was able to return to a comfortable compromise. She could spend time with Zack while still taking care of her own mental, emotional, and physical health.

Mental toughness is not simply a trait you are born with. It is a skill that needs to be cultivated and developed. Mental toughness is like a muscle that needs to be focused on and worked in order to grow. As Chloe found, it is easier to allow your mental toughness to fade than it is to continue to practice self-discipline. However, by making yourself do the tenth rep instead of stopping at nine, choosing to ask the extra question when it would be easier to accept the original answer, or deciding to tackle the bigger project at work, you can actively exercise your mental toughness muscle and keep it in shape.

So often we think that mental toughness is about how we respond in extreme situations, but what about day-to-day challenges? Grit is a trait that can and should be applied every day. Prove to yourself that you have enough grit to get into the ring and do battle with life!

To build your mental toughness muscle, you need to tackle small things every day. You have to build up the muscle and then put in the work to keep it growing every day. You have to move out of your comfort zone. No one becomes tough doing things they like.

UFC light heavyweight Quinton Jackson said, “Toughness is a skill. You learn it. Nobody comes... born that tough. That’s why we do stuff like those sand-dune runs. It’s a very conscious thing we do, and it’s to take people out of their comfort zones, break them down, and positively build them a structure that will help them when times are rough.”

Consistency is key to improve mental toughness, whether it is through thinking long-term, practicing realistic optimism, or avoiding cognitive distortions. Mentally tough individuals know that in order to see results, they must be diligent in their practice of key skills that contribute to mental toughness.

“The hallmarks of elite performance within the most hostile environments are the ability to be tough-minded, adjust to unpredictable demands, and to properly attend to the task at hand,” said Michael Garvais, a high-performance psychology coach advising the study.

Building the skill of mental toughness is about the mindsets I've discussed and published so far but it’s also about engaging in acts to purposely build and enhance it. Achieving true mental toughness takes consistent action over time, not just wishes.

• Facing the Uncomfortable

There are some specific evidence-based practices that you can undertake to enhance your mental toughness. By controlling and mastering these small, everyday situations you will gain the confidence to excel in even the most unpleasant of future situations.

The first example is taking cold showers. Taking cold showers in the morning is unpleasant, but there are immense benefits to cold-water exposure, including a stronger immune system, better blood circulation, and reduced inflammation. Forcing yourself to take cold showers makes you more disciplined, and doing this every day develops mental toughness and willpower. Plus, everything else that happens in your day will seem so much easier because you’ve already accomplished a difficult task!

There are two parts to adapting to the cold: the physical and the mental. On a purely physical level, your body has to adapt to the lower temperature. This is the easy part. From a mental standpoint, your mind will try to fight back against the unpleasantness. If you listen to your own inner voice of self- doubt and give in to the desire for comfort, then you won’t be able to muster enough courage or willpower in other, easier situations. You ultimately have to realize that a daily cold shower isn’t going to harm you; it will make you better and stronger.

Another act of daily discipline to engage in is refusing to hit the snooze alarm. Small wins can set the tone of your day, and this is actually the first moment of your day. Developing discipline is about doing the little things right, consistently. It’s tempting to hit your snooze button in the morning, especially when there is nothing forcing you to wake up at that time. But it’s a decisive moment that can determine the outcome of your entire day. Use it as an opportunity to exercise your discipline and again tackle the unpleasant.

Something as small as taking a cold shower, refusing to hit the snooze button, but doing all the right little things can lead to doing the right big things. There is nothing forcing you to make these choices; it’s all internal drive, self-control, and discipline. Make a statement; attack the day head-on. These are just ideas for how to start building your toughness muscle; all you need to do is grow an indifference to discomfort and unpleasantness.

• Practice Delaying Gratification

Humans are hardwired to want things immediately. This is called instant gratification and it is an extremely powerful force that winds its way through all aspects of life. It’s one of the most universal and predictable causes for human behavior.

Instant gratification is the desire to satisfy these needs and wants without delay. This is the opposite of what those with mental toughness practice — delayed gratification.

Delayed gratification is the practice of waiting for what you want. Waiting is hard, but it allows you to flex your mental toughness muscle. Constantly indulging in instant gratification often manifests as procrastination; you would rather indulge in a giant slice of chocolate cake than go for a run or surf the Internet instead of finish a course paper.

These choices to pamper yourself through instant gratification can ultimately hamper your ability to reach your long-term goals. Allowing the pleasure principle to take over your decision-making degrades your self-discipline and makes you mentally weak.

Making the choice to forego short-term pleasure in order to gain increased long-term satisfaction and rewards is the very spirit of building the skill of mental toughness. By warding off the short-term temptations, you are able to stay laser-focused on the long-term outcomes. In some cases, this might cause short-term suffering or a certain level of discomfort, but in the end your long-term goals are worth a bit of pain! We already know that short-term discomfort only makes you better and stronger.

Getting into the habit of delaying gratification gives you more control over your life, decisions, and habits. It also helps you to understand the value of hard work and effort. Choosing to delay gratification helps to strengthen your mind and shape your character. It builds self-control, willpower, self-discipline, and the value of patience. It is one habit that can be used to gauge how successful you will become and what you will achieve in life.

Curious about how to practice delayed gratification so you can benefit from the skill?

1. First, stop thinking about short-term pleasures. It sounds simple, but if you are constantly surrounded by temptation it can be tricky. If this is true for you, you must immediately change your environment to hide, or remove, the temptations. The more difficult it becomes to access temptations, the less likely you will be to indulge in them. Staying focused and on-task when problems arise is in large part a matter of the type of environment you construct for yourself.
2. Another effective way to delay gratification is to invest your extra time, effort, and energy into future gains. You should be pursuing long-term pleasures and rewards. To do this, consider every action through the lens of what you are likely to gain in the future. \Choosing to work on your big presentation now, instead of heading out to happy hour with friends, may seem torturous, but you will be more prepared during the event and might even score an advancement or at least kudos from your boss

In order to become mentally tough, you must practice engaging your mental toughness in many small ways, every day. Avoid allowing the pleasure principle to influence your actions, and practice delayed gratification for greater future rewards. No one will be mentally tough on day one; just like any muscle, your mental toughness muscle needs to be used and stretched to grow strong.

• The 40% Rule

An easy way to think about building the skill of mental toughness is to borrow from Navy SEALs. The 40% rule is straightforward. It says that when an individual’s mind begins telling them that they are physically or emotionally maxed out, in reality they have only pushed themselves to 40% of their full capacity. In other words, they could endure 60% more if only they believed that they are capable of it. When you think you have reached your limits, you’re not even close, and whether you can keep going or not depends on if you believe it. It’s quite a belief to feel that you’ve reached your limits and say to yourself that you’re only 40% done. It’s an acceptance of pain.

We are usually ready to give up around the time that we begin to feel pain or are barely pressing our boundaries. But that point is actually just the beginning of what we are all capable of, and the key to unlocking more potential is to push through the initial pain and the self-doubt that surfaces along with it. By maintaining a belief in yourself, you show yourself that you can do more, and that evidence builds your confidence and mental toughness.

Believing that you can do more will make it true, and this in itself is a skill to build. It enables you to go well beyond the limits that you’ve constructed for yourself in your own mind. The next time you’re challenged, you’ll feel all the more capable and prepared to push past your supposed limits again. This embodies mental toughness in a nutshell — it’s really a matter of how much pain you can stomach, and most of us will only bend and never break.

Imagine that you decide to run a 5k or even a full marathon despite being out of shape. Inevitably, as you run you’ll begin to breathe harder, your legs will feel heavier, and you might question yourself. You could easily give up in that moment and save yourself from extra pain and soreness. But if circumstances were different and you were running away from danger out of self-preservation, you could undoubtedly continue on well beyond that first inclination to give in. Barring massive injuries, you’d finish if you believed the pain was part of the process. It’s all a matter of whether you believe you can or not.

The reality is, most of us have no clue about our true physical and mental limitations. Our lives are so much safer and more comfortable than those of our ancestors, and that has some undesirable consequences when it comes to mental toughness. We don’t test ourselves and we don’t know what we’re capable of. Now it is mostly the people who seek out intense challenges that subsequently learn discipline and mental strength, while the rest go about their comfortable lives without any idea of their full capabilities.

Being able to relax and focus in order to avoid distractions from natural stress responses is essential for mental toughness. We secrete hormones in large doses when we are under high stress or experiencing a good deal of fear, and controlling those secretions in the moment is next to impossible for us.

For Navy SEALs, however, succumbing to undesirable responses will mean the difference between life and death. As you might expect, they have some techniques that help them maintain clear mental states even in the most dangerous and stressful environments. One of those techniques that anybody can easily use is what’s known as box breathing. This means that when SEALs recognize that they are feeling overwhelmed, they regain control by focusing on their breath — breathing in for four seconds, holding for four seconds, and then out for four seconds, and repeating until you can feel your heart rate slow down and normalize. Its beauty is in its simplicity.

A stressed-out mind is a mentally weak and emotional mind, so it is crucial for you to be able to remain calm if you want to perform to your full potential. Box breathing is simple to implement, and if it works for Navy SEALs, it can certainly work for us. The technique itself is easy, but the real key is to be able to recognize when your arousal might spiral out of control and sabotage your mental toughness.

Categorizing mental toughness as a skill rather than a trait has value because skills can be learned but also need time and hard work. Mental toughness does not arise out of nowhere in people.

What are some ways we can work to increase our mental toughness skillset?

It’s really about putting yourself in situations where you must exercise your self-discipline and mental toughness on a daily, continual basis. There are daily actions you can practice, such as taking a cold shower — but the main idea is to choose to put yourself into an uncomfortable position often to build up your tolerance levels.

Mental toughness can also be said to be the epitome of delaying gratification. Instant gratification is when you choose your present self over your future self — we know how poorly that decision will turn out. You can practice delaying gratification by recognizing the difference between your present self and future self and also by replacing your excuses for instant gratification (I was hungry) for the unfiltered truth (I couldn’t resist eating; I have no willpower).

By Patrick King's "Mental Toughness & Iron Will: Become Tenacious, Resilient, Psychologically Strong, and Tough as Nails"