Mental Toughness & Iron Will : The Case of Mental Toughness

There are two passengers in the back of a taxi, and the taxi is in a minor car accident.

Neither passenger was hurt, and they both went home that night without a scratch on their heads. However, one passenger ruminated on the accident for weeks after, while the other nearly forgot about it when his coworker asked him how his week was.

What are the differences between these two people? You could say that one person was more sensitive to dangerous situations, or the other was more relaxed in their approach to life. These might be true, but ultimately, the major difference between these two people is their mental toughness. One person was able to process and move on, while the other remained stuck in their thoughts and headed down a dark road.

What is mental toughness, and why should you even care about it? It’s not like you’re dealing with potentially traumatic experiences on a daily basis. But every day, we make decisions that we know we shouldn’t or that we feel too scared to refuse. For many of us, life is driven by fear, anxiety, and anticipation of the unknown. We’re living to minimize mistakes and suffering as opposed to boldly seeking out exactly what we want.

Mental toughness is a trait that gets you out of this rut. It prepares you for the realities of the world and arms you with the means to achieve what you desire. A favorite quote of mine is “Life is tough, get a helmet” — that’s exactly what mental toughness provides you with. Life with a helmet is life that is able to take risks and occasionally fail; life without a helmet is fearful and confined to a small comfort zone.

Mental toughness is about the will to carry on even when life is tough. It is the ability to bounce back and become stronger than before after failures. It means adjusting the voice inside your head to one that cheers you on and sneers at obstacles, instead of one who fixates on the worst-case scenario every single time.

Simply put, it’s what separates people who are able to achieve what they want and those who end up with the lifelong habit of settling. No one is born with a helmet, and that’s what this book seeks to rectify.

This article, we will talk about The Case of Mental Toughness as the first chapter of seven.

Why to Strive for Mental Toughness

As we all know, events in our lives rarely go exactly as we plan them to, but letting small deviations and massive setbacks alike throw you off your game is a recipe for failure. Planning to avoid failure is a fool’s errand; instead, plan for what happens when it inevitably comes.

Mental toughness allows you to learn from these difficulties, deviations, and even failure. Failure can be hard to overcome, mentally and emotionally, but those with mental toughness allow themselves time to process their feelings and simply move on. Mentally tough individuals know that to give up after failure simply leads to more failure. You have to learn from mistakes, get up, dust yourself off, and go at it again!

This resilience and fortitude can give you the strength to keep your emotions under control when something seems overwhelming and you need to be strong. Essentially, mental toughness is that voice in the back of your head that tells you to keep going, to push through the difficulties, and to keep trying.

The Biology and Physiology of Mental Toughness

Building mental toughness isn’t only about making choices; there are also biological and physiological components. Taking the time to understand how your body is programmed to react in stressful situations allows you to step back and view your feelings and emotions through a scientific, logical lens. This can help keep you from making hasty, emotional decisions and also allows you to capitalize on the processes your body is going through anyway to increase your mental toughness.

Viewing mental toughness from a biological and physiological standpoint, there are three distinct chemical classes that control mental toughness and this process of alternating between stress and rest: catabolic hormones, anabolic hormones, and amines.

• The Stress Reaction. As mentioned, the stress reaction is controlled by catabolic hormones.
• The Repair Reaction. The rest, or repair, reaction is controlled by anabolic hormones. These hormones repair the damage done to the body by the catabolic hormones. During this rest period, anabolic hormones work to return the body to its baseline state.
• Amines. The anabolic and catabolic states can flow directly into the other, but that is a much slower process, which correlates to lower mental toughness. When you’re in an anabolic resting state, there are actually two pathways your brain can take to deal with a stressor.

Along with the interplay between stressed and restful states, the concept of ego depletion also figures into one’s amount of mental toughness. You might experience this most tangibly in the context of making decisions or exercising willpower.

• Ego depletion is the idea that our mental resources for specific activities are limited. When the resources drain or are decreased, those specific mental activities perform poorly.

Mental Toughness Mantra

To cap off our introduction into mental toughness, it’s helpful to keep a few things in mind right from the start. We can call this our mental toughness mantra, which sets up how we want to think differently and what we want to accomplish. If nothing else, think of it as an inspirational way to cap off the first chapter before moving into more detailed discussion of how to be resilient and tough.

I believe and I know:

Adversity is a temporary condition.

Adversity does more good than bad.

Failure is feedback.

Failure has purpose, and it may not always be immediate.

Persistence will always make the difference.

Persistence is just around the corner.

Mental toughness is more than a trait; it’s a way of looking at life. Life is tough, so you better get a helmet. Point being, adversity and failure aren’t things to plan around — that is impossible. What we should be doing is planning for them and thinking to the next step of how we will react and get back up. That is mental toughness at its core.

Surprisingly, mental toughness has biological components to it. This manifests mostly in two ways. First, there is an interplay with stressed and rest states, mediated by how strong our amine response is. The stronger the amine response, the less we stress and grow anxious. Second, the concept of ego depletion applies handily to mental toughness. Generally this means that our willpower and discipline wears down with mental fatigue, and it applies to toughness as well. Thankfully, this is something you can plan around if you are aware of it.

What kind of mantra should you repeat to yourself regarding toughness? It involves adversity, failure, and persistence. Adversity is good, failure is inevitable, and persistence is the secret sauce.

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