Mental Toughness & Iron Will: Mind Over Heart

We're now having the third chapter of seven discussing about Mental Toughness and Iron Will. Buckle up folks, it's going to another long read.

Having control over your emotions is an important aspect that characterizes mental toughness. Having control over your emotions does not simply mean suppressing them. Mentally tough individuals still experience their emotions; however, they do not let their emotions dictate their decision-making.

Part of the reason mental toughness is difficult to achieve is due to the necessity of keeping our emotions in check. Emotions hijack our mental processes and leave us agonizing over a decision or cause us to make a terrible choice, even when logically it is very clear what choice should be made.

People who are not in control of their emotions react with anger or sadness when something doesn’t go as planned. This behavior can be alienating to spouses, children, coworkers, and friends. Mentally tough people refuse to let outside circumstances affect their plans. Regardless of what difficult situations life may throw at them, these individuals keep their emotions in check and continue moving toward their long-term goals.

To achieve mental toughness, being aware of and in control of your emotions is paramount. Out- of-control thoughts and feelings lead to reactive, nonlogical decisions; fragile states where you can become paralyzed with indecision; or easily excitable mindsets in which many poor and contradictory decisions are made. Working toward mental toughness helps you avoid all of this and instead allows you to make calm, cool decisions that help you make strides forward toward the life you want to lead.

Expressing Your Emotions

Sandra’s mother was recently diagnosed with dementia. She is an only child, so all of the required caretaking quickly fell to her. Between taking her mother to doctor’s appointments, preparing food, and completing the daily tasks required at two homes — Sandra was exhausted.

Sandra had always been described as a perfectionist, so although she felt overwhelmed, she suppressed her emotions and carried on with her duties. By rushing from doctor’s appointment to doctor’s appointment, she was able to completely bottle her feelings and act as though nothing major had occurred in her life.

A few weeks went by and Sandra began to feel run down. Although she was exhausted, she found it difficult to fall asleep at night due to anxiety about her mother’s condition. She often found herself snapping at her husband and daughter. At work, she began to forget deadlines and even forgot a few important details regarding a client’s file.

Finally, at one of her mother’s doctor’s appointments, the physician mentioned that Sandra looked stressed. The physician advised Sandra to acknowledge her feelings and spoke about the stress relief that can often be found through journaling or giving oneself time to cry.

Although it felt foreign, Sandra decided to give herself some space to write about her feelings. Over the course of a week she noticed a significant difference in her concentration, work performance, and patience with her family. It almost felt like magic how quickly she noticed herself bouncing back to her normal equilibrium.

As you can see, suppressing your emotions is not healthy or effective. Mentally tough individuals express and experience their emotions but ensure that they do so in a way that is not detrimental. That’s the major difference. By expressing and experiencing your emotions you are able to think clearly and calmly and move forward to deal with whatever obstacle you are facing. Sandra was able to capitalize on journaling as a form of emotional expression to help her release her feelings and avoid the stress that comes from ignoring one’s emotions.

Suppressing your emotions, whether anger, sadness, or fear, can lead to long-term psychological damage. Crying releases negative tension that builds up from the everyday occurrences in our lives. Emotional tears contain hormones that escape our body, which ultimately improves our mood after crying. This is an indication that important psychological and physiological changes happen within the body during the emotional release of crying.

After crying, people often feel recharged, comforted, and filled with the energy to pick themselves up and continue moving forward. Deep, emotional crying involves very specific physical processes including muscular spasms, rapid breathing, and tears. These symptoms quickly increase, come to a climax, and then gradually subside. During stressful situations, stepping back and taking the time to feel your emotions sets you up to think logically about solutions or next steps without having anxiety or depression clouding your judgment.

There are a number of ways to express your emotions, and the method that you choose doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you are taking the time to feel your emotions to prevent them from intruding into your life and altering your decision-making ability.

Emotional Granularity

Since it is clear that emotional suppression is not the answer, what should you do instead? Emotional granularity is another part of the answer. This is the process of understanding what you are feeling by putting a specific name on it. It seems insignificant, but you will be able to release some of the intensity of the emotion just by allowing it to make itself known. There’s a certain amount of tension from a lack of clarity about your feelings.

People that have finely tuned feelings and are very in touch with their emotions are said to exhibit emotional granularity. It’s not about being able to complicatedly label every emotion you have or just expand your vocabulary so that you can do this. It is about experiencing the world, and thus yourself, more precisely. By doing this, you will be able to better identify what it is exactly that you’re feeling, and by identifying it, you will be able to understand the reasoning behind it.

The better your understanding of what it is exactly that you’re experiencing, the more flexibility your brain has in anticipating or prescribing actions. It is easy to generalize or dismiss what you are feeling, but it is much more effective to give it some thought and pinpoint exactly what your emotional state is.

Mental toughness typically conjures up an image of a stoic stiff upper lip, but that is far removed from reality. Feeling your emotions and truly understanding them gives you a proper foundation to take charge of your life.

Thinking Long-Term

Expressing your emotions is vital to mental health and resiliency. But there is another step that mentally tough people take to ensure they make balanced, well-thought-through decisions—they aren’t reactive to what happens on a daily level. To be successful in regulating your emotions, your ability to think long-term instead of focusing on the day-to-day nitty-gritty of life will prove invaluable.

Many people make the mistake of spending too much of their time focused on the immediate future or sucked into the status quo. Instead, you should consciously choose to zoom out and look at the broader picture in order to gain control over your emotions. Focusing on small setbacks that occur in the short-term can skew your view of what matters in the long-term.

Choosing to focus on the immediate moment causes you to engage with life in a very reactive manner: you are emotional; prone to making quick, ill-thought-through decisions; and easily derailed by day-to-day setbacks. Instead of living in this reactive manner, those with mental toughness make a conscious choice to live their lives in a state of controlled deliberateness. They are logical, measured, and consider the long-term implications of their decision before setting a course of action. Everyone encounters day-to-day ups and downs, but obsessing over short-term wins or losses is a waste of energy.

There is an old Zen saying: “Your anger, depression, spite, or despair, so seemingly real and important right now; where will they have gone in a month, a week, or even a moment?”

Intense emotions blind us to the future and con us that now is all that matters. In fact, when we are incredibly angry or anxious, we can even forget that there is even going to be a future. We’ve all said or done things we later regret simply because, for a time, we let ourselves be dictated by our own emotion. Look beyond the immediate and you’ll see the bigger picture and calm down, too.

The ABC Loop

The previous section was about zooming out and considering the bigger picture to remain calm and balanced. Another way to keep your mental toughness is to analyze the circumstances surrounding your emotions to understand what your triggers are. This is known as the ABC loop and it asks you to consider emotional reactions as the end result of a series of events.

The ABC loop is a classic behavioral therapy technique that considers all the elements that contribute to an emotional reaction. It stands for Antecedent, Behavior, and Consequence. The middle section, the behavior, is often called the Behavior of Interest, and the technique works by looking at the before and after to understand why the behavior in the middle occurred. It’s also what you want to examine and regulate or control — hence, the increased scrutiny on it. To control the behavior, you must understand and control the antecedent and consequence.

Let’s begin with Antecedent. This is the environment, the events, or the preceding the Behavior of Interest. This is your cause or trigger, typically. Anything that happens before the event that may contribute to the behavior would fall into this category. When identifying the antecedents, consider where and when it is occurring, during what activity, with whom it occurred, and what any others were doing at the time.

For example, perhaps you are someone who finds yourself constantly arguing with your parents. You might realize that most of the time you don’t even agree with what you’re arguing with, but you do it anyway. You want to stop this behavior, so you think about the last time it occurred. Set the scene first. In this situation: dinner at your parents’ house, early afternoon, things were going fine, you were talking about your job and your career goals. This is the Antecedent.

Then we move onto the Behavior, which is the focus of this technique. This is what follows the antecedent and is what you have identified as something to change or control. In this case, the behavior is uncontrollable anger toward the people around you, which causes stress and conflict. It is important to describe the behavior in full when looking back in hindsight. In this situation, there are raised voices, dramatic gestures, insults thrown, and intentionally vicious comments being said, most of which were irrelevant to the actual argument.

Last is the Consequence of the behavior. This outcome is important because it is often one that reinforces the behavior. If the consequence is one that is genuinely undesirable, most unwanted behaviors will not be repeated, but if there is some sort of reward that is incidentally received, then the behavior will continue. In this case, the outcome may be that one of your parents, usually your mother, leaves the room upset and the dinner is cut short, whereby you then go home. This is not that negative of a consequence, and thus, the behavior sees no real reason to change. Consider, instead, if the reaction was being kicked out of your parents’ home and becoming homeless. The behavior would certainly have reason to change.

The ABC loop is designed so that you can focus on the before and after of a behavior and figure out why certain behaviors are being repeated over and over again. If you can identify the cause and the effect of a behavior, you can better control your emotional reactions by avoiding those triggering causes or by considering the reward you are unconsciously receiving from emotional outbursts.

In other words, take a step or two backward. Ask yourself, “How did I get here?” Understanding where our emotions arise from and what evokes them is a crucial component to help you begin to manage emotions. When you notice your emotions, be willing to hunt for the triggers that may have propelled you into your given feelings. Then fast-forward and ask yourself about the consequences of your actions. Emotions don’t happen in a vacuum. You are ultimately responsible for them, but part of mental toughness is understanding where they stem from and cutting off their supply.

Ultimately, we are all slaves to our emotions. This is an undeniable fact. But at least we can try to battle our lesser instincts and think with logic and reason.

First, it is important to note that this does not mean suppressing your emotions. In fact, expressing them has been shown to have huge psychological benefits. The more specific and granular you can be with your emotions, the bigger the benefits. It’s just a matter of moderation between remaining in control and feeling.

Thinking long-term is a powerful means of remaining calm and rational. When something goes wrong, it may feel like the end of the world, but then what happens when you zoom out? On a long enough timeline, nothing is really very serious. The problem is, we all live in the present moment, but if we were to adjust our expectations and think long-term, we’d understand that we rarely have anything to truly worry about.

Sometimes when we’re emotional, we forget there is going to be a future. Remind yourself by thinking in terms of 10-10-10 and looking toward the rest of your life.

Finally, a way to build mental toughness and rein in your emotions is to use the ABC loop. ABC stands for Antecedent, Behavior, and Consequence, and they all work together to either reinforce or punish behaviors such as emotional reactions.

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