How to become Mentally Strong
Being mentally strong allows us to have a stable, confident and successful life regardless of the conditions we face. But how exactly does one go about building their mental strength?
What is Mental Toughness
Everyone has ups and downs in their lives. What differentiates someone with fulfilling and successful life is their ability to handle these different phases well.
Mental strength refers to the inner strength that you need to take on challenges, to perform in stressful situations and to have confidence in yourself.
Being mentally tough is a skill that can be developed and nurtured as a personality trait. Before we look at how, lets first look at some benefits of being mentally strong.
How can mental strength help you in your life
Being mentally strong helps you a lot in many areas of your life. It acts like the inner rock that keeps you balanced no matter where the current of life flows.
Mental toughness provides you with resilience towards any set backs that you may face, it leads you to be more stable both emotionally and mentally.
Mental strength allows you to maintain composure and to keep moving towards your goal. It allows you to make better decisions under stress among other things.
What can you do to become mentally stronger
Just like physical strength, becoming mentally stronger requires effort and repetition of certain mental exercises. Practising these within your life will lead you to where you want to be over time.
Here are a few things that can help you become mentally stronger:
1. Develop Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence refers to the ability to handle your emotions, and it plays major role in developing a healthy and stable mindset.
People who cannot handle their emotions well are known to indulge in escapism and suppression of their emotions.
Having a strong mind means having the courage to face any emotion that might come up. It means being able to handle emotional pain and not running away from it.
Emotional intelligence also allows you to better understand yourself. When you are in touch with your emotions you are able to take proper care of yourself.
2. Develop Impulse Control
Impulse control is the ability to stop yourself from engaging in impulses that arise within you.
Unlike sensations of hunger or emptying your bladder, impulses are not need of the body. Instead impulses are urges that seek to distract you or provide an escape from anything that might feel uncomfortable.
Impulses can be harmful to our day to day functioning. They interfere with our goals and our ability to function well not just in work but also in social situations.
Although impulse may arise, you have to let them come and go, and learn to continue with what you were doing before.
3. Create Healthy Habits
While we take comfort in judging ourself through out intentions, dreams and values, they merely exist within our brain.
When you look back at your life, it is the habits that define who you are and what you have done.
We do not consciously think of every action that we are going to take in our daily lives. Instead we rely on habits to guide us through most things.
Because habits dictate most of our lives, developing good habits while removing the bad ones helps not just mentally, but also improves your life in general.
4. Accept Everything As It Is
Do not fight or resist what is going around you. When you do not accept what is, you end up resisting your situation or condition.
Resistance takes up a lot of mental energy and usually leads to exhaustion and inability to focus.
Constant resistance within your life feels like you are fighting against the whole world and doing simple things feel like a massive burden.
Instead acceptance will help you be at ease with what is. You should first accept the situation completely, then try to seek to change or improve it if needed.
Accepting yourself just they way you are is also the basis of self love. This allows you to feel comfortable with yourself, even when you know that you are not perfect.
5. Influence the Direction of Your Mind
Your mind works on the beliefs and awareness that it understands. Your beliefs and understanding of the world around you acts like the seed that grow the forest within your mind.
It is common for the mind to build upon your thoughts and beliefs. If the seed of these are doubt and worry, it will slowly but surely snowball over time into panic, fear and unhelpful mindset.
This is, if you only focus on your negatives, about the challenges, etc. your mind will build on top of this to create your mindset in a way that is negative and challenging.
If you keep cutting the branches of this mental forest another of the same plant will grow. Similarly it is pointless to try to stop or control your thoughts.
Replacing these beliefs with something positive is the only way to grow a healthy mental forest.
While this may seem like cliché, positive affirmations can help you align your mind with what you want.
When you affirm something positive, any conflicting ideas that exist within your mind will pop up to contradict your affirmation.
It is your job to realize these unhelpful beliefs exists within your mind and to root them out by challenging or disproving this belief.
6. Exercise and Nutrition
Our brain is connected to our body through the nervous system and various other hormones. There is constant communication between our brain and the rest of our bodies.
Therefore, we cannot seek to improve our mental health without addressing our physical health as well.
Proper nutrition will not only provide the energy to your brain, but healthy dietary changes like low sugar consumption can reduce inflammation in the brain as well.
Exercise on other hand is known to reduce stress, increase focus and helps manage hormone levels across your body.
All of this helps directly build your capacity to get do more things, while staying clear of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.
7. Be Comfortable with Lack of Control
One of the biggest pitfall that people instinctively make is to seek control over everything that relates to what they do.
This includes interfering in the tasks of other people, stressing out over what may or may not happen in the future. This is in no way productive to achieving what your goal is.
Instead it creates conflict and confusion. Fights breakout between co-workers and partners when they feel like you intrude too much into their tasks.
Lack of clarity and confusion thrives when you try to overthink your future based on assumptions and imaginary scenarios.
Instead realize that you do not have control over everything, and focus on the things that are in your control.
Being comfortable with the unknown is a strength that can be developed.
8. Deal with your Trauma
Trauma occurs when you face a situation that creates overwhelming amounts of emotions that you find hard to process naturally.
This trauma is stored within your body and remains in the background when not healed properly.
Everyone has some unprocessed memories or emotions that either haunt us through flashbacks or are hidden deep in our minds while we seek to constantly run from them in search of escapism.
Although being free of trauma contributes a lot to your health and wellbeing, it takes longer process such as therapy to properly deal with it.
Want to learn more? Check out What is trauma, and How trauma affects your life.
We at Somatic Being offer body based therapy that tackles the root of trauma, improves mental health and develops resilience. If you are interested check out our therapy program by clicking on the button below.
