There will always be obstacles and challenges that stand in your way. Building mental strength will help you develop resilience to those potential hazards so you can continue on your journey to success.
Amy Morin
Everyone has the ability to increase resilience to stress. It requires hard work and dedication, but over time, you can equip yourself to handle whatever life throws your way without adverse effects to your health. Training your brain to manage stress won't just affect the quality of your life, but perhaps even the length of it.
Spending time with negative people can be the fastest way to ruin a good mood. Their pessimistic outlooks and gloomy attitude can decrease our motivation and change the way we feel. But allowing a negative person to dictate your emotions gives them too much power in your life. Make a conscious effort to choose your attitude.
Positive thinking is a valuable tool that can help you overcome obstacles, deal with pain, and reach new goals.
Your thoughts greatly influence how you feel and behave. In fact, your inner monologue has a tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When self-doubt creeps in, don't ignore it - address it. Respond to harsh self-criticism with something more compassionate. Talk to yourself like a trusted friend and refuse to believe your unrealistic, negative inner monologue.
Although circumstances may change in the blink of an eye, people change at a slower pace. Even motivated people who welcome change often encounter stumbling blocks that make transformation more complicated than they'd originally anticipated.
Sticking to good habits can be hard work, and mistakes are part of the process. Don't declare failure simply because you messed up or because you're having trouble reaching your goals. Instead, use your mistakes as opportunities to grow stronger and become better.
Striving for success is healthy - but believing you need to succeed the first time around may backfire. Mentally strong people believe failure is part of the process toward a long journey to success. By viewing failure as a temporary setback, they're able to bounce back and move forward with ease.
The more you practice tolerating discomfort, the more confidence you'll gain in your ability to accept new challenges.
Wasting brain power ruminating about things you can't control drains mental energy quickly. The more you think about problems you can't solve, the less energy you'll have leftover for more productive endeavors.
Being a top performer - whether it's in business or on the athletic field - requires grit and tenacity, as well as the continuous desire to become better.
Establishing healthy habits - like eating a healthy diet, getting plenty of sleep, and participating in regular exercise - can also go a long way to improving how you feel. Similarly, getting rid of destructive mental habits, like engaging in self-pity or ruminating on the past, can also do wonders for your emotional well-being.
A lot of problems stem from a desire to avoid discomfort. For example, people who fear failure often avoid new challenges in an effort to keep anxiety at bay. Avoiding emotional discomfort, however, is usually a short-term solution that leads to long-term problems.
Just because you're struggling with self-discipline doesn't mean you have to raise the white flag and declare your self-improvement efforts a complete failure. Instead, work to increase the chances that you'll stick to your healthier habits - even when you don't feel like it.
It can be easy to get swept up into catastrophizing the situation once your thoughts become negative. When you begin predicting doom and gloom, remind yourself that there are many other potential outcomes.
The greatest things in life tend to happen outside our comfort zones, and doubting your ability to step outside of your comfort zone will keep you stuck.
Sleep deprivation robs you of mental strength and impairs your ability to deal with stressful events.
While ignoring your bad habits may help you feel good initially, that avoidance will eventually catch up to you. When you don't address the unproductive and unhealthy things you're doing alongside your good habits, you'll stagnate.
As we go about our daily routines, our internal monologue narrates our experience. Our self-talk guides our behavior and influences the way we interact with others. It also plays a major role in how you feel about yourself, other people, and the world in general.
Mentally strong people don't shy away from change - nor do they expect immediate results.
Mentally strong people overcome setbacks with confidence because adversity only makes them better.
Proactively working to develop mental strength increases your resilience to stress and reduces the toll it takes on you both physically and mentally.
Reminding yourself of your strengths can help chip away at your core belief that you aren't good enough to be successful.
Stress impacts the way we think, feel, and behave. It often leads to a negative, self-perpetuating cycle that is hard to escape.
Mental strength is not the same as mental health. Just like someone with diabetes could still be physically strong, someone with depression can still be mentally strong. Many people with mental health issues are incredibly mentally strong. Anyone can make choices to build mental strength, regardless of whether they have a mental health issue.
Just like it's not healthy to think overly negative thoughts, exaggeratedly positive thoughts can be equally detrimental. If you overestimate how much of a positive impact a particular change will have on your life, you may end up feeling disappointed when reality doesn't live up to your fantasy.
People with a mental illness aren't mentally weak. In fact, many of them are incredibly strong. And just like everyone else, they possess the ability to create positive change in their lives.
Mental health is a continuum, and people may fall anywhere on the spectrum.
Acknowledging the unproductive thoughts and ineffective behavior that you've tried to ignore can be uncomfortable. But, stepping out of your comfort zone and choosing to proactively address bad habits will skyrocket your ability to create long-lasting change.
Examining your behavior on social media could give you insight into your own personality as well as how others perceive you. You may think you're presenting yourself in a certain light, only to discover other people view your behavior completely different.
If you want to become physically stronger, you'll need healthy habits - like going to the gym. You'll also have to give up unhealthy habits - like eating junk food. Building mental strength requires healthy habits - like practicing gratitude - while also giving up unhealthy behavior, like giving up after the first failure.
If you quit every time you face a new challenge, giving up can change how you view yourself. You may begin to think you're weak or that you're a failure because you can't seem to stick with things long enough to see positive results.
Parents who achieve a successful work-life balance don't live and breathe to make their kids happy. Instead, they strive to raise independent children that will grow to become responsible adults.
Narcissists - people with an inflated self-concept and a strong sense of uniqueness and superiority - seek attention and affirmation on Facebook.
After a hard day, choosing to do something to help you feel better - as opposed to staying in a bad mood - is a healthy skill.
When you're feeling overtired and stretched too thin, it may seem incomprehensible to squeeze in a little 'me time.' But, the times when you feel like you can't possibly spare a minute for yourself, are likely the times when you need 'me time' the most.
Time and energy are finite. You only have so many hours in a day and so many days of your life. The solution to using your time wisely isn't about exerting more energy - eventually you'll run out of steam. The key to reaching your greatest potential is about working smarter, not harder.
Choosing to avoid uncomfortable feelings offers immediate short-term relief, but avoidance can lead to long-term consequences.
Although we may think we're masking our insecurities or portraying ourselves in the most favorable light, our behavior on social media reveals more than we might think. It's not just what we post on Facebook that reveals information about our personalities - it's also what we don't post that can be quite telling.
Whether you want to exercise more often, or you're hoping to become debt-free, real change happens in stages. Slow and steady progress is great - as long as you're taking steps in the right direction.
Being ill-prepared and unequipped to deal with life's inevitable challenges leaves us vulnerable to the dangerous effects of stress.
Pick friends who make poor choices, and you could get dragged down fast. But, if you choose friends who inspire and challenge you to become better, you'll increase your chances of reaching your goals.
Pay attention to how your thoughts change when you're faced with negative people. The more time you spend dreading, fretting, worrying, and rehashing, the less time you'll have to devote to more productive things. Make a conscious effort to reduce the amount of mental energy you expend on negative people.
Quitting because you don't want to be uncomfortable will prevent you from growing.
As a therapist, I've worked with many high-achieving people who don't feel worthy of their success. Whether it was a recent college graduate who had landed a high-paying job or a mature adult who had just received another promotion, all of these people suffer from impostor syndrome.
Being stuck in a rut can kill your creativity, stress you out, and zap your productivity. Doing the same thing over and over again causes your days to blend together.
The busyness of life can keep you running from one activity to the next. If you never step back to consider whether all those activities are really how you want to spend your time, you could miss out on building the kind of life you want. Devote at least 10 minutes each day to examining the bigger picture in your life.
Many of life's problems and sorrows are inevitable, but feeling sorry for yourself is a choice.
One of the major dangers of being alone in February is the tendency to dwell on past relationships. Whether you're daydreaming about that 'one that got away,' or you're recalling the fairy tale date you went on last Valentine's Day, romanticizing the past isn't helpful - nor accurate.
