7 Ways to Grow Your Mental Toughness

Mental toughness can benefit you in many ways. When you’re mentally tough, it’s easier to overcome challenges, whether they be mental, physical, emotional, or something that’s keeping you from achieving your goals.

Would you like to make your life easier with mental toughness?

Luckily, you don’t have to be born mentally tough. You can cultivate toughness. And you can grow your mental toughness step by step from wherever your starting point happens to be.

Use these strategies to create a level of mental toughness that will send a chill down the spine of most others:

1. Meditate. Meditation looks peaceful and easy to the casual observer, but they might not be seeing everything.
   • Meditation can be exhausting and uncomfortable, both physically and emotionally. It’s uncomfortable to sit in the same position for any length of time. Your brain is also used to a lot more stimulation than meditation provides.
   • When you teach yourself to sit still and clear your mind, you also practice mental toughness.
2. Physical discomfort. A cold shower, hot weather, an exhausting workout, staying awake when you’re very tired: These are a few examples of physical discomfort. Put yourself in physically uncomfortable situations and see how long you can last. Obviously, you want to avoid causing yourself any real harm.
   • Keep in mind that the level of discomfort doesn’t have to be extreme. Mild discomfort over a longer period of time can be just as challenging.
3. Emotional discomfort. Make yourself bored. Introduce yourself to five strangers each day. Ask out someone on a date. Sit, stare at the wall, and count until you give up. Boredom and anxiety are the basic emotions of discomfort. Test yourself each day.
4. Finish what you start. Most of us want to quit before we’re done. We’ll vacuum the last room tomorrow. That last repetition of bench press isn’t necessary. Why pound away on the treadmill for an hour when you can quit after 45 minutes? Some of those dirty dishes need to soak anyway.
   • Quitting is the result of either physical or emotional discomfort. Learning how to finish what you start is a great habit to grow and display your mental toughness. It’s also great for your overall success in life.
5. Only concern yourself with what you can control. One way to be tougher is to focus all of your mental and physical resources on just one thing – something that you can control. Avoid spreading yourself too thin. Why worry about something you can’t do anything about?
6. Avoid complaining. Complaining is a demonstration of weakness. If you’re tough, you don’t complain, because nothing can bother you. Show yourself and the world that you’re a tough guy, or tough gal, by not complaining about anything.
   • That doesn’t mean you have to tolerate something you don’t like. If you can change it, change it. If you can’t, keep yourself from complaining about it.
7. Use affirmations. There are plenty of affirmations online related to mental toughness. YouTube is loaded with videos of affirmations.
   • Tell yourself each day just how tough and resilient you are.
   • When you notice your internal dialog beginning to falter, fall back on those affirmations.
   • Make this a daily habit. It takes time, but affirmations can make a difference.

How tough are you? It’s a trick question, because it doesn’t matter. Whether you’re super tough or a total wimp, you can become even tougher. You don’t have to join the marines, live in a cabin with no electricity or running water, or join a motorcycle gang to learn how to be tough. You can teach yourself each day.