Mental resilience is not easy to come by. Some of us are naturally mentally strong, but for others, coming back from stressful and traumatic events can be extremely difficult. But mental resilience isn’t just important for recovering from life-changing experiences.
It’s crucial in everyday life and can help individuals fulfill their life goals or have better relationships with family and friends. So, how can we define mental resilience, given its importance in navigating a wide range of life events and challenges?
When someone’s mentally resilient, they possess the following traits:
- They are good at coping with stressful environments .
- They can adapt to as well as recover from crises or painful situations notably well.
Contrastingly, someone who lacks mental resilience might find these situations uncomfortable and damaging. For them, traumatic experiences may have a knock-on effect and bring up challenges like anxiety and panic attacks.
The key to becoming mentally resilient lies in building positive habits when you’re faced with discomfort and pain, and ensuring that you stick to them – even when it feels difficult to. In this article, we will discuss 5 habits that make you mentally resilient.
Habit One: Get Used To Doing Hard Things
Arguably, the most challenging yet most effective method of improving mental resilience is choosing to do things that are hard and confronting. Putting yourself in an environment that you’d usually avoid challenges your comfort zone, and anything you can do outside of this safe space directly improves your mental strength.
The brain is the most complex organ to exist in the entire human body. Despite its sophistication, it actually works in the exact same way as any other muscle in the body in the sense that if you train it, it gets stronger.
Instead of choosing the easier route, you pick the harder path, which first signals to the brain that these environments aren’t ones to be avoided or feared, and secondly, it improves your self-confidence when you overcome it and emerge stronger than before.
Putting yourself in uncomfortable situations can start with small and manageable changes that you can incorporate into everyday life. Staying consistent with these habits is what will improve mental resilience over time.
Here are some examples of where you can start:
- Taking a cold shower instead of a hot one
- Daily exercise (particularly beneficial when you build a routine of early morning exercise)
- Difficult conversations – this could be with a partner, family member or work colleague.
- Mobile phone fasts – sitting through periods where you leave your phone in another room or switch it off completely
- Saying No – useful for people who typically put the needs of others before their own and dislike confrontation
Habit Two: Take Control Of Your Attention
Many people misjudge the power that their attention has over their actions, feelings and emotions. When you think about it, it’s impossible to feel any sort of negative emotions towards something that you’re not focused on. Scientifically, this is because our brains are known to have very limited focus.
This is the process that our brains go through every single second:
- A stimulus such as seeing someone we recognize on the side of the road is detected by our sense organs and processed by the Cerebral Cortex
- Attention functions as a mechanism that is entirely selective, and prioritizes information that is important or relevant and suppresses non-essential stimuli
- Once a stimulus is prioritized, information about it is passed to the amygdala – the region of the brain that controls all emotional activity.
- Once the information reaches this point, we associate an emotion with these stimuli.
So what benefit does taking control of your attention have for mental resilience? After consistent practice of managing and diverting your attention, you become much more able to deal with difficult life situations.
This is because, instead of allowing your brain to naturally spiral and overthink in these moments, you’re able to control your focus, usually strategically moving it to something other than the situation that’s causing you stress. This shift in focus acts as a distraction, of course, but also something much deeper.
When you become able to move your attention away from situations that usually overwhelm your attention, you become in control of your thoughts and emotions.
You reduce the amount of time you spend thinking about the difficult situation you’re faced with, meaning the brain has less time to overthink and come up with unhelpful and unrealistic thoughts that make the situation worse.
Here are the most effective ways to practice controlling your attention:
- Meditation – at least 7 minutes and daily if possible
- Spend Time in Nature – this could be through a solo walk with no distractions.
- Pausing – throughout the day, take random moments to stop, pause, and reflect on some of your thoughts and emotions.
Habit Three: Gratitude
You’ve probably heard gratitude come up a few times in mindfulness and mental well-being topics, and for good reason. Practicing gratitude involves thinking about and focusing on things that you can be grateful for – big or small.
When you first practice being grateful, you might find it difficult to think of answers outside of typical desirable life priorities such as health, strong relationships and a stable financial position.
Though the deeper you dive into gratitude, often when you’re consistent with your practices, you will start to answer with more specific details and moments that you perhaps never would have thought of in the beginning.
How it works
Gratitude works in a similar way to how controlling your attention does; in fact, it’s an effective method that can shift your focus in difficult situations that arise.
Gratitude teaches your brain to focus on the positives around you, even in the worst situations, but it requires you to experience these stressful events to practice thinking positively. There are several ways to incorporate gratitude into your everyday routine so that you see its benefits and it’s easy to keep consistent with.
Every morning, or evening if that’s what you prefer, make a note of the things you have to be grateful for, or say them out loud if you’re without something to make a note with.
Gratitude works well when it’s written or spoken because it instantly changes these feelings from thoughts in your head to opinions that feel real and concrete now that they’ve been communicated.
How to practice gratitude effectively
It’s important that when practicing gratitude, you answer with things that are genuine to your life and experiences, not just what you think you should be grateful for.
If one evening, you’re feeling grateful for the new beauty products you treated yourself to earlier that day, perhaps from a luxury brand like REFY and Clinique – write it down!
In fact, showing gratitude for completely unique and specific things demonstrates to your brain that you can find joy in quite literally anything.
At first, it might feel unnatural and sometimes even uncomfortable to practice gratitude, especially in truly stressful situations when all your brain wants to do is worry and overthink.
But over time, here are some of the benefits you will start to see:
- Reduced stress
- Less anxiety or worry
- Improved focus and sleep quality
- Lower blood pressure
It’s also important not to expect to feel instantly relieved after you’ve practiced being grateful, because the process is slow, and in the beginning, it’s less about improving your mood and more about training your brain to build atomic or zen habits that it will eventually do subconsciously.
Mental resilience helps you to overcome fears, loss, and painful experiences, but no matter how much you’re determined to reach it, you must accept that it takes time and persistence to develop. Luckily, you’ll be able to see your progress along the way, which can be incredibly motivating and encourage you to keep going.
Habit Four: Find Purpose
Most of us already have purpose in many different aspects of our lives – several of which can exist naturally, without you ever realizing. A purpose in life is a reason to wake up every morning – even when it feels difficult to.
Having any old purpose doesn’t help build mental resilience. Instead, you should look for and find a purpose that’s important to you specifically. For example, a purpose centered on making money is less effective than one focused on providing a good life for your children and their grandchildren.
To find your purpose, think about what makes you happy and what you enjoy doing. It could be centered on helping others, like feeding the homeless, or more personal, like building your own brand. Finding purpose helps to build mental resilience, as it can be a glimmer of hope through some of the darkest periods.
Habit Five: Ask for Professional Help
While there will always be helpful methods and techniques that you can try to improve your mental resilience, it can be highly effective to reach out to a professional if you’re not making any progress.
As well as encouraging you to open up about your thoughts and emotions, mental health professionals will dive much deeper into your past and childhood upbringing. With this knowledge and understanding, they will then work with you to break any negative thought patterns you’ve previously learned and build new, healthier ones.
Your therapy journey is likely to be gradual, but with consistency, you can make lasting changes and develop a more positive and resilient approach to life.
Conclusion: Thriving with Resilience – Not Just Surviving
There’s no secret way to become the best version of yourself overnight. It’s a journey that is far from linear, one that comes with setbacks, challenges, and moments of self-doubt.
Personal growth is achievable for anyone willing to commit to the process, but those who find the greatest success are the ones who don’t let inevitable mistakes discourage them.
It’s also important to realize that there is no definitive endpoint when it comes to improving your mental resilience. It is a skill that can continually be developed and strengthened, but one that you will never truly perfect.
After all, we are only human, and none of us are perfect. As long as you remain aware of the direction you are heading in and create small, manageable habits that allow you to make progress each day, you can continue to grow and improve.
