Mental Toughness: An Antidote to Stress
Life as we know it has changed significantly this year.
It seems that the boat we’re on hasn’t stopped rocking, and it’s unsure whether the waters ahead are clear or stormy. Disruptions to what we used to consider normal still continue to crop up and the end is not clearly in sight. We notice society at large experiencing unrest, and part of that may be the effects of the prolonged, intense stress that we’ve all been going through.
Extreme long-term stress may cause fatigue and exhaustion that can erode your well-being. It might even be causing you to feel like giving up, waiting for the uncertainty to be over, or even taking a “don’t care” attitude where you are taking chances that may compromise your health.
That reaction is normal and understandable — the wear and tear has posed an emotional challenge and this is why more than ever we need to be strategic about our wellness and well-being. The consequences of this uncertainty and difficulty are very real, and there are direct impacts of this stress on physical and mental health. To understand how to combat this, we need to understand stress on a deeper level.
We’ve all felt it–but what’s going on under the hood?
Stress is a biological reaction caused by our sympathetic nervous system in response to stimuli we perceive as threats to our well-being. Challenges, tough situations and difficulties cause stress. Sometimes, this stress can be a good thing, like when it motivates you to study harder to meet a deadline or get out of harm’s way. On the other hand, if you find that stress regularly gets in the way of you living as normal, it may be an indicator that it’s time to take action.
If it’s not managed, stress takes over the way we think, feel and even act, since our mood and body and influences the way we behave. Understanding the potential repercussions of stress can put this danger into perspective. Segal and colleagues outline the effects of Stress in 4 domains.
Work through it with Mental Toughness
It’s clear then, when left unwatched, the vines and weeds that spring up from stress can grow unruly–and sprout unintended dark sides. How can we combat this? A set of four principles, deemed Mental Toughness is a useful group of strategies to put into action. Mental Toughness, according to author and sports psychologist James E. Loehr is “the ability to consistently perform toward the upper range of your talent and skill regardless of competitive circumstances.” Life is going to include stressors, and what determines whether one makes it through them is their degree of mental toughness. You don’t have to be a pro athlete to take advantage of these concepts — they’re helpful for all of us who encounter stress (name me one person who doesn’t) from parents to students.
Loehr describes 4 Markers of Toughness:
Emotional Flexibility: Being able to manuever through different emotions, weathering the negative and conjuring positive emotions is a hallmark of emotional flexibility. Loehr defines it as the ability to manage “unexpected turns.” We can do this through staying balanced emotionally and unsheathing the emotional strategies in our toolbelt that may benefit us and keep us going, like turning to humor and embracing joy.
Emotional Responsiveness refers to the ability to remain in control of your emotions and the interconnected web of emotions that occur during moments of stress. Responsiveness means to be able to react rather than shut down or go cold in tense situations. It’s the difference between letting go or freezing up and being able to persist and respond measurably.
Emotional Strength: Loehr defines Emotional Strength as “the ability to exert and resist great force emotionally under pressure”. Think of this as your ability to create an emotional force that keeps you going, like a tidal wave with a relentless trajectory. Emotional strength is the single-minded warrior within us that persists even in the face of goliath tasks.
Emotional Resilience: Resilience is all about bouncing back. Individuals with high emotional resilience don’t dwell on the negatives that have happened, but bounce back and focus on what’s in their control now.
It makes sense that mental toughness is made up of emotional responses as our emotion directly relates to what we consider our state of mind and based on that assessment, we act or react accordingly. Our emotions are tightly linked to the way we appraise (perceive and interpret) stimuli around us.
Take Action!
So, knowing this about stress and how mental toughness can help us persist, how can we put these principles into practice? Here are four ideas, each related to a respective marker of mental toughness.
- Flexibility: Appraise your stressful situation and make sure you’re neither overemphasizing the negatives or neglecting the positives. Watch out for catastrophizing, and use self-care to your advantage to massage your mood with joyful activities.
- Responsiveness: Sit down with a journal and write down what you can do about the problem you’re facing. Just one step of action can provide the momentum you may need to tackle the problem head-on, or break the cycle of inaction. Be compassionate with yourself though, dealing with adversity is inherently difficult!
- Emotional Strength: Invoke the growth mindset. Remind yourself that you have faced adversity before, and that you can in fact do this. You will get through this!
- Emotional Resilience: Take a moment to forgive. Self-forgiveness can sometimes cut loose sandbacks of guilt and shame from previous mistakes or losses. You’re only human, and we’re all fallible. And practically, your negative emotions may not be friends to the goals and aims you have, so allow yourself to dispute them by forgiving yourself!
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