How To Become Mentally Strong
Mental toughness is a quality that many people want to have. To be able to be resilient in the face of life’s challenges is an admirable thing. Yet it can be a difficult trait to cultivate. In this guide, I will explain how you can increase your mental strength by learning one essential skill: how to focus on what is within your control.
Why We Need To Learn This Skill For Mental Toughness
Human beings love control. We crave it. Studies from Rutgers University have found that we get a rush of dopamine (a rewarding, stimulating neurotransmitter) when we feel like we have the power to make a choice. Not much has changed from the time that we were babies, experiencing immense satisfaction and pride in banging blocks together because we were the ones who made it happen. Our brains want to have control and actively seek it out. We all have our own ways of creating control in our lives. Some of them are productive (like setting and achieving goals.) Some are less productive (like trying to control others.)
In psychology research, there is a concept called your locus of control. Your locus of control is the degree to which you believe that you (and not external circumstances) have control over your life. This is one of the single greatest contributors to your mental health.
When you have an internal locus of control, you believe that you have control over your own destiny, and that belief changes the way you act, think, and live.
People with an internal loci of control have greater psychological well-being, physical health, resilience, and lower stress. They are also more able motivate themselves to take action towards their goals, even when things are hard. When they do take action, it reinforces their belief that they have control in their lives. This in turn strengthens their internal locus, creating a positive upward spiral.
On the other hand, if you have an external locus of control, you believe that what you do doesn’t really matter. The world will do what it does, regardless of your actions. People who suffer from depression tend to have a very high external locus of control. As with the internal locus of control, it can lead to a spiral — but in this case, a downward one, where your beliefs lead to you not taking action, which then reinforces those beliefs that nothing you do matters.
How To Let Go Of What’s Not In Your Control
The first step is to identify what we can’t control in our lives. Many of us leak essential energy by spending our time ruminating on these areas, which then contributes to feeling that we don’t have control over our lives.
People with high internal loci of control have learned how to identify what they can’t control and how to redirect their energy to the places that yield positive results (which in turn, reinforces their internal locus of control!)
Grab a piece of paper and draw two circles—a big one, and a smaller one inside of it. Label the big one “Out My Control” and the smaller one “In My Control.” In the big circle, write down what you are focusing on right now that falls outside of your control.
Take a moment to reflect on what you wrote in the “Outside of my Control” circle. How much time do you spend ruminating on these, trying to control them, or anticipating what will happen next?
The first step is acknowledging, out loud, that you cannot control anything in this circle. As you start to acknowledge this reality, notice and feel any emotions that come up: this type of surrender can lead to powerful emotional releases.
Dig deeper and reflect on the ways that trying to control these externals is creating you pain. How has trying to control the uncontrollable affected your emotions, your energy, your relationships?
We place a tremendous burden upon our minds by asking them to control the outer circle — even though they are not remotely within our power to impact! Look at what you’ve written here, and reflect on what a hard job you’ve given your mind to do. No matter how hard your mind tries (and it has been trying very, very hard — that’s why it’s so tired!) there is no way that it can succeed.
Release your mind from this job, letting it know that it is no longer responsible for controlling anything that is out of your control.
Every time you feel the desire to control anything you’ve written in the outer circle, practice gently releasing it. I like to use the phrase, “I surrender this over” every time I notice myself trying to control anything in the outer ring. Doing this will release so much pressure and free up powerful mental energy.
We have to discipline ourselves not to give external circumstances power over our lives. When you notice that you are giving away responsibility for your happiness to anything you wrote down, like “I can’t be at peace until we know what’s going on with school,” it is a good cue that you are moving towards the external end of the spectrum. Instead, choose a more empowering phrase like, “I am frustrated by what is happening, but am choosing not to spend my energy on it.”
When you feel angry, sad, or frustrated about something in the outer circle, state your emotions out loud. Whatever you have listed in the outer circle will, at one point or another, stir up your emotions. That is completely normal. Instead of suppressing or ignoring the emotions, practicing naming them. Stating out loud that you feel sad, angry, or frustrated quiets the amygdala and other limbic areas of the brain that are responsible for feeling stressed, panicked, or afraid. When you label the emotion, you turn down the volume on the intensity of the emotion, allowing you to move from reacting to responding.
How To Focus On What’s In Your Control
One of the most famous psychology studies of all time was conducted by Dr. Martin Seligman who coined the concept of learned helplessness. He discovered that when an animal is repeatedly subjected to an inescapable negative stimulus like an electric shock, eventually, the animal will give up on trying to avoid the stimuli and accept it. Even when the animal is given an obvious chance to escape, they don’t try to take advantage of it, because they have come to believe that these electric shocks are their reality and that nothing they do matters. (See how this mirrors an extreme version of an external locus of control?)
Originally, psychologists thought this indicated that the animal learns to be helpless when it experiences challenges. However, recent studies have found that something much more interesting was going on. It turns out that we don’t learn how to be helpless. Helplessness is the default response to challenging experiences. It is control that must be learned.
In order to overcome our natural helplessness, we need to create mastery experiences by exerting control in our lives through solving the problems that arise. That’s why it’s so essential to take the energy we waste on what is not in our control and direct it towards what we can control: this is what helps us to overcome our default helplessness.
Every time we take control or solve a problem or work hard towards something we care about, we slowly rewire our brains to create what neuroscientists calls ‘the hope circuit’: the neural pathways that suppress our default helplessness response. People with strong hope circuits are able to bounce back from setbacks and respond to challenges with excitement and ease. They know they can get through this new challenge, because they’ve built a strong hope circuit. It’s also why some people struggle when they face setbacks: they haven’t had enough practice creating mastery experiences.
The next part of this exercise will help you to build your hope circuit. Turn back to your page and fill in the inner circle, the one you labeled “Inside of My Control.”
How much time do you spend thinking about these areas? If you’re like most people, probably not even close to the amount that you devote to the outer circle! One new idea to try out: view everything in the inner circle as your priority list, the parts of your life that deserve the most attention and care. Every time that you redirect your energy from the outer circle distractions to the inner circle priorities, you will be shifting your locus of control and building your hope circuit.
Resolve that, today, you will spend more of your energy on the smaller circle, and less of your energy on the bigger circle. Shifting your locus of control happens one small act at a time. Keep chipping away at it. Within a few days, you’ll start to feel more hopeful and empowered; and within weeks, you’ll be amazed at the difference you see in your well-being and resilience.
Expand Your Circle Of Control
The final step is learning how to discern if you can make a positive impact on anything in the outer circle. People with internal loci of control are masters at this practice. They can look at a horrible event, one that they have no control over, and skillfully identify what is within their power to make a difference,
Take a look at what you listed as outside of your control. Is there anything that you could do that would positively influence that situation?
This is an incredibly powerful way to shift your locus of control. It helps you to regain a sense of control in your life while also recognizing the limits of what you can do.
Our circles aren’t here to say, “this big problem is not in my control, so I abdicate responsibility for it.” Many of our biggest problems (like racism, inequality, and the current health crisis) need us to acknowledge that while we are not in control of the global outcome, our actions can make a major difference in our homes, communities, schools, and towns, which then in turn makes a difference toward the global outcome. You can further develop your internal locus of control by looking at the big picture problem and narrowing in on what you can do to help. And those actions really matter: if we all do our small part to take action in our selves, home, and community, they will add up to major changes.
Ironically, one of the best ways to help ourselves is to do our small part to help others.
