How To Become Mentally Strong
Your locus of control is the degree to which you believe that you (and not external circumstances) have control over your life. It’s one of the key ingredients for mental strength. In this guide, you will learn how to build it.
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.
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How To Manage Stress
While stress is inevitable, we can change the way that we respond to it in order to better support our well-being.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the science of stress, how to manage stress, how to cope with it more effectively, and the practical tools that will help you to reduce it.
What is stress?
We experience both the physical and mental state of stress when we encounter a stressor. There are two forms of stressors:
A biogenic stressor creates a stress response no matter what (like caffeine or extreme heat and cold.) There is no mental component to these stressors: the stimulus naturally leads to the stress response.
A psychosocial stressor creates a stress response because we interpret it as a stressful event. For example, one person could be incredibly stressed by a confrontation while another person remains unruffled by it.
When faced with a biogenic stressor or a psychosocial stressor that we interpret as stressful, in less than a second, our brain triggers a massive cascade of neurochemicals that are sent around our body, limiting our ability to think clearly, manage our emotions, and respond effectively. Over time, if this happens over and over again, the cumulative effect of this stress response can lead to illness. (Read more about the biology of the stress response.)
There are two approaches that will help you to manage stress more effectively: change the way you face stress in the moment and change the way you think about stress.
How To Face Stress in the Moment
Here are several science-backed strategies that you can use the next time you are stressed.
When you feel stressed, take five deep breaths.
If facing a stressor is like pressing the accelerator in the car, taking a breath is like hitting the brakes. Breathing deeply activates our parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for calming down our stress response. When you notice that you are feeling stressed, pause whatever you’re doing and take five deep breaths. Visualization can also be helpful. Imagine breathing in golden air and exhaling red air.
Move around.
From an evolutionary perspective, the stress response existed to rapidly build energy to either fight off your enemy or to flee from it. In today’s world, our stress response is triggered so often throughout a given day (emails, instant messages, spills, bills, the list goes on...) but unlike our ancestors, we don’t have a specific use for that energy. None of us are charging towards our computers using our energy boost! Some scientists argue that the energy we build up inside of us needs to be ventilated through exercise. Release your stress energy however you can: jumping jacks, a quick walk, throwing punches. Any form of movement will dissipate the energy and also minimize the long-term impact of the stress response.
Additionally, exercise creates an essential growth factor in our brains (known as BDNF) that enhances resilience, neuroplasticity, our ability to learn, and protects us from chronic disease. The more movement you can fit into your day, the better you will be able to handle and recover from stress.
When you notice you are stressed, label the feeling.
Using just a few words, you can quickly pause the stress response. Brain MRI studies have found that labeling our negative emotions reduces the stress response. Just saying, “I feel anxious” or “I am overwhelmed” pumps the breaks on our emotional reaction, making it possible to quickly return to a baseline state where you can calmly address the stressor.
At the bottom of this page, you’ll find a feelings wheel that you can use to help with this time. It’s a highly effective tool for managing stress.
Tell a loved one about your stressors.
Research has found one of the most powerful ways to minimize our stress response is to connect over challenges with family or friends. If you are stressed, don’t follow any instincts to clamp down: instead, share, open up, and let others in. We are far better able to cope when we face challenges with others. One study even found that holding hands with your partner while you’re in pain actually reduces the severity of the pain. Call a friend or other loved one you trust and let them help you.
How To Change The Way You See Stressors
The second strategy is changing the way you interpret psychosocial stressors. This rewires our neural circuits, slowly changing the psychosocial stressor into a more neutral, less stressful event in our lives.
Understand your psychosocial stressors
Some psychosocial stressors are very hard to change our responses to (like grief, loss, and fear), and expecting that of ourselves is quite unrealistic. But there are some stressors that cause us pain that we can more easily address. Today, as you go through your day, make a list of any psychosocial stressors you encounter. Give each a number between 1-10 for the amount of stress they cause.
Tomorrow, look at your list. Are there any stressors that you could reclaim control over? Is there a new way to engage with it that would make it less painful? Who in your life responds to this stressor with less pain, and could you learn from them? Is there someone who could take that particular stressor off of your plate? Don’t accept 7-10 stressors without trying to minimize them in some way. Even a one-point drop is a win!
Say to yourself, “This is a new challenge that I just haven’t mastered, yet.”
The challenges in your life are especially hard right now because most of them are new. Think about your first few months in a new job or school. You are learning everything for the first time. You don’t know who to ask for help. You aren’t sure what ‘good’ looks like. New things are cognitively and emotionally exhausting. But over time, as we all know, new things do get easier. Use the magic word — “yet” — and remind yourself that you just haven’t mastered this, yet, but you will, just as you have done before in other hard, challenging situations.
Adopt a new stress mindset
Our mindsets are the way in which we see the world, and they influence every action and behavior we take. Often, we live with outdated mindsets that no longer serve us. Think of them like your mental software (that’s long overdue for an upgrade!) Here are some of the most common mindsets around stress and your upgrade manual for each.
Shift from “I’m just not a resilient person” to “Resilience is a skill I can build”
Remind yourself that resilience is not something that you are born with. It is a skill that you cultivate. No one was born knowing how to ride a bike, and no one is born naturally resilient. You are capable of learning how to be resilient, and this moment is actually giving you a chance to do so.
Shift from “All of this stress is harming me” to “Stressful moments can help me grow”
Research has found that viewing stress as a danger actually leads to negative effects. People who had a stressful life and believed that stress was harmful had a 43% greater risk of mortality, compared to those who also had a stressful life and believed that the stress wasn’t harmful. You can shift your mindset to focus on what stress has given you from a positive perspective.
Here’s an example: most of us would say that we get through our hard times by relying on what we learned from previous hard times. Whether it was a setback, a loss, or a new start, we gain strength from the fact that we got through it and we learned valuable coping strategies that can be leveraged today. What are you learning from this moment? Believe that you can transform this moment into growth and purpose. Remind yourself that this chance to work through new problems will help you become stronger and to flourish in the long run.
Shift from “Life shouldn’t be this stressful” to “Any good life will have some stress”
Some people have come to believe that the ideal life is free from stress, and their life is therefore, wrong. This mindset is often connected to perfectionism. People believe that their ideal life needs to be free of stress to be perfect, and if it isn’t, there is something wrong with them. In fact, research has found that we only stress about what we care about, so a stress-free life would mean that you don’t have anything that matters to you! Remind yourself that there is no good life where there is no form of stress.
Offer yourself compassion
When you feel stressed, or when you forget to use these new strategies, don’t make it worse by beating yourself up for it! You are human and these are hard times. Not only are you overriding your own habits, but you’re also fighting millions of years of evolution that have given us a brain that focuses on the negative, gets easily stressed, and tells stories that doesn’t serve us. It will take time to unlearn old habits and learn new ones, and self-compassion is essential on the journey.
Self-compassion has been associated with greater life satisfaction, emotional intelligence, social connectedness, happiness, and optimism, and less depression, perfectionism, and anxiety. Give yourself a hug. Tell yourself you’re doing a good job and you believe in you. Cheer yourself on the way you would a loved one. You can be the best friend you’ve ever had!
None of these strategies intend to diminish the very real stressors and challenges that you are facing. We can’t eliminate stress, but we can learn how to think about and manage it more effectively. These strategies will not only help you to face stressors when they arise in the moment, but also support your long-term health and well-being.
The Definitive Guide to Happiness
A groundbreaking new approach based on a decade’s worth of research and brought to life with beautiful artwork, New Happy shows you the proven path to happiness.
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How To Bounce Back From Hard Times
Everyone goes through hard times. The key is learning how to bounce back from them. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to recover, be more resilient, and grow from setbacks.
Have you ever noticed that when you’re in a good groove in life, things start to magically become easier, and life transforms into something better? Things seem to flow more smoothly. You are more active. You’re more connected to people. You eat healthier. You’re kinder to others. Life is just good!
And then, when the opposite happens, when you’re in a rut, and it feels like you’re sliding down a slippery mountain of frustration? Maybe you eat a bit too much cake, and then feel bad about yourself, so you skip your regular workout, and then you sleep in, and then you don’t fall asleep as normal the next night, and then you eat unhealthy because you’re tired, and all of a sudden, you’re looking around, wondering how you got into this massive rut?
We all experience this in our lives. The key is learning how to get out of the downward spiral, and spark it’s opposite: an upward spiral.
The scientist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson has discovered that these spirals actually start with one simple thing, something so small that you might not ever have guessed it could have such a disproportionate impact upon you: an emotion.
The Science of Emotions
Emotions are a mind, body, and soul experience. As you experience a feeling, you will also experience changes in physiology (like a facial expression), in communication (like what you say in response), and in your perception of the whole world at that moment (like believing that it is a bad place).
Negative emotions have an enormous impact upon us. They impress themselves heavily upon us, far more strongly than positive emotions. It takes at least three positive emotions just to cancel out one negative emotion. The leading marriage researcher John Gottman discovered that happy marriages have at least five positive emotions to every one negative.
While negative emotions are really powerful, positive emotions carry their own secret weapons, too. First, they actually temporarily broaden your view of the world, making you more open, aware, and connected. Second, they also add a tiny bit of oomph to what psychologists call your ‘personal resources’, which are things like resilience, self-acceptance, and openness. Every positive emotion you have essentially contributes to a bank that you can draw from in the future when times are hard or when you really need some support.
The Power of Glitter Dust
Positive emotions have one last magical feature: they allow us to sprinkle glitter dust all over an activity, a place, a person, or a thing. Good feelings trigger a whole bunch of neurochemicals that lead you to really, really like whatever caused it. When we like something, we are attracted to it. We want to spend more time with it. We think about it all the time. We go out to get it.
(This is how we know we are in love: we have sprinkled our glitter dust all over another person, and so we think about them all the time, and want to be around them, and when we are around them, we experience more positive emotions, which adds even more glitter dust!)
Glitter dust leads us into these upward or downward spirals. If we sprinkle glitter dust on things that are good for us, like by finding a type of exercise that we absolutely love to do, we will find ourselves nonconciously drawn to do more of it, without ever needing willpower. We’re pulled towards it, like a magnet. Even more, our motivation towards it will continue to increase over time, because every time we engage in it, we put more glitter dust on it, which makes it even more compelling. Thus, the upward spiral!
Unfortunately, our neurochemicals don’t care if a behavior is positive or negative: they just know that they like it, and they want more of it. It’s all too easy to sprinkle it on things like chocolate cake and alcohol that make us feel really good in the moment, but don’t contribute to positive outcomes in the long run.
Where you put your glitter dust, then, has an enormous implication for whether you live in an upward spiral world or in a downward spiral world.
Sprinkling glitter dust over something is the easiest way to build a habit, a lifestyle, or a routine that serves your goals, because it will create nonconscious and continually increasing motivations for that behavior.
How to Retract Glitter Dust
Sometimes, we end up sprinkling glitter dust over things that we actually don’t want to give that power to, or we end up realizing later that it’s not a behavior that serves our goals, and we need to retract it. This is consistent with what we know about addiction in the scientific literature, and the way it manifests in the brain. Sometimes, we feel magnetized to engage in the things that we know are bad for us, and it’s really hard to use willpower to halt our engagement with it.
Here’s how to sweep off glitter dust of anything out there that doesn’t serve you, and to become free of it.
Let’s say that you’re trying to avoid stopping by your regular lunch restaurant. You always end up getting the hamburger there, because it’s so good, but you really want to eat healthier. To sweep off the glitter dust, focus hard on the bad things about that behavior: the disconnection from your values, the money you’re spending on it, how tired you feel a few hours after eating it, how you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable in your clothes lately, and anything else you can bring to mind. The more visceral and visual, the better. As you’re focusing on that, bring that feeling of ‘I feel horrible after eating it’ to the forefront of your mind. Focus really, really hard on it. Then let it go.
One way to tell how much glitter dust has accumulated on something is how often you think about it spontaneously. So every time you think about that hamburger or that restaurant, switch to focusing on that thought of ‘I feel horrible afterwards’. Eventually, the spontaneous thoughts will dissipate, and you will know that you are free.
How To Get Out Of A Downward Spiral
Some downward spirals are short-term and easy to snap out of; some of them last for years. It is often sparked by things that are well outside of our control. For example, losing a loved one leads to sadness. If you ruminate constantly on that sadness, it will make it more likely that you withdraw from things that give you energy, which will then make you fatigued. That fatigue will then make it more likely that you have even more sad emotions. Soon, you may start to see the world as a sad place filled with events that you cannot control, which leads to negative beliefs about yourself and the world. Over time, this compounds more and more, potentially leading to depression or other disorders. If you sense that you or someone you love is in a long-term downward spiral, it’s really important that you seek out professional help to get through it.
One helpful strategy is to figure out your silver bullets: the things that reliably bring you positive emotions.
For me, there are five things that usually help: exercise, truly connecting with someone, practicing gratitude, playing with my dog, and listening to music that makes me feel joy. When I notice I’m in a downward spiral, I try to prioritize one of the five to help me switch into an upward spiral. Gratitude and music are quick hits if I don’t have a lot of time, and puppy time, exercise and connection are usually things I can get to in 24 hours or less.
What are your silver bullets?
How to Build A Life Of Upward Spirals
Now that you’ve learned how to pull out of downward spirals when they happen, it’s important to also learn how to create a life that makes upward spirals easier to get into. One helpful strategy is known as ‘prioritizing the positive.’
Prioritizing the positive is all about making the time and the space in your day to do the things that are positive for you. It’s not about thinking positive — it is about doing positive.
Fredrickson recommends six key positive areas: each of them contributes to your happiness in the moment and contributes to your happiness in the long-run. A good goal is to try to incorporate 1-2 of each of them in every day, which will help put you into more upward spirals.
1. Being physically active
2. Being social and connecting with others
3. Learning something new
4. Pursuing meaning
5. Eating well
6. Caring for your self
Prioritize it by treating it as just as important as a work meeting or an appointment. Block off time for your activities and actually do them. You are making such a valuable investment in yourself and in your life every time you engage in these behaviors.
Look at those six categories up there and figure out something you absolutely love that fits into each of them. People who are into exercise like exercising! You might look at them and wonder how on earth they conned themselves into believing that, and the truth is, they probably found a specific activity they liked, which inspired them to become more active, which made them into different types of exercise. It got the glitter dust!
If you’re trying to be more active, find a workout that you actually enjoy, because it will make it far easier for you to do it, and you won’t have to use your willpower. You might not love eating broccoli, but love brussels sprouts. Meditation may not be your self-care of choice, but hiking is. Figure out the things you love that are good for you and don’t feel any guilt for pursuing them: it’s the best way to change your life for the better.
Finally, Fredrickson recommends that we stop looking at happiness as this big, far-off goal, where we ask ourselves, “How will I be happy?” and think about how to achieve it five or ten years down the road.
Instead, she counsels us to focus on creating positive emotions, right here and right now. Enjoy the moment. Savor the good things. Find ways to integrate joy into your life, and to see it for the important investment that it is.
In this way, you end up becoming the best version of yourself and creating the resources that will equip you for challenges that may arise in the future.
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