Ways To Be More Mentally Resilient

Mental resilience is a major skill that can prove useful in general but especially during tough times. Having the ability to bounce back from or tolerate challenges can increase the chances of success in life. This is one of those skills that are important to have and build no matter how easy you may have it.

Being mentally resilient doesn’t have to mean being emotionless. You can still have feelings towards experiences. Resilience is more about durability – being able to minimize the amount and the length of time something affects you.

How to build mental resilience

Here are some ways to build mental resilience.

1. Build your patience

Resilience and patience are closely connected. People who are more resilient are, in a way, demonstrating a unique patience – a tolerance for hardships. By building your patience and being able to be more emotionally regulated in the face of trouble, you are becoming more resilient.

One great way to build patience is by gradually exposing yourself to controlled and safe situations which test your patience. Something like reading a book and committing to a certain amount of pages per day, for example, could help.

Mental health troubles can also wear patience and decrease tolerance to stress. Anxiety, depression, trauma and other similar conditions can make even the smallest inconveniences feel like major setbacks. If you are dealing with any mental health issues, address those and make an effort to get on the journey to recovery. This helps increase the chances that you will be able to tolerate challenges.

2. Practice acceptance

A major source of emotional determent is feeling like something that was out of one’s control got the best of them. This can be a mental setback when it causes excessive emotional distress. Having an accepting mindset or being able to accept everything from inconvenience to disaster can help keep you moving even in the event things don’t go your way.

Remember that not having control over everything in life is okay. If things don’t go as planned for you, be ready to accept them and move on. Always remember that accepting something doesn’t absolutely have to mean viewing it positively. You can think of it negatively, just don’t let yourself become overly emotional or opinionated about it. Don’t let your thoughts about it weigh you down.

3. Use willpower

Willpower is not just a useful but also an abundant resource when it comes to being more mentally resilient. It might sound too easy but it works.

Simply obligating yourself to keep pushing no matter what you deal with can be effective. Using willpower to restore calm in your mind if/when circumstances seem dismal can make staying resilient easier, as well.

4. Expect and embrace challenges

The ability to keep going in the face of a challenge or challenges is a key part of being mentally resilient. It’s important to understand that it’s very possible you will encounter challenges in life. For those who have ambitious goals, the path to achieving them could present a lot of unique challenges as well. If you haven’t been guaranteed freedom from hardships in life then congratulations, you’re in good company.

Sometimes challenges are tolerable but other times they test the limits of mental resilience and tolerance. This is not only okay, it should actively be embraced. Being more accepting of challenges helps with resilience alone because the likelihood of a welcomed obstacle bringing you down is much less compared to that of the same obstacle which was not welcomed.

Learn to expect things not to go your way and embrace that. This doesn’t mean they never will go your way – a lot of times life can go exactly as planned. This just means if life doesn’t go your way, you’re ready for it. Expecting the worst can help mentally prepare you for dealing with trying times.

5. Realize many challenges aren’t that big of a deal

Many people are in the habit of magnifying the importance of relatively unimportant events in life. If small inconveniences are viewed as major setbacks they are more likely to drain patience and cause emotional exhaustion. Even though they don’t deserve the attention or mental energy they get, they still end up using energy needed to be resilient elsewhere – thereby making it more difficult to be more resilient overall.

Think of how important a challenge really is before you let it have an effect on you emotionally. Will it matter in 5 minutes? 5 days? 5 weeks? 5 months? 5 years? For a lot of life’s “obstacles” the answer is probably a no. Whenever you find yourself faced with a less than ideal situation, think through its real impact on you and ask yourself if it truly deserves any energy from you. If the answer is no that is automatically a reason to leave it be and move on to thinking of more important matters.