Lessons - Building Mental Strength When Everything Feels Impossible | Amy Morin - Mental Toughness Expert

In this lessons episode, explore the power of mental resilience through 13 key habits that emotionally strong people avoid during adversity. Learn how taking ownership of your emotions helps you navigate grief and trauma. Learn why controlling your thoughts and behaviors can change how you feel and learn practical tools to regulate intense emotions such as sadness, anxiety or anger so they do not control your decisions. And this first list, this list that like again like went viral obviously it's when things like that just hit home you know that everybody's dealing with it but nobody knows how to put it into words and you incorporate into this list things from your own lived experiences probably but also from your from your from your professional background you understood how these things impact you. So let's actually just start off with that let's start off with like the first version of the list really that I think helps people get through these really tough times based on all the different things that you went through and then we can talk about maybe why these things work so well and we can talk about the psychological maybe even biological pieces to it because there's a lot there that encompasses like mental toughness and and and making yourself not impervious to these horrible situations that everybody's going to go through but at least better equipped to deal with them. Sure, mommy runs through the list. Let's go through the way. Yeah, let's go. Just kick it off. It's a good framework just to start and then we can take it from there. Let's see how good my memory is if we can do these in order. So I think I have a red dot somewhere too. Yeah, don't feel sorry for yourself. Don't give away your power. Don't make the same mistakes over and over again. Don't give up after your first failure. Don't fear alone time. Don't shy away from change. I don't resent other people's success. Don't worry about pleasing everybody. Don't feel like the world owes you anything. Let's talk about these these rules or these I guess these these laws of things that mentally strong people don't do. So can you from like a therapist perspective talk about why these things are so and you don't have to go through each one but talk about what these things actually do to the person when they're going through a tough time. Why does why does for example not doing some of these things allow you to go through a death or this very traumatic experience. So it really boils down to taking a responsibility for the way that you think the way you feel and the way you behave. So the reason the list starts off we don't feel sorry for yourself is because that's right where I was. I was thinking this isn't fair. I got another loss in my life. Why me? But I knew as a therapist like anybody who comes in feeling sorry for themselves isn't going to get any better. And if you see somebody who feels sorry for themselves and you offer a solution and idea any kind of support their immediate response is well that won't work for me and here's why my case is special like yes that strategy works for 99.9% of the people in the world but I'm the 0.1% that that is never going to work for and they kind of get angry that anybody's even trying to help them out. So I knew that it's okay to be sad and that we have to be sad and that's part of our grieving process and that's how you heal is by going through those tough things but I also knew that if I dug in my heels and exaggerated that my life was worse than everybody else's or that this was so horrible I could never recover I would make those things true that I could say yes my life is awful and I'm going to spend the rest of it sitting on my couch and never leaving again but that wouldn't do me or anybody else any good so and a lot of the things on that list are really about that like if you took looked at don't give away your power that's really about saying well I'm in charge of how I think feeling behave you can call me an idiot but I don't have to let I don't have to feel bad like that would be my choice if I said like oh I feel really bad because Scott called me names today no I can just be like all right that's his opinion and I can move on or if you have a co-worker who talks to you a lot you could be like you know that person waste my time and they ruin my day because they won't stop talking and I can't get anything done or you could set a boundary and say hey we're not going to do that right now or thanks for thanks for having a chat with me but I can't talk I'm busy I have something to do and all of these things are a tough sometimes to be like oh you know it really is me who's in charge but at the same time like there's a lot of freedom in that knowing I get to pick what kind of life I have I can't control all the things that happen to me but there are so many choices I have and even when we look at things you can't control you can't control somebody else's behavior you can't control the economy you can't control whether people buy your products but you can control how great of a product you make or you can control how you respond to people when they behave a certain way so just keeping that in mind I think brings us into a lot of freedom where we say all right the choice is up to me like just like you can't always control that the hand you were dealt in life there's so many options and how you respond to it so this list is really about that because people who would come into my therapy office some of them had been handed incredibly difficult cards in life and yet the ones who were still optimistic the ones who would say you know this has been tough yet I have these skills and resources and here's how I'm going to get through it could get through it and they still were like hopeful about the future compared to other people who are like can you believe how bad my life is and they want it to come in next week and tell me how horrible everything happened in the past seven days like can you believe how awful this has been to and these people that don't get better and it seems so obvious from the outside like yeah I just take some time a little bit of hope a little bit of optimism a willingness to try new things and an openness to say I'm going to experiment and if I fail or make a mistake I can handle that and I'll be okay I love it's just about it's about ownership and to be like I need to ask because it's easy to say and like you mentioned much harder to do and to live so yes extreme ownership yes believing that you happen to the world the world doesn't happen to you and you can take control of your circumstances it's very it's a very important mindset shift but in the moment and whether or not it is God forbid somebody passes away or on a much lighter scale your business isn't working out or your spouse cheats on you in the moment for some people it is almost impossible to remove themselves because I think just like anger and anxiety just like take they take over they take over and you feel helpless so maybe talk about your strategy or even like some of the strategies that you've helped your clients with as a therapist how do you remove yourself from the moment so you can think clearly so you can take yourself back to this list because I think that if somebody's not going through something dramatic it's very easy to say oh yeah that sounds good for next time until they're going through some shit and then all of a sudden like the rules go at the window correct and that's what happens we know from the research like when our emotions goes up our logic goes down so the more intense we feel in emotion the more difficult it is to think clearly as you just alluded to so if somebody gave you a test to take when you're really angry you would score poorly on it like you literally get stupid when you're angry an anxiety does the same thing to us are overwhelming sadness it's nearly impossible to to figure out what do I do next so we all need tools to deal with uncomfortable feelings and sometimes they're simple things just putting a name to an emotion takes a bunch of the sting out of it if I could say hey I'm really anxious today my anxiety goes down just a little bit just because I've helped my brain and my body make sense of it if I can then say all right is this emotion serving me well we'll call it a friend or an enemy like sometimes it's our friend like if you feel really sad about something you've lost by all means embrace it but if you're sad and you're about to go ask for a raise in that moment that's not your friend you want to boost your mood before you walk into that meeting so we all need skills and tools to boost our mood so could be listening to a happy song for a few minutes it might be a matter of saying I'm gonna go for a walk around the block I'm gonna go outside in nature I'm gonna do something to reduce the intensity of this feeling acting the opposite helps if I feel really sad my brain's gonna say you know stay in your pajamas and sit on the couch today you don't need to go out and do anything like never met anybody who said you know I skipped work today so out on the couch in my pajamas and by noon I felt amazing and other than when I was eight and I didn't want to go to school but for the most part when we do what our brain tells us to do when we're like stuck in a bad mood is it just reinforces a bad mood we listen to angry music when we feel angry and it makes us feel angrier so sometimes you have to then say okay this emotion isn't serving me well so I'm gonna do the opposite and I'll sometimes work with people to create what we call a list of mood boosters so I'll say what do you do when you're really happy if you came home from work and you were an amazing mood what would you likely do and somebody might give me a playlist of the songs they'd listen to they might say I would call a friend I'd go for a walk I might work in my garden for a while and we'll take that list of whatever things they say and you hang it on the refrigerator when you come home from work and you're in a bad mood I want you to do something on that list you're not gonna feel like doing it but it makes you feel a little bit better and we have control over our emotions so many people say well you shouldn't control how you feel no by all means you should and it's okay to feel sad and it's okay to feel anxious when those emotions are serving you well but you don't have to stay stuck in them we have some control over our behavior and we can also control what we think when you wake up in your sad you're gonna think this is gonna be an awful day I can't handle anything people are gonna be mean to me nobody likes me if you keep thinking those things the worse you feel and the worse you feel the more you're gonna think about it so change what you think say well what's one reason today might be a good day what's one thing I can do today and then change your behavior too so if we change how we think and we change how we behave we change how we feel then this all seems like common sense stuff when you really think about it but literally nobody teaches us this when we're when we're kids and I don't know why they know it because it would have changed so many lives and that's what I get for people is only I would have learned it 20 years ago thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one