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Mental strength and resilience is an important component needed for those looking to flourish in life. It allows us to handle challenges, pressure, and stressors in our lives without letting them affect our self-confidence or well-being.
The ability to deal with negative experiences, understand our emotions, and address our emotional issues in a healthy manner is a sign of a person who has developed his/her mental strength. Anyone can develop a strong mental muscle through practicing some mental exercises.
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The development of mental strength is fundamental for a person to live their best life filled with joy, good social relationships, and positive self-esteem. It allows us to cope with a world filled with uncertainty, try out new experiences, and take risks.
There are three main components of mental strength—thinking, feeling, and doing. It enables us to think realistically and recognize irrational thoughts. It facilitates us to acknowledge our feelings and even accepting uncomfortable emotions or situations. According to research, it pushes us toward productive action and to make the right decisions that benefit us in the long run.
Benefits of Developing Mental Strength
There are many benefits to be had from developing mental strength. These include leading a productive life and finding joy in relationships.
Anxiety is neither good nor bad on its own; however, when it causes us to be overwhelmed or paralyzed with fear, it is a problem. Research conducted on mental strength shows that it helps us fight anxiety by helping us reframe it and helps us think logically about our situation. It allows us to work through our anxiety and achieve success in our goals no matter how dire the circumstances may seem.
Developing mental strength allows us to handle the various types of stressors that arise in our lives. We can manage our stress levels by rethinking of adversities as opportunities to grow.
Our daily lives can become demotivating and energy sapping. With adequate levels of mental strength, we can overcome our negative thought processes and not quit in the face of a challenge. It allows us to keep trying and looking for solutions. This strength also keeps us from procrastinating and makes it easier for us to start and work toward our goals.
Self-awareness is a key component of a joyful life and is heavily linked to good mental strength. It makes us respond positively to criticism and focus on personal growth instead of negativity. We are able to better understand and regulate our emotions.
Mental strength increases our self-confidence and self-efficacy. This makes us more adaptable to the world around us as we become capable of thinking about solutions for our problems instead of focusing on the challenges. It also prepares us for sudden changes which are often a feature of our lives.
Mental Strength Exercises
Cognitive exercises are a great place to start when looking to develop mental strength as they help you think more positively, reframe negative thoughts, and develop a more realistic mindset focused on what is possible.
1. Evaluate Core Beliefs
We develop our core beliefs based on our experiences, mostly in our childhood. The risk with such childhood beliefs is that they can be flawed. They can cause limiting of our thoughts to our perceived disadvantages, which then become a set mindset. Such a trend could be harmful as it adversely affects our emotional maturation as adults.
It is up to us to evaluate our core beliefs as objectively as possible to check whether they are inaccurate and unproductive. We have to replace negative core beliefs with positive core beliefs.
2. Gratitude
Expressing gratitude intentionally on a regular basis is one of the fastest ways to develop mental strength. Gratitude has been shown to increase resilience, increase feelings of joy, and decrease levels of stress, anxiety, and grief in us. Gratitude fundamentally rewires how we see the world and how we react to it.
Gratitude decreases the amount of comparisons we make with other people, lowering the amount of negative emotions that we experience. It also significantly reduces the negative impact of stressors on our minds, emotions, and bodies.
Emotional exercises also improve our mental strength as they help us understand which emotions are productive and useful to us while helping us avoid those that aren't. They also help us reduce the intensity of the negative feelings that we experience.
3. Cope with Uncomfortable Emotions
The goal is not to avoid negative or uncomfortable feelings as that results in further problems down the line but to learn how to cope with these emotions in a healthy manner. This requires us to learn how to sit with and tolerate discomfort.
You can coping with negative emotions by reinforcing activities like reading a book and exercising. This helps in alleviating the pain and anguish caused by these emotions while accepting them as a part of life.
4. Labeling Feelings
Labeling feelings as we experience them helps us to understand them better, understand why we are feeling those feelings, and allows us to get some distance from them. It helps us to think more logically about our feelings and we get a better perspective on the problems we are facing.
Behavioral exercise is a great way to develop mental strength as repeated behaviors reinforce our mental state and allow us to focus on ways to get up and do things that are good for us.
5. Practicing Self-Care
Improving our well-being is one way to develop mental strength and we can do this by setting aside time to enjoy activities, hobbies, and habits that improve our well being. this includes watching a show, reading a book, working out, getting a massage, journaling, and having a warm bath.
These self-care practices allow us to rest and recharge our internal batteries and increase our sense of accomplishment. This gives us the strength to challenge any thoughts that are self-limiting and unproductive.
6. Meditation
Meditation has been shown to have numerous benefits when practiced daily, with one of them being that it greatly increases mental strength. Meditation improves brain functioning in areas associated with problem-solving and emotion regulation.
Conclusion
We can increase our mental strength the same way we increase our physical strength. Exercises for the mind are abundant and we should use them to improve our mental strength. Studies have conclusively shown that mental exercises provide various benefits and allow us to live fulfilling joyful lives.
Steve George Verghese is a trained psychologist with an MSc in Counseling Psychology from the Indian Institute of Psychology and Research.
