Becoming Mentally Strong: 5 Tips to Build Mental Resiliency
Becoming Mentally Strong: 5 Tips to Build Mental Resilience
March 15, 2022 by Lesley Seto, MSc.A, RD
Mental strength is the capacity that someone has to deal effectively with stressors, pressures, and challenges while performing to the best of their abilities despite the circumstances. Mental resilience is the ability to bounce back or adapt to traumas, hardships, failures, or difficult life circumstances. Building mental resilience is attuned to going to the gym to build muscle, hence it takes effort, practice, and consistency to improve mental resilience! Keep reading for some mental health tips on how to build resilience.
The Importance of Mental Resilience
Mental resiliency gives us the ability to take risks, try something new, and adapt to difficult circumstances that enter our lives. Good mental health helps us to engage in meaningful connections and live a life we love with positive views about ourselves. Resilience doesn't mean we won't have experiences of distress, instead, we can learn and develop behaviours, thoughts, and actions to withstand and learn from these experiences. Here are a few strategies to help improve mental resilience so you can learn to grow from life's difficulties.
Build relationships and connections
Healthy relationships with friends, family, and members of the community are important for giving us hope when we encounter difficulties in our lives. Bring focus towards developing trusting, compassionate, and meaningful connections. Try developing a new skill in a group setting! Learning a new hobby or developing a new skill gives you a sense of capability and confidence. Acquiring a new skill through group classes not only gives you a sense of accomplishment but also provides social support. A 2-for-1 benefit for mental resilience!
2. Find purpose & help others
Finding purpose is about having a vision, taking initiative, setting goals, and moving towards them. Part of the process of finding purpose also involves self-discovery during difficult times. Look at difficult times and how you've been able to grow from those situations and move forward with greater gratitude for life. Volunteer your time to help a senior neighbour, friend, or non-profit organization that aligns with your values to create a sense of purpose and build social connections.
3. Work towards your goals
Take time to establish a goal, whether it be big or small, and map out the process to achieve your goal. Start by writing down your goal - in doing this you clarify what achieving your goal looks like and feels like. What are the small, realistic, and actionable steps you need to take each day or week to get you to your goal? Working towards a goal and achieving them can help to transform your life in a positive way, it gives you significant direction and focus.
4. Create a positive outlook and self-view
Cultivating healthier thoughts towards yourself can be a long but rewarding process. The first step is to garner awareness for when negative thoughts arise and begin to shift them to a more positive and empowering statement.
During difficult times it may feel impossible to switch your mindset. See if you can look beyond the current circumstance, begin to understand that the situation is not going to last forever, and develop a more positive outlook. Visualization is one way of allowing more positive things to come your way. Looking to the past and how you effectively handled similar situations or what you learned from them can also give you the confidence to move beyond current circumstances.
When recognizing your worries have gone out of control, start to shift towards visualizing what it is you want for yourself and how you would feel if all your concerns were no longer an issue (e.g. financial, expectations, fears, etc.). Sit with that feeling and notice how you feel over time.
5. improve personal wellness
Personal wellness includes taking care of yourself through prioritizing nutrition, relaxation, sleep, and exercise. Exercise helps to reduce stress levels and adaptability to anxiety and depression while lack of sleep and insufficient nutrient levels in the body can worsen feelings of anxiousness, depression, memory, focus, and concentration. Although these areas of wellness support our mental resilience, bring awareness to instances of over-exercising, emotional eating, or over-restriction as these can be signs that a problem is not being dealt with. Maintain a flexible mindset on wellness practices, allowing yourself to experience strong emotions when needed. Journaling, meditation, yoga, prayer, and other spiritual practices are some examples of mindfulness practices that can be used to experience emotions and reignite personal desire and ambition.
Try a mindfulness practice! Not all mindfulness practices work for everyone. Try each one for a few weeks to identify if it's for you at this time in your life. You can always revisit a practice again in the future. Consider what you would enjoy, for example, If you want a physical practice - try yoga, tai chi, or qi gong to start.
These tips might be all you need, but getting help along the way is key to becoming mentally strong. Connect with a professional so that you don’t have to do it alone! Embodhi takes a holistic approach to your overall wellbeing, understanding that there is more to nutritional health than generic recommendations or protocols and quick fixes. Every body is different and effective preventative health care needs to address you as a unique individual in its approach to healing and mental health support.