What Is Mental Toughness?

These will help you in developing tolerance skills for distasteful or stressful situations. Another thing you need to focus on is finding a way to soothe yourself. This is a concept known as self-soothing, and it's especially important in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. One size doesn't fit all The crucial thing to understand about humans is that the size of their mental bubble varies greatly from one individual to another. Let's take a look at Jane, for instance, inside her more spacious mental bubble. Jane is, just like Joe, aware of her car, her house, her family and her bank account. But contrary to Joe she also takes into account, in all her decisions and thoughts, a lot of other people nearby and far-off; Jane is not really aware of what's going on in the world of soccer, but instead she's into neuroscience. I'll admit I kind of like Jane. She's cool. Most people would call Joe somewhat more egotistical than Jane. I would call him mentally nearsighted, compared to Jane. Essentially, this is all about finding ways that you can be kind and comforting to yourself. We aren't supposed to run all the time without having an opportunity to get rid of the stress. You are supposed to have periods of leisure time and simplicity. These are intended to help you with decompressing and unloading. Allowing yourself time to do this is important because it lets your mind reset to a bit of a blank slate. Many people who have extant emotional problems are often exacerbated by being in high stress environments and not allowing themselves the opportunity to really decompress and relax. While this won't solve all of your emotional problems at once, it can definitely help you in processing them when you're out and about.

Remembering that you have the opportunity to destress at a later point in the day can also make it easier to take on the various stresses of any given day. Don't be afraid to set time aside for yourself. What exactly should you be doing in this time? Or I would say: his mental bubble is smaller. If you could stick a number on the size of people's mental bubbles, and plot those in a graph, it would very probably (like many other human characteristics) look like a bell curve. Most people, by definition, have an average sized mental bubble. That's the chunky part in the middle of the curve, eternal home to neurotypicals. To the left of the graph we have a minority of people who have a tiny mental bubble. These would include low-functioning autistic people for instance, and people with an intellectual disability. To the right of the graph, there are the neurodivergents with an especially large mental bubble. These include the high IQ people, the especially creative, the highly empathetic, et cetera. The ones that complicate everything, think too much, make impossible connections between (to neurotypicals) seemingly unrelated things, et cetera. Definitely neurodivergent. This is one of those things where the choice truly is yours. There is no right or wrong thing to be doing. Much like the final rule of meditation, the real goal here is just to be effective: do what works for you! There are many different things that you may find soothes you. For example, give yourself time to take a bath at night, to read literature of your favorite genre, or to work on some sort of hobby or project. In effect, just be kind to yourself. Allow yourself the opportunity to relax.

Know that there's nothing wrong with taking time to yourself. This is an important part of the depression block, so be sure to incorporate it into your day. I'm going to digress for a moment, to be real and truthful with you. Definitely a minority. Definitely not understood by your average neurotypical. In our examples above, Joe would sit somewhere in the middle of the curve, and Jane would find herself somewhere to the right. Joe would feel quite in place on this planet, since most people have a mental bubble roughly the same size as his. They enjoy the same kind of jokes he does, they have the same general reaction to the same kind of events as him. They might disagree with him on certain topics, but their mental machinery would work in similar ways and their mutual way of thinking would happen in the same dimension. Jane however might feel at times as if some cosmic mistake planted her on the wrong planet. Most people would deem her way of reasoning awkward. They would feel as if she hauls in arguments from nowhere, maybe find her hypersensitive, and generally consider that she complicates everything too much. If Jane doesn't overadapt, others will probably not find her fun to hang out with. The fact is that most people who practice ACT do so because they have Borderline Personality Disorder. When people have Borderline Personality Disorder, their prognosis isn't exactly great. While it's largely treatable with adequate therapy and possibly supplemental medication to aid with depression, ten percent of people with Borderline Personality Disorder will end up killing themselves. This is a tragic and terrifying number. If you are reading this because you have Borderline Personality Disorder, or you have read about it and think that you may fit the bill, I'd like to refer you to seeking the help of a medical professional who can be there in person with you and talk you through the various different options. Depression is real, it is heavy, and Borderline Personality Disorder is constantly comorbid with it. While everybody can benefit from the skills that are developed through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, if you're here because you fear that you might have Borderline Personality Disorder, seek genuine help and get into a program with a personal therapist so that you can be sure you're getting the best and most personalized experience possible.

The reason that this is relevant and not a total digression is that sometimes, the ability to encourage yourself is going to be very, very difficult to maintain. In fact, if you do have depression comorbid with your mood or personality disorder, the chances are good that when I say you need to cheer yourself on, you have no idea what I'm even talking about. While it's easy to say from a certain perspective that you ideally should tell yourself that you can do anything, it's not the reality of the situation that just because you do it, you're going to believe it. If she does overadapt, she can be fun to others but there'll be no fun in it for her. And as long as she unconsciously thinks that everyone has the same size of mental bubble as she has, she'll be in for a generous daily serving of frustration, anger, confusion, misunderstanding, and depression. Let's take the example of the bees dying. This issue is well within Jane's mental horizon, but falls outside of Joe's scope. When Jane talks about this to Joe, he tunes out, answers with platitudes, and brings up manifestly faulty arguments. He might even get upset. It's not that Joe doesn't know what a bee is, what pesticides are, or that he can't have a muzzy understanding of `pesticides kill bees'. But his mental bubble is too small to accommodate his car, the soccer league and the whole, actually rather complex issue of bees, agriculture, food supply, health, etcetera. And if something has to be thrown out of Joe's mental bubble, it's not going to be the car or the soccer league. They bring all the fun in his life (and that of his equally mentally nearsighted drinking buddies). At first, when you tell yourself that you can do it, you're likely not even going to have an emotional kickback reaction; Why would I be able to do it? But even if you don't believe it, you need to fake it until you make it. There are a lot of reasons that this is helpful. Your brain ultimately accepts what it's given, and if you say that you can do something, it's going to over time believe that it can. What you say and do is a very powerful emotional input, and recent psychological studies have shown that faking it until you make it is a very real phenomenon in terms of your brain structure. More than that, the very act of telling yourself that you can do it, and accept whatever is happening, and cope with it properly, is extremely powerful.

It's a psychological sword, if you will. If you do this, you can build the skill to accept what is coming your way and really work your way through it all, no matter what it may be. Telling yourself that you can do it is impactful. It's going to be the bees that get axed (mentally, and as a consequence, also physically). But even if Joe would throw out the car and the soccer from his mental bubble, the whole bee issue wouldn't fit in anyway. Because if you look at it objectively, environmental issues are of the most complex there are. They include biological, chemical, engineering, sociological and psychological aspects, extrapolations, and multiple mathematical models, all intermingled in quite complicated ways; Although (and this is a very important part to understand) he'll never admit this because that would lower his social status and prestige. So if Jane wants to avoid a daily dose of frustration and depression, she will have to consciously realize that Joe's head simply isn't made for dying bee issues, and divert her energy elsewhere, other than toward Joe's poor little brain that's already overworked as it is with the car, the soccer and the bank account. Rule for survival: One mental size doesn't fit all. Be acutely aware that most people's mental bubble differs substantially from yours. Just don't expect them to admit it, or even realize it. Don't waste your time and energy on people who don't actively think with you on any subject. Beyond all of that, over time you're going to develop the ability to believe in yourself, because of the simple fact that you are going to make it through everything that you're trying to do. While you may not believe it, you will always be able to ultimately cope with whatever you're trying to do. Think of it this way: all of life follows the same pattern. They are either moving forward, or they are at rock bottom, and rock bottom implicates dying. If you aren't dying, then you're progressing still. Find security in that fact. Your mind is designed to deal with various things, though it may not be designed to deal with them immediately.