Life has a way of testing your mental strength when you least expect it. The true sign of mental strength doesn’t lie in what you do; it’s what you don’t and absolutely won’t do. The greater the challenge, the more difficult it is to respond with mental fortitude.
It’s hard to be mentally strong, especially when you feel stuck. The ability to break the mold and take a bold new direction requires that extra grit, daring, and spunk that only the mentally strongest people have.
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You can improve your mental strength by studying the things that mentally strong people won’t do under any circumstances:
They don’t wait for an apology to forgive.
Mentally tough people know that life goes a lot smoother once you let go of grudges and forgive even those who never said they were sorry. Grudges let negative events from your past ruin today’s happiness. Hate and anger are emotional parasites that destroy your joy in life.
The negative emotions that come with holding on to a grudge create a stress response in your body, and holding on to stress can have devastating consequences (both physically and mentally). When you forgive someone, it doesn’t condone their actions; it simply frees you from being their eternal victim.
They don’t feel sorry for themselves.
Here’s the worst thing about feeling sorry for yourself, other than it being annoying, of course: it shifts your locus of control outside yourself.
Feeling sorry for yourself is, in essence, declaring that you’re a helpless victim of circumstance. Mentally strong people never feel sorry for themselves because that would mean giving up their power.
They don’t hold grudges.
The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Holding onto that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time.
Researchers at Emory University have shown that holding onto stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding onto a grudge means you’re holding onto stress, and mentally strong people know to avoid this at all costs.
They won’t let anyone limit their joy…
When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from comparing yourself to others, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When mentally strong people feel good about something they do, they won’t let anyone’s opinions or accomplishments take that away from them.
While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think of you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. Mentally strong people know that regardless of what people think of them at any particular moment, one thing is certain—they’re never as good or bad as people say they are.
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