12 Tips to Build Mental Resilience 🧠

When you have to navigate challenges and stress and adversity, you can do it more effectively if you're more mentally resilient, right? And so let's talk about how to strengthen your mental resilience on a daily basis. I came up with 12 things that I put into practice, and I know I certainly don't do these every day, right? My goal here is to kind of give you the tools and the principles, and then you customize it For, you know, for yourself and your, your own brain type. So in no particular order, let's start with meditation. So mindfulness— now there's a difference between mindfulness and meditation. I'm not going to go through that. We've covered it on multiple podcasts. But what it can do is when you're doing it on a regular basis, it could help to enhance your awareness and help you control more of your your thoughts and your feelings, your emotions. So that could help you to reduce stress, improve something called emotional regulation, and also increases, for me, mental clarity, which contributes to my, my overall mental resilience. Right. The next thing, exercise is so very important. You know, we know that, but are we, are we doing it on a regular basis? So when you engage in regular physical activity, Which not only benefits your physical health, obviously, it could boost your mental strength. So exercise, we know you create dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, right? And so you're releasing these endorphins, which improves your mood, decreases symptoms of anxiety. It's been shown to decrease symptoms of depression, and it just makes it easier to be able to handle and cope with stress. Number 3, to be mentally resilient, resilient is adequate sleep, right? And again, it's common sense, but just kind of shining a light on it. We talked about sleep. If you have any questions, again, we have like one of the top sleep doctors in the world on our book club. So have those questions ready if you want to send them in advance. We will try to do our best to make sure they get answered. But If you didn't sleep very well, you know, it's so, it's so easy to cave to our challenges that we have, you know, the next day. So sleep plays a crucial role in emotional and psychological resilience. It also helps you to process emotions. It helps when you sleep, it helps you to consolidate your memories. It helps you to be able to reduce stress. So just kind of rate yourself on this.

Next one.

You've heard me say this before, but always learning, continuous learning. You know, when you adopt this, and this is how it relates to mental resilience, when you adopt a lifelong learning mindset, when you're challenging your brain with new information, new data, new skills, it not only enhances your cognitive function, but also helps you to adapt, right? You're training yourself through neuroplasticity to be able to adapt in new situations, and that helps you to foster a more resilient mindset. So that's very important. So we have adequate sleep, we have continuous learning. Next one I would say is your positive peer group. And you've heard me talk about this. The list is very similar to the top 10 things I recommend for just having a limitless brain, but a positive peer group. Because think about it, when it was especially thousands of years ago, our survival is based on our village. And When you cultivate supportive relationships, I know it's not always easy. When you could get have an external source of encouragement, you know, to feel seen, to feel understood, social support—it's vital for resilience. And because the opposite is feeling lonely, and a lot of people sometimes—and I know this from some of some of the people I coach—they might be very famous, but they feel very alone. They're surrounded by people all the time, but they still feel loneliness. So they they they they're they don't feel the connection to the people. around them. So social support is vital for resilience. Also, they offer a sense of belonging and it helps you navigate through tough times. Gratitude. That's kind of probably in my top 3 of this list. When you regularly practice gratitude, what it does for me at least, it shifts my focus from what's wrong to what's right. And it enhances those more positive emotions that help you to build more emotional resilience. So something simple, I consider keeping a gratitude journal or every day having some kind of practice where you're sharing the thing that you're grateful for. This mental exercise that I do, I just now do it on autopilot. I don't think about it anymore, but when I do my gratitude practice before I go to sleep, it helps put me in that Parasympathetic rest and digest because it gets me out of my head and puts me in my heart. And I think about the things that I was grateful for that day. So I do this episodic memory kind of review where I go through my day. So you have 3 different forms of memory. One of them is called episodic memory. And episodic memory is the episodes of your life, right? The things that happened throughout your day. your life or your day. And a lot of people maybe feel like they're not very strong in that area. So as an exercise for what I've been doing for a long time is I just take 3 to 5 minutes at night and I review my day. And after you start doing it for a couple of months, you start remembering so much better because you're training your memory. And when I— how I co-opt that with my gratitude practices, I just— pick 2 or 3 things out of my review of that day that I'm really grateful for. Or I will fast forward till the next day in my mind and I'll say, what if the only things I was, you know, I had in my life tomorrow were the things I expressed gratitude for today, right? But the gratitude helps me become more, more resilient because I'm focusing on, you know, who I am and what I have as opposed to— My obstacles are things that I lack.

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The next thing, again, it's part of the 10 keys, is a healthy diet. We've done so many episodes on how food affects your anxiety, your levels, your levels of stress. We have an episode coming up on our podcast. This is— it's a I can't wait to have this conversation. Well, you'll hear it, but I talk about specifically the foods with this expert guest, the foods that actually promote greater levels of anxiety and those that actually reduce anxiety. We also do vision. We go down deep on how diet could affect, could actually enhance your vision and actually in some ways even repair your vision through foods. So going back to healthy diet, How is it important for resilience? Well, a diet rich in, you know, the vital nutrients like the fruits and the vegetables can support brain health, and that can improve your resilience. And then finally, have some kind of stress management technique. And I know I mentioned meditation, but it doesn't have to be meditation. It could be deep breathing exercises. It could be yoga, it could be some kind of progressive muscle relaxation. That's something I do at night. They do that also a lot in the military because they have to sometimes sleep under adverse conditions. And so progressive muscle relaxation is where you tense up every part of your body and then you just kind of let it go. I also do that with gratitude, by the way. Sometimes if I don't want to go through and think of all the things, uh, that I'm grateful for. I'll just scan my body and go, you know, from the— from my toes to the top of my head, just sending gratitude to different parts of my body. Something simple like that. I, I feel like I'm talking to the— in my mind, I'm talking to the cells of my body and just saying thank you, you know. Thank, thank you for, for my heart beating and my, uh, my feet that allow me to go these places and, and, and so on. But, uh, stress management technique, because when you can lower stress, Continuous stress, constant stress will, will, will actually shrink your brain. You've heard me say that before. But when you have lower stress levels, you're lowering the cortisol and the adrenaline. It could help enhance your, your mental resilience. Something I don't put in the top 10 for a limitless brain is goal setting. I think sometimes what will get you through something difficult is to have a, some kind of chief aim. Purpose we talk about in the book. So when you set these goals, it fosters a sense of purpose and it gives you a sense of direction, right? And achieving, you know, when you break it down into small, simple steps like achieving small goals, it can help boost your confidence, it can help boost your motivation, and it can give you momentum. to get over, to overcome challenges, right? Which is a big part of having resilience. And so having goals, and we've done many episodes on goal setting and goal getting, you can refer back to them in the podcast or some of the courses. Okay. I think that leaves us with 3 more.

Yeah.

The 3rd one is having some kind of reflective practice. And I kind of touched on this, engaging in regular self-reflection It could be, for me, my go-to is journaling to process your thoughts and process your emotions. Some people have, they go to therapy, right? But it allows some kind of introspection. And I think this has been shown to help you understand your reactions to stress. You have to know yourself, right? Which is part of what we're doing with the chronotypes and the Power of When. But whether it happens to be journaling practice or talking to a friend or a therapist. For me, what it does, it could help you understand how you react to stress and helps you identify strategies to cope more effectively moving forward. So you know what your triggers are. And there's always this gap. If you listen to the episode we had, I don't know if it was last week with Dr. Deepak Chopra, that there's a gap between stimulus and response. There's this space, right, where we could decide what something means. before we instinctively react to that thing. So that's being reflective. And then finally, 11 and 12, I'm gonna put this out there just for consideration, is optimistic thinking. I think optimism is a muscle, and you could still be realistic, Right. Because I feel like sometimes if you're too optimistic, maybe you think that thing's going to go away and you don't go see the doctor. And that could be a challenge. Right. So I think there is a challenge with being too positive, but it's hard for a negative mind to create a positive life. And optimism for me doesn't mean ignoring a problem. It means understanding that setbacks are temporary, that you have, with proper training or dedication choices, that you You have— you can have the skills and the knowledge and the abilities to combat the challenges that you faced. And I think optimism is a muscle, like focus is, like creativity is. And the more that you spend time there, you know, the more you'll be able to reap the benefits. And then finally, the last thing that I put on the list for mental resilience is acceptance. And that could be a whole, like, hour conversation. But learning to accept what you cannot change and focusing your energy on what you can influence or what you can control. Acceptance is a really— it's a key element to resilience because it helps you to reduce sometimes the judgment or the frustration or the disappointment when we're faced with life's— let's just face it, it's inevitable, right? These kind of challenges. And so those are the 12 things that came to mind when that question was posted in, in our membership site.