If You Have a Hard Life, Watch This

So given my mom unexpectedly died on Friday, given that backdrop, I've had a good amount of time to reflect on a concept that's been spoken about by many but rarely defined, which is mental toughness. And before I dive in, I want to be clear. I'm not saying that grieving is bad or that there's a correct or incorrect way to grieve or that you need to tough it out independent of whatever it is that you're going through. And so please do whatever you want. This is not my pulpit, but I wanted to share my thoughts on the topic as it directly applies to my current situation. And likely many of you here are dealing with hardships of your own. So what is mental toughness? So I define it as the chance a bad thing changes how you act in a way that's against your goals. This means mental toughness is not do you have it or not, but instead how much do you have. So for example, if you have lots of mental toughness, that would mean a low likelihood of a negative impact on your behavior. So strong mind, weak or zero impact. On the other hand, if you have low mental toughness, then it'd be a high likelihood of a negative impact on your behavior. So weak mind, equals strong bad impact. And so now that we have that defined, we need to create an environment in which mental toughness can be exercised and ideally measured. So let me show you a little visual representation of how people act when bad things happen to them. Bad being against your preferences. And so you can follow along these little numbers that I have here, but this is the basic drawing of the context of how this works. So number 1, This is how you normally act. Then a bad thing happens. Sad face. This is how much you act out. The distance between these two points, when you act out and then you recover, is how long before you restabilize your behavior. How long does it take for you to get back to normal? Then after that point, you have two alternatives. Or technically you have infinite, but You can, in a good scenario, behave even better and even more aligned with your goals after that bad thing happens. You can have no change in behavior. So you were impervious to it. You got through, got back on track, or you can permanently behave in a way that's stabilized but worse. And so if we see that as the baseline model of behavior change, then we can begin to apply our framework of mental toughness to it. And so I'll begin with an obvious observation. I think that people mistakenly believe that mental toughness is only one thing. And looking at this model, I believe that there are 4 separate components that make up mental toughness. I also believe that they exist independently, and only when taken in aggregate can they give us a complete picture of someone's actual mental toughness. And so the 4 components are as follows. Number 1, tolerance. Number 2 is fortitude, and I'll define all these. Number 3 is resilience. And number 4 is adaptability. This is what they look like labeled. In our, in our fancy model. So we have our original little guy here. So here to here is tolerance. Here to here is fortitude. Here to here is resilience. And here to here is adaptability. Okay, so the first component of mental toughness in my model is tolerance. This is how much hardship, the number of hardships, or how long you can endure hardship before you have a change in behavior. This is before you snap. This is how long your fuse is. How much can you tolerate before you diverge from your normal behavior? And so if you're someone who has a long fuse, AK, it takes a lot to rock your boat. You have high tolerance. Now, if you're someone who has a short fuse, anything can set you off, and you demonstrate low tolerance compared to the first example. It doesn't take much to get in your head, to get you off your game. That's the first component. The second component of mental toughness is fortitude. So this is number 1, that's number 2. So fortitude is the intensity of the behavior change once your tolerance threshold has been surpassed. So think, how low did you go, or how upset did you get? I didn't mean to rhyme both of those. That worked out well. So when something bad happens, do you take a deep breath, walk outside for 5 minutes, and then come back? If so, you have high fortitude. Or do you quit your job, get divorced, and get into hard drugs? If so, you have low tolerance compared to the high fortitude example. The third is resilience. After a change in behavior— so behavior has changed here, right? After a change in behavior has occurred from a bad thing, how long does it take you to get back to a new baseline, to restabilize? Do you bounce back in 5 minutes? If so, you might have high resilience. Or do you bounce back in 5 years? If so, you have low resilience compared to the 5-minute person. As an aside, here's something that I think about a lot. In an instance where you have something terrible to happen, like death of a loved one, does the amount of time it takes you to recover have any bearing on how much you love that person? Said differently, do you need to suffer to prove your love? And if not, would any reasonable person want the person they love— excuse me— And if not, would any reasonable person want the people they love to suffer? Probably not. I actually didn't think it was going to go this way. Anyway, behavior. So just something worth considering. So in other words, Maybe you suffer as long as you decide is adequate. And if it's even partially true, then it means that you have some influence over how long you choose to suffer. Tolerance is how long, fortitude is how much, resilience is how long it takes to get back, and then number 4 is adaptability. So, how your new baseline compares to your old baseline. This distance here. In other words, are you better for this— the disruption? Are you permanently worse? Or are you the same as you were before? This would be the same. This would be permanently better. This would be permanently worse if we went underneath. So if you stabilize after a bad thing happens at a new higher baseline, then you have high adaptability. You let hard times beat the strength into you, not out of you. If you stabilize to your former baseline, just the same as you were before, after a bad thing happens, you have medium adaptability. You demonstrated that you didn't allow bad things to affect you. And if you stabilize below, which should be here, then the hard thing beat the strength out of you. Note: if the new baseline changes in either direction, positive or negative, then the experience traumatized you. In other words, you have a permanent change of behavior from an aversive, bad stimuli, thing that happened. Now, if that behavior change is positive, then you got better from this traumatic experience. If it's against your long-term goals, then you got worse from it. But both outcomes, however, mean that you were traumatized. Like I said, you had a permanent change of behavior from a bad thing, AKA you learned something different going forward. So this means that trauma, as it relates to us as individuals, rather than judging what happened to us, can be a force for good. If we let it. So people who take my words out of context want to make it seem like I justify trauma when it couldn't be further from the truth. I hope that no one has bad things happen to them. But I see bad things, things happening against our preferences, as a fact of life. The only thing we have is our response to those bad things, how we choose to act or not, according to the ideals that we strive to live by. So I see these 4 components as the things that create mental toughness. And none of these are binary, like you have it or you don't. Instead, they exist on a continuum. It's how much or how little of each of these skills do you have. And this makes our behavior something malleable rather than identity that we must be stuck for for the rest of our lives. And so now that we have a basic understanding of these components, let's look at some real-life examples. So if you had a 10 out of 10 mental toughness person, so this is one extreme. So you have somebody who's maxed out all stats in all 4, perfectly mental tough— toughness. How does this ideal person behave when something bad happens? They have huge tolerance, so almost nothing bothers them. They have endless fuse, right? And if something does bother them, the change is so small it's almost unnoticeable. And as soon as it does happen, they recover almost immediately. This gap shrinks. And not only that, they use the experience to get better. So the end result is someone who just keeps improving. And so life happens for them, not to them. So what does it look like at the opposite extreme? So I'll show you what this looks like in practice. So for the first, the ideal mental toughness person, it looks like this. So bad thing happens, but they get stronger. Bad thing happens, they have this fused, almost imperceptible change in behavior, they adapt. They get better. And that happens over and over again. Now, in the opposite scenario, a 0 out of 10, the absolute weakest mental person you can imagine, you might know some of these people, it takes very little to throw them off their game. So a tiny inconvenience can send them spiraling. That's low mental tolerance. Then they dramatically change their behavior, low fortitude. Then they stay down for a long time, low resiliency. And not only that, when they finally stabilize, it's at a new lower baseline, low adaptability. And so you've met these people, I've met these people. This is the person who gets broken up with, gains 50 pounds, loses their job, gets addicted to drugs, and then never recovers. Life happens to them, not for them. And of course, people in the real world like you and I usually sit somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. And so as an example, you might have someone who has a long fuse, but when they snap, they really snap. This is someone who has high mental tolerance but low fortitude. And if they stay upset for weeks, low resiliency. But maybe they come back to a baseline again, so they have medium adaptability. Give you a different example. And these are probably some people that you might know. Maybe it's you. So number 2, maybe they have low tolerance, high fortitude, high resilience, and normal adaptability. So that would mean that many things bother them, but they barely change their behavior. They get in a bad mood, cry, but then they quickly recover to baseline. So it'd be like low tolerance, they quickly get in a bad mood and cry, and then boom, they're back to baseline. That's what that would look like. Or it's somebody who has low tolerance, high fortitude, low resilience, and medium adaptability, which is they get in a funk easily, but then they stay there for a long time, but it doesn't ruin their lives. They just stay below baseline for months until they finally come back to normal. And so I give these examples because we all know people who fit these descriptions, and maybe you match one of them. And I see being able to describe the components of mental toughness as the first step to improving them in yourself and others. Just telling yourself or others to toughen up doesn't actually help anyone, but giving them clear instructions they can use to change their behavior over time can help them improve it. And if you can improve it, It no longer means mental toughness is a trait you're born with, but a skill you can develop. So, what to do about it? Mostly notes to self. If you want to develop mental toughness according to this model— maybe I'll flip it this way— you can rate yourself on each of these 4 attributes on the continuum. And from there, if you realize your large discrepancy between actual and ideal is just one of these 4 components, then you have a specific behavior that you can work on rather than just hoping and praying you mature. So here's an example of each of the behaviors that make up mental toughness and how you can adjust them. So let's say that you're like, I'm a low tolerance person. I got a really short fuse. Okay, then you need to practice not giving power to something to ruin your day. In other words, don't stop being upset. Just allow yourself to be more upset about letting something change your behavior than about the thing itself. For example, I can't believe that person said that thing to me. And rather than lashing out, you think, I don't want to give them that level of control over my behavior. I don't want to hand them the keys to my mental car. Keep your hands on the wheel. Be bigger than the pain. Simply put, just continue to behave as normal despite the fact that something bad happened. So that's a low tolerance example. So how about a low fortitude example? So if you ever heard somebody say like, "Bad things happen in threes," right? Or, you know, "Insult leads to injury," or, "You let bad get to worse," then you need to recognize as soon as your behavior begins to change here, as soon as it begins to change, to not make even more bad decisions. You can avoid the slippery slope, the negative life snowball, by first recognizing you diverted from your normal behavior. Then rather than justify why it's okay, remind yourself of all the even worse things that will happen if you continue this course, continue down, right? Or just what happened to you the last time you went down this road. The more you practice this, the faster you catch yourself from spinning out. And on a personal note, I find this one hurts the most for me because I have to admit that I was too weak to control my behavior to begin with. But at least now that I recognize it, I can give myself the opportunity to demonstrate strength enough to change it. This action reverses the momentum of the bad decision and begins the ascent back up to baseline. Third example. So let's say you're a low resilience person. It just takes you a long— like, just takes you a while to come back in. Like, something pisses you off or, you know, gets you upset. It's just like you just mull on it for a while. You stew, right? And so if you realize you've already messed up, no matter how big or small, You just focus on getting it back to normal, independent of whether you feel like it or not. So this doesn't invalidate your feelings. It simply breaks the direct link between how you feel and how you act. The goal is to return to baseline as fast as possible. Over time, you can act like normal faster and faster until eventually it's almost as if you were never upset to begin with, a.k.a. your behavior doesn't change at all. On a personal note, this is the one that I found to be the easiest to improve on because as soon as you hit whatever your rock bottom is, for whatever this upset thing is, just reverse. It's like it only controls you as long as you let it. I'll give you a final example. So if you realize— so adaptability. So if you realize that you're worse off than you were before, you have some bad breakup, you're like, I don't feel like I have my mojo back, or whatever it is, right? Then you can ask yourself, how can I let this bad thing serve me? So no matter how bad it is, our moments of greatest growth typically come after our biggest upsets. So if you were the main character in a movie, and you know it's a happy ending, and the character gets passed up for the promotion, doesn't get the girl, you know, the person they cared about most died. What would the character in the story do to move the plot along to get the happy ending? As soon as you recognize what that character would do, or what worldview would have to exist, then do it. Because guilt, a.k.a. you broke your own rules, and shame, you broke other people's rules, are only useful as long as they get you to change your behavior for the better. After that, they serve no purpose. So my hope is that by writing this, I can return above baseline with a deeper and better understanding of my own relationship with things that go against my preferences, and maybe help one of you guys as well. Beyond that, for the— I like to— my troll note, for avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that you're supposed to numb yourself or not feel your feelings. I'm stating that you do not need to act out your feelings. In other words, just because you feel like shit doesn't mean you need to act like shit, treat other people like shit, or treat yourself like shit. And I think separating our feelings from how we behave is a sign of maturity, which has almost nothing to do with how old you are, only how skilled you are. And that means that you can work on it. And if that's not a hopeful message, I don't know what is. So thank you.