These Habits Will Make You Mentally Strong
#2 – Follow the biggest psychological breakthrough in history
I went on a relaxing holiday to crocodile country.
It’s known as The Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia. My family and I spent the first few days walking around the town. We went everywhere. My wife wanted to go to Four Mile Beach so we added it to our schedule.
She was so excited and put together and elaborate picnic lunch.
A few hours before our visit to the famous beach, we went to a zoo to see crocodiles. They were scary. The bastards would eat anything. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. They lurked below the murky water.
I imagined a small kid accidentally pushing me into the water full of crocodiles. My mind became weak for a few seconds. I started to panic. I had to leave the crocodile area and my wife and baby daughter.
I sat on a seat outside to relax and a large, dangerous lizard snuck up on me. I nearly had a heart attack. “Is there nowhere in this town I can relax away from predators?”
Once I calmed down I went back to the crocodile area. They were about to do a croc show and some dumb humans were going to swim with the crocodiles. They even paid hundreds of dollars to do it.
I stood there and watched. At the end I went to chat with the nice man who looks after the crocodiles. He told me how he loved them. He jumped on the backs of crocodiles for fun every weekend.
He asked me what we were up to for the rest of the holiday. I told him about our gorgeous picnic we had planned later that day.
“Crikey, I’d never go there, mate!”
My heart stopped.
“What’s wrong with Four Mile Beach?”
“Mate, that’s where all the crocs are. They hang out along the shoreline. The sea there is like the crocodile main highway for Australia, maybe even the world. They go from the sea to the rivers at that spot.”
I had just learned I was about to eat lunch with my wife and daughter next to a crocodile savanna. There’s a high chance we would have been eaten. What a bad father I would’ve been if I took my baby daughter there and she was swallowed whole.
The old Tim would’ve never gone on holiday to a strange place again.
Over the last few years, I’ve worked hard on my mental strength and can move past these scary situations.
The real pandemic is weak minds
…minds that are easily manipulated and default to being fearful.
When your mind is mentally strong, you can control it rather than have it control you. Being mentally strong looks like this:
Losing all your money and not taking your own life
Getting fired and holding it together
Facing rejection and seeing it as a redirection
Hearing news of war and not losing your mind
Seeing a loved one die and remembering the good times with them rather than being ruled by decades of sadness.
When you become mentally strong you feel better emotionally. According to psychologists, it also lowers your anxiety.
These habits will make you mentally stronger.
1. Give up constant mental time travel
Time travel is supposed to be impossible. We don’t have time machines (yet).
But we can already mentally time travel. When we think about the future using our imagination, we time travel. When we tap into our memory to think about the past, we also time travel.
Mentally weak minds live in fictitious worlds in the past and the future. This is why so many grown adults watch a stupid amount of Marvel superhero movies. They can’t escape La La Land or dare live in the real world. The fake world is a crutch, a way to numb the pain of regret.
You need to spend most of your time in the present to be mentally strong.
The present is reality. It’s where you have control. It’s where big goals happen and produce enormous fulfillment.
2. Follow the biggest psychological breakthrough in history
William James is the father of American psychology.
The American Psychological Association once asked him to come and give a 1-2 hour talk. They wanted him to sum up 50 years of psychological research.
He rocked up to the talk and said one line:
“People by and large become what they think of themselves.”
Then, bizarrely, he walked out of the room and went home. His talk lasted 10 seconds. Simplicity is hidden genius.
If you think you’re a moron then you’ll act in line with that character. If you think the world is screwed then you’ll live as if it is. That means we have to see ourselves as valuable. As someone who deserves the good life.
The alternative is you see yourself as a victim of external forces. That’s how you slowly transcend into darkness and become crazy.
One way I’ve found to increase my self-esteem is to get off the couch and actually build sh*t. Actually take risks, execute, and try. When you’ve experimented and collected some data, it’s easier to think highly of yourself.
3. Become aware of your mental programming
Our minds operate based on our programming.
The problem is 99% of people are unaware of their programming. They live in ignorant bliss. They believe their mind controls them. Or that their inherited genes determine if they’ll succumb to depression and even alcoholism.
Nothing happens in our minds by accident.
Mentally strong people are aware they can reprogram their minds. They understand the basics of neuroplasticity. The brain can fire and rewire continuously. We are way more in control than we think.
So if our mind goes weak we can notice the cause and adjust our programming, so the next time the situation doesn’t take us hostage and murder our thoughts in our sleep.
Notice how you think.
Write down your beliefs.
Write down your limitations.
Adjust as needed. Brainwash yourself into higher-level thinking that leads to higher states of consciousness.
4. Make a decision and don’t ghost like a piss weak parasite
Decision fatigue that leads to indecision is common.
When someone is asked to make a big decision they’ll often ghost the person asking them. It’s what weak minds who are afraid of everything do.
If this is you then there’s an opportunity to improve. Make a decision. Get out of the hell of maybe, or worse, someday (mayday, mayday, mayday).
Piss weak parasites run from decisions and ghost others. Mental toughness is making hard decisions and backing yourself.
The more courage the more growth.
5. Give up the need for certainty
“The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces” – Robert Greene
The need for certainty will f*ck up your life.
The universe runs on entropy. Therefore, none of us know what will happen next and chaos is our default.
When you seek too much certainty you stop taking risks. This limits your growth. And a lack of growth leads to huge regrets that you can never go back in time and fix.
In the last 5 years society has become prone to fortune tellers in disguise. They watch the news for predictions about wars that haven’t started. We think we know the outcome of the 2024 US election before it’s happened.
In the world of money, we think experts can predict the price of tech stocks or crypto. But this is all one big lie that the need for certainty makes us susceptible to. The vaccine is to embrace uncertainty.
Not knowing what’s going to happen makes life bloody exciting.
6. Fall in love with the word “yet” and change your life forever
Your potential is unknown.
Instead of saying “I can’t do that” to new challenges, try adopting the yet mindset. Then you start saying “I can’t do that YET.”
The word yet removes the limiting valve on your consciousness. It reminds us we can do whatever we want if we put our mind to it. Your current results have nothing to do with the success you can achieve in the future.
Our potential is found beyond YET. It’s when we transcend our comfort zone, take risks, meet new people, choose hard things, and feel pain.
Sometimes the process burns us alive for a few days. But eventually your true self is revealed and you discover you’re capable of doing much bigger things than you realized.
7. Upgrade your impulse control
Strong minds don’t give in to impulses.
They don’t get addicted to:
P*rn
Sugar
Junk food
Netflix TV show fantasies
Dopamine-driven social media
People with a strong mind understand the danger of too much pleasure and being a dopamine junkie looking for a hit of mental smack.
Admittedly, I need to do some work on my impulse control. It’s a big focus for this year. But compared to 5 years ago, I’m a freaking saint.
Choose mental toughness. Live accordingly.
Are you mentally strong right now? If not, what’s holding you back? Let me know in the comments section below so we can all learn from you. I’ll personally respond to your comment.
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Growing accustomed to excessive comfort can diminish mental strength too.
In 2009, I spent 3 weeks in Japan. In a country where English is not widely spoken, I only had the maps in the appendix of my Lonely Planet book to navigate. It was fine.
Now, I get panicked when I have to drive more than 15 minutes from home without GPS.
2 years ago I felt extremely bored and mentally weak. I started working with a coach and the transformation from a weak mind to a mentally strong one has been extremely rewarding. I was the classic victim playing character. I took control over my thoughts and became the main character of my own story. It requires hard work and dedication, still today.
Thank you for this great article. It made me realise I've already grown a lot and yet, still have more potential to get better.