A few hundred years ago, life frequently required performing challenging tasks: hunting and gathering, migrating great distances over dangerous terrain, and more. Quitting could lead to dire consequences. For much of the world, that’s no longer the case.
While writing my book The Comfort Crisis, I spent years researching the concept of “mental toughness”: the belief that by persisting through self-imposed psychological and physical suffering, a person gains a reservoir of resilience that transfers to everything else in their life. The idea — which rose to prominence in military, sports, and fitness culture and has bled over to the larger world of “productivity” and self-improvement — is often pitched as the secret that makes a person a good athlete, good leader, good parent, good anything.
Even though living in our world has become increasingly effortless, humans undoubtedly still thrive off challenge and persistence. (I include a whole section on why that is in The Comfort Crisis.)
But as I was diving into the research and speaking with scientists, I found that there is a lot of misinformation about mental toughness and what builds it.
What mental toughness gets wrong
The term originated in legitimate psychology to describe the ability to keep our shit together and push through adversity.
But over time, mental toughness has been commercialized and given magical powers. That’s according to a team of researchers in the U.K., who studied mental toughness and how it’s now positioned in popular media. They concluded that it’s become a “pseudo-concept” that isn’t sound psychology. We’re now often told that by, for example, doing a stupid-hard workout in the gym we’ll have the mental toughness to take on anything life throws at us. But it probably doesn’t work that way.
Craig Weller, a former U.S. special operations soldier who now develops training programs for various elite military units around the world, told me that the stuff pitched as mental toughness training — and even real special forces selection and assessment camps — “evaluate what a person already has,” he says. “That is not the same as developing a quality. By not quitting, a person is displaying a capacity that’s already there, which has resulted from their past experiences.”
Consider, surprisingly, the very group that mental toughness is associated with. If flagellating military-type training allows people to overcome all psychological challenges, then soldiers who face the most challenges should experience lower than average rates of mental health problems. This is not the case.
So what can we do to build the qualities mental toughness is after? Here are five approaches.
1. Address the underlying motivation
Why do we feel like we need to be more mentally tough in the first place? What problem do we think mental toughness will solve?
Our individual answers help us identify the real issue. From there we can find proven approaches that are more likely to work. Perhaps we become anxious while presenting at work. The answer is to say yes to more presentations. Or we may feel like we’re not productive enough. Here’s a guy you can steal some productivity secrets from. Or maybe we’re feeling depressed. Maybe a tough workout will help, but perhaps we need to figure out what might be making us depressed in the first place and see if we can address that.
2. Find the rate-limiting step
Weller continually failed a timed swimming test as he was entering the special forces. But his sergeants gave him the same old advice: “Swim harder and don’t quit.”
So he did. He swam so hard he literally passed out, sank to the bottom of the pool, and had to be rescued. His problem, obviously, was not a lack of mental toughness.
“And that’s the drawback of mental toughness in isolation,” says Weller. “You can work really hard doing something badly for a long time and break yourself doing it. Applying an inefficient process harder is not helpful.”
One day a new sergeant showed up at training. “I got out of the water and the new sergeant said, ‘First of all, this is your parents’ fault for raising you somewhere without the ocean or water,’” said Weller.
Weller had never learned to properly swim, a fact he was completely unaware of. “Rather than some nonspecific ‘just try harder’ advice, he gave me specific and measurable things I could do to swim better.”
Chemists call the least efficient step in a reaction — the one that most hinders an entire process — the “rate-limiting step.” We’re often unaware when we’re approaching challenges inefficiently. This extends to all domains in life, from weight loss and exercise to productivity and learning. If something isn’t going the way we want it to, we should scrutinize every part of our process, looking for our own rate-limiting step. If we can’t see flaws, we should bring in an outside perspective for feedback.
3. Lean on others
The modern idea of mental toughness, as those U.K. researchers pointed out, hinges on us believing we’re heroes who can do it all. But the reality is all of us are bolstered by a larger human ecosystem.
Consider special forces soldiers. “Virtually every selection and training scenario in the special operations community is designed to reinforce teamwork,” wrote my friend Doug Kechijian, who is a former special forces soldier. The soldiers who behave like mavericks, no matter how many selection camps they pushed through, don’t fare well and are rarely chosen for teams.
The military is onto something: “If people suffer together they have stronger bonds,” says Trevor Kashey, PhD. “Which is one of the keys of military training. So this ‘mental toughness,’ ironically, breeds a necessarily practical dependency on others. But then those soldiers will work harder and rise to many occasions for their brothers.”
We can adopt this when chasing our own goals or solving our own problems. Find an ally with similar goals and work together. You’ll learn from and push each other.
4. Draw on a wide variety of experiences
“Gifted athletes often don’t do well in military selection,” says Weller. “They’re used to being naturally good at things and have become accustomed to always receiving positive feedback. And then they get to the selection environment and all of a sudden, no matter how fast they run or how many pushups they do, everything still sucks. And everyone is telling them that they’re too weak to keep going and that they should just quit. And they believe them and quit.”
“A paradox is that you often see the farm kids do well,” Weller adds. “The kids who never excelled naturally at anything, but who are good at suffering and are used to continuing to work without anyone giving them positive feedback.”
This highlights a key shortcoming of mental toughness: It seeks a silver bullet, when in reality life’s challenges are actually composed of many individual challenges wrapped into a larger whole. We should prepare for challenges, whether speaking in public or running an ultramarathon, in a way that most closely mimics the actual challenge. This will better prepare us for all the stressors that will be thrown our way.
5. Take on Epic Challenges
We may no longer have take on big challenges in nature like we used to. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something about ourselves by inventing them. In The Comfort Crisis, I write about the concept of Misogi. Read more about it here.
