How to build mental toughness

After months of dealing with the pandemic and its consequences, stress levels are running high for many. Military mental resilience and performance coach James Elliott explains the simple things you can do to help ease the worry.

Building mental toughness, or resilience, isn’t as complicated as it seems, after all, the brain is extremely reactive, and it evolves to, and accepts the reality with which it’s presented. Whether it be a behavioural pattern, a thought process, or an environment.

Start by asking yourself some questions:

• Can you manipulate your thought patterns, attitudes, behaviours and beliefs to increase your mental resilience?
• Can you implement small daily changes, which if motivated enough to do for 21 days can then become habits?
• Can you bring positive habits designed to change the way you respond to stress and pressure?
• Can you instil positive habits that will teach you to remain positive in the face of adversity?

The answer is most definitely yes. But enough with the loaded questions, let’s talk positive habits.

Breathe

It’s your strength that consciously controls this incredible feat of osmosis, that you can dictate the amount of oxygen entering your body and the rate at which it does that dictates so many of the body’s functions; it’s incredibly worrying that the vast majority of people don’t understand or utilise this strength enough.

Being able to consciously stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system (our “rest and digest” functionality), so that when stressed or under pressure, we can simply relax our body. The ability to flood the brain with oxygen, to be able to sedate the instigator of our stress response, the amygdala, and therefore calm our psychological responses, to see things more clearly and logically.

So, next time you feel the stress or overwhelmed, flex your strength and do one of the most incredible human capabilities, and that, is to consciously and calmy, breathe.

Baby steps

The vast majority of stress stimuli can’t be solved instantly, you won’t have a solution pop into your head.

Stress is often described as overwhelming because it comes from many different sources, gathering momentum as deadlines creep ever closer, financial worries build and almost instinctively, our anxiety with it.

These multiple sources become ever more imposing, so, stop, breathe, and prioritise the next steps, identify an order of which your work must be done and start with the smallest of steps. Remain flexible and understand that you may well fall over, but that you can get up and keep going.

Look at it this way, when an infant stands up, the whole family turns and stares wide eyed, phones instantly in-hand, baited breath as the child tentatively puts one foot out and takes their first step. But then wobbles and then proceeds to heavily fall onto their bum.

Nobody is devastated that the child didn’t then set a new world record marathon time, everyone is too busy cheering that the first step was taken. Apply that to yourself, be proud of the baby steps that you take, be proud of yourself for utilising the strength of breathing. Continue to learn the skills of mental toughness, read and attend the workshops, download the apps and apply the positive habits to your life and condition the skills of toughness, for you yourself, to become tough.

Industry charity Ben offers a range of services if you’re struggling, see how it could help, or if you simply want more information it’s all here.