Mental Toughness

I've made a few postings on how to trick the lizard brain so you can do things such as build habits and have more mental availability. I wanted to say something about where mental toughness fits in.

Mental toughness is the quality you need (some might call it discipline but its more than that) when things are hard. Either a situation you face is awful, you are tired or you have some internal resistance (lizard brain!) that wants you to give up, sleep in or some how procrastinate your activities into never never land.

In my opinion, you don't want to rely on mental toughness as a strategy. Its a high energy spend that if used as a default is going to fail. To use a physical analogy, I could probably go run 10 miles right now but my body wouldn't be able to do the same thing again tomorrow. I'm not conditioned for it and I have an injury compounding it.

We all have things we need to do. We all need to make a living in some way, get exercise in, take care of our home and family, manage our money etc. If you are white knuckling it through these things day in and out, your life is going to be a painful grind and you will never have the energy to do the interesting things your life should be focused on. The alternative is for your life to devolve into chaos so you can focus on one or two things. Neither of these approaches are very good.

The approach to life I've been working on develops mental availability by eliminating unnecessary conflicts with will. The approach is basic--rest deeply so your mind and body fully recover. Eat and drink well and enough for peak clarity. Develop a baseline of habits that minimize chaos and keep you moving towards your important goals.

The point is to not struggle with these basic things. Once your mind is clear (because it is well rested and well fed) resistance is much less likely to show up. Once you eliminate unnecessary inconvinience by integrating rituals in your daily flow, baseline activities become second nature.

You make these adjustments over time--its not an overnight process. It also doesn't help to compare where you are with where someone else is in the process.  Much of what we perceive to be an infinite depth of mental toughness in others is simply very good organization facilitated by the right help.

My partner used to work with a woman who said she relaxed by coming home and cleaning her house so it was spotless--this was after a three hour daily commute. I got tired just hearing this! I hire someone to do the mopping and polishing of surfaces because I don't find cleaning relaxing. I spend 15 minutes picking things up when I get home from work which includes loading/unloading the dishwasher--that's it. My energy is better spent on other things. Also, I would never agree to a job that required I drive 3 hours everyday. There is no home so grand or paycheck so enormous that I would sacrifice nearly one fifth of my waking hours to commuting--the circumstances would need to be extreme for me to agree to that. 

Being selective is important. Small can be beautiful--by that I mean small consistent efforts instead of trying to do everything. I won't lie and say this has always been my modus operandi--as I write about these things I'm learning to do them as well.

It's impossible for me to count the number of times I've put together a grand plan to change everything in my life and have it blow up in 30 seconds or less. However, since I've worked on improving my mental availability and flow, my motivation has increased and even difficult things are doable--mental toughness isn't even a factor.