How to Build Mental Strength | Mental Toughness
Mental strength, in the context of this video, is the ability to overcome a psychological stressor, such as the loss of a job or the death of a loved one. And I’m going to explain it in a way that you’ve probably never heard of before. I’m going to use words that sound familiar, like memory and strength, but these words aren’t going to have the same definitions as they do in the dictionary. To really understand what I’m saying, you have to approach this video with an open and philosophical mindset. With that said, let’s get into it.
One of my main arguments is that physical and mental strength work the same way. Physical strength is our ability to deal with a physical stressor, such as lifting a heavy weight or performing a sudden sprint. Mental strength, on the other hand, is our ability to deal with psychological stresses. So you can think about strength like this. Imagine a circle on a line. The circle is you, and the line represents a state of balance. Now let’s say something stressful happens, either you lose a job or lift a heavy weight. In other words, you encounter a stressor.
We can indicate the magnitude of a stressor with the size of the arrow—the bigger the arrow, the bigger the stressor. And the bigger the stressor, the further you move away from the line (or the more you’re knocked off balance). Your strength then is a measure of how far you can move away from this line and still recover. And building strength, whether physical or mental, is about improving your ability to recover from greater states of stress.
So where does strength come from? Your current strength is a function of your memory, but be careful, I’m using memory in a different way here than you might be used to. Your physical strength for example, how much weight you can lift or how far you can run, is a byproduct of the weights you’ve lifted, or the distances you’ve run, in the past. Your current strength is a function of the stressors you did or didn’t overcome in the past. Mental strength works in the same way. If you’ve done a lot of public speaking in the past, it might be really easy for you now, and you feel very little stress doing it. That’s because you’ve become someone who can easily lift that psychological weight.
You can think about memory like this. Let’s place me in the middle of the screen. Right now I’m in a specific State of Memory. What do I mean by that? My eyes are damaged due to various factors such as the stress I place on them, my diet, and my genetics. I have a certain amount of muscle mass based on my DNA, how I use them, and what I eat. I have certain values, ideas, and worldviews based on my experience with life. In other words, I’m saying that I’m a collection of information, and I’m combining all of this information—the totality of my entire being, my hormone levels, eye strength, muscle mass, cardiovascular health, so on and so forth—into a single term: Memory State.
Let’s call my current state Memory State 1. Now imagine two circles, one on the left and a larger one on the right. Let’s call the one on the left Memory State 1 and the one on the right Memory State 2. Both are a combination of physical and psychological memory. Memory State 2, the larger circle on the right, is in a greater state of memory, and this provides greater strength. State 2 is where I have bigger muscles, a better cardiovascular system, or a more powerful worldview that helps me deal with the difficulties of life.
So how do we go from State 1 to State 2? Obviously, if the circle is growing, something is being added. Well, what’s being added? I believe it’s knowledge. But what is knowledge? Knowledge is a special type of information. There’s a lot of different kinds of information in the universe, perhaps even infinite. You can find out how many species of bird there are in the world, or how many grains of sand there are on a beach, but I wouldn’t necessarily call any of that knowledge. Knowledge, in the sense that I’m using it, improves your state of memory, improves your stren...