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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Amy Morin
Good habits are important, but it’s often our bad habits that prevent us from reaching our full potential. You can have all the good habits in the world, but if you keep doing the bad habits alongside the good ones, you’ll struggle to reach your goals. Think of it this way: you’re only as good as your worst habits.
We work hard to do the things that we think will make us better, but we forget to focus on the things that might be sabotaging our efforts.
Developing mental strength is about improving your ability to regulate your emotions, manage your thoughts, and behave in a positive manner, despite your circumstances.
There are several factors at play to determine the ease at which you develop mental strength: • Genetics—Genes play a role in whether or not you may be more prone to mental health issues, such as mood disorders. • Personality—Some people have personality traits that help them think more realistically and behave more positively by nature. • Experiences—Your life experiences influence how you think about yourself, other people, and the world in general.
To understand mental strength, you have to learn how your thoughts, behaviors, and feelings are all intertwined, often working together to create a dangerous downward spiral as in the preceding example. This is why developing mental strength requires a three-pronged approach: 1. Thoughts—Identifying irrational thoughts and replacing them with more realistic thoughts. 2. Behaviors—Behaving in a positive manner despite the circumstances. 3. Emotions—Controlling your emotions so your emotions don’t control you.
CHOOSE BEHAVIOR BASED ON BALANCED EMOTIONS AND RATIONAL THINKING
We make our best decisions in life when we balance our emotions with rational thinking. Stop and think for a minute about how you behave when you’re really angry. It’s likely that you’ve said and done some things that you regretted later, because you were basing your actions on your emotions, not logic.
Mental strength doesn’t require you to ignore your emotions. Increasing your mental strength isn’t about suppressing your emotions; instead it’s about developing a keen awareness of them. It’s about interpreting and understanding how your emotions influence your thoughts and behavior.
It’s about understanding your thoughts and feelings well enough that you can determine when to behave contrary to them, and when to listen to them.
Being mentally strong is not about positive thinking. Thinking overly positive thoughts can be just as detrimental as thinking overly negative thoughts. Mental strength is about thinking realistically and rationally.
Developing mental strength isn’t about chasing happiness.
It’s often easy to feel mentally strong when life is going well, but at times problems arise. A job loss, a natural disaster, an illness in the family, or a death of a loved one is sometimes inevitable. When you’re mentally strong, you’ll be more prepared to deal with life’s challenges.
It’s about growing, improving, and striving to become a little better than you were yesterday.
Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality. —JOHN GARDNER
We all experience pain and sorrow in life. And although sadness is a normal, healthy emotion, dwelling on your sorrow and misfortune is self-destructive. Do you respond positively to any of the points below?
You’re more likely to tell people what went wrong during your day rather than what went well. You often complain about things not being fair. You struggle to find anything to be grateful for sometimes.
Even when you can’t alter your circumstances, you can alter your attitude.
Instead of taking action or moving forward, exaggerating how bad your situation is justifies why you shouldn’t do anything to improve it.
Unfortunately, misery loves company, and sometimes self-pity becomes a bragging right. A conversation can turn into a contest, with the person who has experienced the most trauma earning the badge of victory. Self-pity can also provide a reason to avoid responsibility.
There isn’t a higher being—or a human being for that matter—who will swoop in and make sure we’re all dealt a fair hand in life.
It’s a waste of time. Feeling sorry for yourself requires a lot of mental energy and does nothing to change the situation.
It leads to more negative emotions. Once you allow it to take hold, self-pity will ignite a flurry of other negative emotions. It can lead to anger, resentment, loneliness, and other feelings that fuel more negative thoughts.
It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Feelings of self-pity can lead to living a pitiful life. When you feel sorry for yourself, it’s unlikely you’ll perform at your best. As a result, you may experience more problems and increased failures,
It prevents you from dealing with other emotions. Self-pity gets in the way of dealing with grief, sadness, anger, and other emotions. It can stall your progress from healing and moving forward because self-pity keeps the focus on why things should be different rather than accepting the situation for what it is.
If five good things and one bad thing happen in a day, self-pity will cause you to focus only on the negative.
A victim mentality is not an attractive characteristic. Complaining about how bad your life is will likely wear on people rather quickly.
Volunteer to help a worthy cause. It will take your mind off your problems and you can feel good that you’ve helped support someone else.
Do something active. Physical or mental activity will help you focus on something other than your misfortune. Exercise, sign up for a class, read a book, or learn a new hobby, and your behavior change can help shift your attitude.
If you choose to look for the silver lining, even in a bad situation, you’ll experience joy and happiness much more often.
What advice would I give to a loved one who had this problem? Often, we’re better at handing out words of encouragement to other people rather than to ourselves.
We tend to think that we’ll never get through something. Remind yourself of times when you’ve solved problems and coped with tragedy in the past.
You can choose to catch your negative thoughts before they spiral out of control.
Say what you’re grateful for. If you aren’t likely to keep up with writing in a journal, make it a habit to say what you’re grateful for.
Don’t allow yourself to continue thinking that life isn’t fair or that life should be different.
Gratitude leads to more positive emotions. People who feel grateful experience more happiness, joy, and pleasure on a daily basis.
When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness. —DALE CARNEGIE
Although she only physically spent about five hours a week with her mother-in-law, she was devoting at least an additional five hours thinking and talking about her disdain for her. This exercise helped her see how she was giving her mother-in-law power over many areas of her life.
She no longer dreaded Jackie’s visits once she recognized she didn’t have to tolerate rude or disrespectful behavior in her home. Instead, she could control what went on under her own roof.
Giving other people the power to control how you think, feel, and behave makes it impossible to be mentally strong. Do any of the points below sound familiar?
Other people have the ability to make you feel so angry that you say and do things you later regret.
The type of day you’re going to have depends on how other people behave. When other people try to guilt you into doing something, you reluctantly do it, even if you don’t want to.
You often complain about all the things you “have to” do in life.
You hold a grudge when someone offends you or hurts you.
Anytime you don’t set healthy emotional and physical boundaries for yourself, you risk giving away your power to other people.
There are many problems with giving away your power: • You depend on others to regulate your feelings. When you give away your power, you become completely dependent upon other people and external circumstances to regulate your emotions. Life often becomes like a roller coaster—when things are going well, you’ll feel good; but when your circumstances change, your thoughts, feelings, and behavior will shift.
You’ll say other people make you feel bad or force you to behave in a manner you don’t like. You’ll blame others instead of accepting responsibility for your choices.
You become highly sensitive to criticism. You’ll lack the ability to evaluate criticism. Instead, you’ll take anything anyone says to heart.
If you don’t speak up when people hurt your feelings or you allow them to infringe on your life in an unwelcomed manner, you’ll likely grow resentful toward them.
So Officer McDonald set out on his mission to spread his message about peace and forgiveness on his own. “The only thing worse than a bullet in my spine would have been to nurture revenge in my heart,” he says in the book Why Forgive?
Choosing to forgive someone who has hurt you, either emotionally or physically, doesn’t mean you have to excuse the other person’s behavior, but letting go of your anger frees you to focus your energy on a more worthwhile cause.
