Living & Dealing With Anxiety

How mental toughness can help you every day of your life.

The first thing you understand is that all of us can be anxious depending on what is happening to us and around us. Anxiety is a natural response to many events.

To experience anxiety can be normal.

It can also be true that what makes you anxious doesn’t appear to have the same effect on others. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t as anxious as you are. It can be that they are able to manage their response to anxiety.

There can be many reasons why this is so. One of the most important reasons is how you are dealing with this in your head. That is your mental approach to what is happening.

This is called Mental Toughness. It is not describing how macho you are. It is a proper psychological concept which describes a continuum.

At one end you have mental toughness which often means you have a sense of self worth and feel in control; you are clear about what you want to do and won’t be diverted from that, you are happy to see the positives – even in setback and you are confident that you have the capabilities to deal with most things.

At the other end, you may be mentally sensitive. You think that things happen to you and you don’t know what you are supposed to do. You will easily see all the problems and rarely see the solution and you won’t believe that you can deal with what happening anyway.

In fact mental toughness has 8 components. Each is a continuum.

We all sit on these continuums and have a bit of both. The extent can determine how anxious you feel and what you can do about it.

Although the research does show that being mentally tough carries advantage in dealing with anxiety, it is equally true that if we are self-aware about our mental toughness /sensitivity we can develop strategies and approaches what help us to deal better with anxiety.

This applies to all of us. Understanding our levels of mental toughness/sensitivity are fundamentally important in working out how we can respond better.