Have you ever wondered how some people become billionaires while others slave away at a 9-to-5 job their entire lives? While opportunity may have something to do with their achievement, success stories like Jeff Bezos and Jack Ma aren’t merely the result of smarts, physical strength or leadership potential.
Rather, these people used perseverance, grit and consistency to beat the odds and come out on top. Instead of letting their circumstances and failures define them, they soldiered on and are now some of the richest people on Earth.
It’s mental toughness — not talent — that often determines your success. This is particularly true with regards to survival situations. In fact, you must develop your mental fortitude skills now to be ready when they’re needed most. Luckily, there are many exercises that can strengthen your mind and improve your chances of success (and survival) when it matters most.
1. Reframe Negative Thoughts
When you’re in the middle of a bad situation, negative thoughts can easily creep in. Thoughts such as: You’re not strong enough to climb that mountain or you haven’t trained long enough to cross that river could be examples. And no one’s around to tell you any differently.
However, not all of your thoughts are true just because you have them. You may, in fact, be strong and wise enough to do difficult things. But if you believe the mind’s lies, you’ll never even give yourself the chance to succeed.
Therefore, while it’s okay to briefly question your abilities, you must also examine your potential. Search for positive and realistic expectations to begin reframing negative thoughts. If you work hard, you’ll improve your chances of traversing mountains, rivers, and everything in between.
Of course, there is something to be said for doing such things safely! Always weigh the pros and cons of such risks with regards to your chances of survival.
2. Adopt a Mantra
During intense moments of fear and anxiety, your thoughts will override your mind and body thereby making it nearly impossible to reframe them. These moments of sheer panic can cause you to freeze in your tracks and result in physical symptoms like trembling, dizziness, chills, and nausea. These aren’t signs of mental weakness; they’re your lizard brain kicking in.
Luckily, you can overcome — or at least manage — these panic attacks by repeating a mantra to yourself. I am strong. I am capable. I’m afraid, but I’m doing it anyway. Repeating these words may make you feel silly at first, but say them long enough, and you’ll start to believe them. Eventually, they’ll become your go-to self-encouragement phrases when you feel your anxiety levels begin to rise.
[Editor’s note: Daily meditation is a good thing! Practice your POSITIVE mantras each day and you’ll be far better off than you realize much sooner than you could imagine. Positivity really does change your brain.]
3. Limit Your Options
A survivalist’s life is full of decisions. Should you eat those berries? Where should you make camp for the night? Should you spend precious energy making a fire, or can you go without one? Sometimes these choices can mean the difference between life and death, so you’ll need every ounce of energy and intelligence when you make them.
Store up mental energy and make better choices by minimizing the number of non-essential decisions you make in a day. In the wilderness, this might be relatively easy. After all, how many options could you possibly have for breakfast? In everyday life, however, you can begin banishing decision fatigue by developing habits and a subsequent routine.
Eating the same thing every morning, scheduling when you’ll exercise and work each week, and picking one day to do your laundry are just a few simple ways to simplify your options. Apply this same logic to other choices that you may or may not have already automated, like food purchases or stockpiling supplies, to save even more energy. The fewer decisions you consciously have to make, the better.
4. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
Whether you’re planning a backpacking trip through bear country or preparing for the zombie apocalypse, it’s a good idea to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. After all, you’ll likely have few creature comforts in either situation. And failing to mentally prepare yourself could break your spirit down the road.
Practice sitting in discomfort by reminding yourself of the bigger picture and pushing yourself a little further. Do that extra pushup. Take a cold shower. Go parachuting even if you’re initially terrified. Stepping outside your comfort zone will stretch your mental and physical capabilities and remind you what you’re capable of.
Plus, it will give you the confidence and problem-solving capabilities to adapt to whatever environment you find yourself in. In a survival situation, this level of flexibility will allow you to find food and shelter in places you thought there were none.
5. Sit With Your Feelings
Worry, anger, and insecurity can cloud your judgment and quickly put you in dangerous situations if you fail to act. They’re also secondary emotions that cloud how we’re really feeling. Therefore, it’s crucial to practice self-awareness and sit with your feelings to discover their root cause. Usually, there are unresolved thoughts or emotions that triggered your reaction.
For instance, if you feel anxiety or panic before ziplining from one cliff to another, stop and ask yourself why you feel that way. That fear could be justified or not. In either case, ask if your emotions come from irrational fears? Is there any real reason to hesitate before drifting over the canyon if everyone else has done so safely already? Evaluate the situation and decide if there’s any basis for your feelings before making your move.
6. Embrace Failure
You might not want to hear this, but, eventually, you will fail. Whether you were a little too confident in your abilities or decided to embrace a challenge, you’ll put yourself in a situation you weren’t prepared for. You’ll mess up or make a mistake that may put you in danger.
However, everything you’ve done so far has prepared you for this very moment. Now, you can either wallow in self-pity or pick yourself up and try again.
This is where the rubber meets the road. You stand at a crossroads. And for the sake of survival, you must choose pure grit. You have to keep going. So, instead of viewing your mistake as a failure, look at it as an opportunity to learn more about yourself and the situation.
Analyze where you might have overestimated your abilities or ignored your limitations. Then, as you become more self-aware, you can grow in these areas and be stronger or smarter the next time around. Now you know what not to do and can choose a different solution. Better yet, you can avoid making the same mistake twice.
7. Manage Your Reactions
Sitting with your feelings will ultimately allow you to better manage your reactions, even to situations you didn’t plan for. By rationally thinking over your circumstances, you can arrive at other, saner conclusions and respond rather than react. After all, life isn’t about what happens to you; it’s about how you respond to those happenings.
Embracing this truth will give you more confidence and control over every situation. You’re the gatekeeper of your destiny, regardless of the scenario in which you find yourself. So take several seconds to pause, apply consequential thinking, and make an intentional effort to shift to the positives so you can find solutions rather than point out problems.
8. Breathe Deeply
Physical exercises might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you imagine strengthening your mental fortitude. However, deep-breathing exercises can steady the mind and override the sympathetic nervous system so you can control your body’s involuntary responses to danger. This technique is known as the Wim Hof method and could help you sit in discomfort for longer periods of time — which could end up saving your life.
Taking a few deep inhales and exhales or practicing box breathing can also increase blood flow and provide oxygen to the brain. Plus, it can diminish perceived stress, engage the vagus nerve, and increase heart rate variability to ultimately improve your decision-making. In other words, you’ll think more clearly after a short breathing exercise.
[Editor’s note: Deep breathing practices are a good thing to practice. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’ve really noticed a difference in my mood.]
9. Encourage Your Peers
When you’re facing difficulties, very few things are capable of lifting your spirits — but an encouraging friend is one of them.
Uplifting words are powerful because we’re often our own worst critics. If you aren’t used to speaking kindly to yourself, when someone else does, it’s like music to your ears. You might not believe in yourself at first, but their words make you believe enough to try. And that often makes all the difference.
However, when you’re alone, the only person available to offer encouragement is you. Practice lifting yourself up by first encouraging your peers. The more often you voice your confidence in them, the more willing you’ll be to do the same for yourself when you’re in a pickle. Eventually, self-reliance and self-confidence may become natural responses, which is a huge confidence booster for a survivalist.
10. Define Your Goals
Sure, you need mental strength to achieve your goals, but you also need good goals. In other words, they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound so you can define success and track your progress. Only then will you increase your chances of actually accomplishing your goals.
Every time you reach a milestone or achieve a small goal, you’ll gain a little more confidence in your ability to succeed. Thus, it’s important to stick with SMART goals to avoid being overly ambitious. Otherwise, you may fail repeatedly — by no shortcoming of your own — and quickly become discouraged. Eventually, you may simply give up on your goals, which could be a death sentence in a survival situation.
11. Prove Yourself Wrong
Of course, you should also make sure your goals are challenging enough to keep your brain and body engaged. In other words, whatever you accomplish must be difficult enough to be worth celebrating. So embrace challenges and make goals that are borderline unachievable to push your boundaries and test your limits. Then, when you think you can’t do something, prove yourself wrong.
Whenever you succeed, the victory will remind you that you’re stronger and more capable than you give yourself credit for. Over time, your brain will stop underestimating your potential and help you achieve bigger, more intimidating goals.
Plus, being resilient will help you build your skill sets and knowledge so you’re smarter and stronger the next time you go to prove yourself wrong, which only improves your chance of success.
12. Expand Your Skill Set
Gaining new skills is a natural byproduct of embracing failure, challenging yourself, and being uncomfortable. However, you can also intentionally expand your skill set and strengthen your mental fortitude by trying new things.
This approach is quite different from problem-solving your way out of a difficult situation. In fact, you might learn new skills before you even go into survival mode.
For example, if you don’t know how to make animal traps, you might take a course with a local hunter or survivalist. This new experience will test your determination, curiosity, and learning abilities, all of which you’ll need to sharpen before heading out into the wild.
Mastering this new skill will also develop a sense of mastery and competency, which gives you the confidence to problem-solve in real-life situations. And there’s just so much to learn in the realm of survivalism that it’s mind-boggling.
13. Just Begin
Sometimes, simply beginning a task or starting the problem-solving process is the hardest part, especially when you lack motivation. However, there is something to be said for forcing yourself to begin. After all, once you get the ball rolling, you might not want to stop. You just have to take that first step.
For example, you might not want to go for a run or complete your morning push-up routine. However, to maintain peak physical fitness, you must consistently put in the work. Mentally strong people don’t just know what they have to do, though. They go out and do it, regardless of whether they feel like it.
It’s up to you to adopt that same level of mental fortitude. Get rid of that all-or-nothing mentality. Get up and just begin! Whatever effort you put in today will make you stronger tomorrow, which is a win in any book.
Patience and Practice
There are two key elements to increasing your mental fortitude: patience and practice. Just like building a strong body, strengthening your mind takes time and consistency. You must faithfully incorporate the exercises above into your daily routine if you want to see a difference. Then, when you notice changes, you’ll rely on the grit you’ve cultivated thus far to keep going.
And, perhaps, there is a third key component to achieving mental toughness: the ability to believe in yourself. One can only attain this level of inner strength through practice and patience, thereby completing the endless cycle of boosting your mental fortitude. Then, when faced with a crucial survival situation, you’ll be that much more capable of acting swiftly, correctly, and without hesitation.
[Note: This was a guest post.]
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