Reality affects us in different ways. We sympathize with the person who has been “broken by life.” Maybe everything went wrong when he didn’t get into university, or broke up with his beloved, or lost his apartment in a casino. And thirty years later he still hasn’t recovered.
And even if we deep down understand that constantly drinking is not a very effective way to get into a rut, we still somehow justify the guy. Life is cruel, what can you do?
Other people somehow recover from traumatic events. Yes, they, too, can become depressed, quit their jobs, and irritate those around them for six months with an invariably sad face. But then they still start working, going on dates and even laughing sometimes.
Sometimes we get upset because of a mere trifle: we had a fight with a friend, we crashed a car... Then some grandfather always appears with a demonstration of his former power: “When I was your age, I walked 30 km! At night. On the ice. With a bucket of potatoes and a crossbow! And I didn’t cry!” This is presented as a great achievement - not whining. Maybe our ancestors were better than us? They fought for their homeland, worked in the construction brigade, stood in lines, and no one thought of calling them the “generation of snowflakes.”
But from a psychological point of view, not crying does not mean having armor. First, you walk cheerfully in the cold with potatoes for years, and then suddenly you fall into hysterics because a match has broken. (It’s still better not to tell grandpa about this.)
It is easier for psychologically stable people to cope with the vicissitudes of fate, stress and matches. This is a very important parameter in the life of a modern person.
In a world of high speeds, crazy movements and 24/7 communication with the office, the ability to take a punch or quickly recover if you miss a left hook is priceless.
They know how to accept defeat...
Mentally tough people know how to lose because they know that the path to success is paved with mistakes. No one has ever achieved true success without learning to accept failure gracefully. Mistakes let you know that you are on the wrong path and thus help pave the way to success. The biggest breakthroughs tend to happen when you feel like you can't do anything. It is this disappointment that prompts you to start thinking differently, looking for a solution outside of the usual framework, and finally see what you have been missing.
Psychological stability
Psychological stability is the process of maintaining the most optimal mode of operation of the human psyche in conditions of constantly changing circumstances and their stressful effects. It is interesting that this personality trait is formed in a person during his development and is not genetically determined. It depends on factors such as a person’s nervous system, his upbringing, experience, level of development, etc. This means that, for example, if a person, as they say, “has been through a lot,” then his psyche will be much more stable than the psyche of someone who grew up “holding onto his mother’s skirt.” But this is not the final indicator yet, because a person who is constantly exposed to stressful influences will react painfully to every problem, because his nerves have become quite frayed over time. These are two sides of the same coin.
In addition, psychological stability is not a 100% guarantee of resistance to everything. Psychological stability is more the flexibility of a person’s psyche than the steadfastness and stability of his nervous system. And the fundamental characteristic of psychological stability is precisely the mobility of the psyche in constantly changing conditions. Psychological stability, just like instability, always “works” according to a pattern.
...without dwelling on mistakes
The people we're talking about know that your emotional state is determined by where you focus your attention. When you dwell on your problems, you create and maintain negative emotions and stress, which reduces productivity. When you focus on what works for you, you develop a sense of personal effectiveness, which creates positive emotions and increases productivity.
Mentally stable people distance themselves from their mistakes, but do not forget about them. Keeping mistakes at a safe but achievable distance will make it easier for you to adapt to succeed later.
The structure of psychological stability of an individual includes the following components
- Emotional balance is the ability to control your emotional state without leading to a nervous breakdown, a rational attitude towards life.
- Constancy of life values , perseverance - maintaining a positive attitude towards life, faith in the best, maintaining an inner core and confidence in any situation.
- Rapid psychological recovery, resilience - the ability to preserve one’s self in a stressful situation, quickly analyze the state of things, and maintain freedom of choice.
Give the following definition.
Psychological stability of an individual is a personality trait acquired over the course of life, which presupposes effective activity that does not depend on negative external influences and allows the use of the body’s reserve forces.
Let us take a closer look at the research of psychologists on the issue of psychological stability of the individual.
And they know how not to let anyone limit their joy...
If the feeling of pleasure and satisfaction comes to you from comparing yourself with others, you are not the master of your own happiness. When mentally stable people enjoy what they do, they don't let anyone interfere with their judgment.
While it's impossible to simply tune out and not react at all to what others think of you, you shouldn't compare yourself to them, and you should always take other people's opinions with a grain of salt. Mentally tough people know that no matter what people think about them, one thing is for sure - they are not as good or as bad as others say.
What determines our ability to recover?
Neuroscientists at King's College London, who have observed how people react to extreme shocks, threw up their hands. While some calmly emerge from the hot hell without any traces of post-traumatic stress disorder, others find themselves on the threshold of a psychiatric clinic after a minor episode involving a bicycle and a dog. The researchers offered this explanation: psychological resilience depends on biological factors, after which they began to sprinkle in clever words like “hormones”, “neuropeptides”, “neurotransmitters”, and the journalist lost his mind... But the fact itself should not come as a surprise. Look at the old labor teacher. Literally two words - and he is already chasing the guys with a plane in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Here you have reaction speed, a tendency to panic, and temperament - years and physiology take their toll.
But not biology alone. Other factors depend more on the individual or his parents. For example, the environment in which a person grows up largely determines our behavior in complex and simply incomprehensible situations.
It is generally accepted that the difficulties of childhood harden you: the harder it was for you, the better prepared you are for adult life. Somewhere I reconciled, somewhere I understood how to fight, somewhere I figured out avoidance strategies. But in reality this is not the case.
Even Bruno Bettelheim noticed in a concentration camp that the first to give up were not the spoiled children whose mother put a bun under their violin, but the strong peasants whose parents practiced slaps on the head as the main pedagogical method.
Modern science confirms: personal troubles, early adversity, low social status are key factors that can be blamed for all subsequent troubles in life. Stress tends to accumulate and at some point it finally cripples a person, especially if he began to encounter it very early. Normal resistance ripens like cheese in the right conditions. That is, in a healthy environment, in a circle of secure attachments, loving relatives, when a person feels completely protected. The main trick is that the positive effect of a prosperous childhood does not begin to appear immediately, but after decades.
The environment a person lives in is also important. It is stupid to consider the psyche in isolation from the place to which it is constantly adapting.
Once again, everything is unfair in this best of all possible worlds: those who run their baby feet across green lawns, live in comfortable conditions and do not experience major shocks, subsequently demonstrate high rates of resilience, even when faced with danger and dark events occur. But in people who are constantly in the zone of serious chronic hopeless stress, the level of mental and physical illnesses is off the charts and the ability to adapt is reduced.
...without limiting the joy of others
Mentally resilient people do not judge others because they know that every person has something good in them, and there is no need to belittle others' achievements in order to start feeling better about themselves.
Comparing yourself to other people is limiting. Jealousy and resentment suck the life out of us; this is the best way to lose energy. Mentally stable people do not waste their time and energy on giving out grades to everyone around them, and do not worry about their place in the ranking.
Instead of wasting your energy on envy, channel that energy into gratitude. When you celebrate other people's successes, everyone benefits.
Become an optimist towards yourself and a pessimist towards the world around you
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and philosopher, wrote about his everyday life: “When you wake up in the morning, say to yourself: the people with whom I have to deal today will be annoying, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, envious and rude.” Try writing this down in your morning gratitude journal!
Marcus Aurelius is one of the most famous Stoic philosophers. They did not focus, as we do now, on happiness and optimism, but believed that you need to imagine the worst outcome from the situation in order to mentally prepare yourself for difficulties. Because when you prepare yourself for the worst, another development of events will be a pleasant surprise.
There is some truth in this. If we are optimistic about everything that is beyond our control, we will be doomed to suffering, because everything very often does not go according to our plan. Therefore, it is worth being a pessimist in relation to the world and an optimist in relation to your own ability to overcome obstacles. That is, thinking that life is damn hard and the world is full of crap, but I can handle it and even become a better person in the process.
They keep themselves in shape
A study conducted at the Eastern Ontario Institute found that people who exercised twice a week for 10 weeks felt more competent socially and intellectually. They also rated their body condition and self-esteem much higher. The most interesting thing is that the increase in self-confidence - the key to mental stability - was not caused by physical changes in the body: it was the immediate effect of endorphins that are produced during exercise.
Source of strength. What is mental toughness and how to achieve it
The American Psychological Association has developed ten tips that will help make your own psyche more adaptive and resilient.
Psychological stability, or psychological resilience, is a mental resource that we have in order to overcome life's adversities, make plans and implement them, establish and maintain relationships.
The term "resilience" was borrowed from physics - this is the ability of solids to restore their shape after mechanical pressure. In the “psychological” interpretation, resilience means maintaining a stable level of psychological and physical activity in unfavorable situations, the absence of persistent violations and adaptation to unfavorable changes.
They have a habit of getting enough sleep
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of sleep on mental stability. When we sleep, the brain neutralizes toxic proteins, byproducts of nervous activity. Unfortunately, it can only do this effectively while you sleep, so if you don't get enough sleep, toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc and impairing your ability to think. And no amount of coffee will help here.
Mentally resilient people know that if they don't sleep enough—or sleep improperly—their self-control, attention, and memory decline; therefore, sleep quality becomes a priority.
Increasing psychological resilience
The main law of increasing psychological stability is the acceptance of the fact that if a person is not able to change circumstances, then he is able to change his attitude towards them. An example would be the situation with a barking dog: walking down the street and seeing a dog barking at someone nearby, you are unlikely to get annoyed about this, but simply calmly continue your way, immersed in your thoughts, right? It’s the same with difficult situations: they should be perceived not as something that happens to the detriment of you personally, but as something that simply takes place. As soon as a person allows events to take their course, without focusing their attention on them and without reacting emotionally, they pass just like that - in their own way; pass you by. If a person begins to “cling” to everything, then this also begins to “cling” to him. If you run to yell and insult a barking dog in every possible way, the likelihood that you will become the object of its close attention increases significantly. Of course, this is just one way. And it is not universal.
Increasing psychological stability is directly influenced by the conditions in which a person lives. For example, if a person by nature has a reactive type of nervous activity, i.e. he likes an intense lifestyle, frequent changes of environment, increased activity, etc., then, most likely, he will not be comfortable living in a small town or sitting in one place in the office without the opportunity to splash out his energy. In order for a person’s psyche to be more stable, it is necessary that his lifestyle correspond to his natural predispositions.
Systematic unloading of the nervous system is another way to increase your psychological stability. Constant pressure and doing something you don’t really love (which, by the way, is a striking feature of many people’s work) have an extremely negative impact on the human psyche. This makes him irritable, nervous, and constantly tired. Only proper rest can affect this. You need to regularly devote time to doing your favorite things, traveling outside the city, relaxing reading books, in general, doing everything that you really want to do. Or you can do nothing at all - just relax and relieve stress.
A person’s cultivation of a philosophical attitude towards life has a very good effect on psychological stability. A person’s mental health is closely interconnected with such personality traits as humor, positive thinking, the ability to laugh at oneself, and self-criticism. Only if a person can look at the events that are happening and at himself without excessive seriousness, without considering himself the “center of the Universe” and the one to whom life or someone else owes something, only then everything that happens will not seem so painful and will stop constantly touch a nerve.
Another effective method for building psychological resilience is a positive self-image. What is meant here is that a person must cultivate a positive attitude towards his personality, accept himself as he is, and be a positive and positive character for himself. But you need to be careful not to cross the line that leads to self-pity and perceiving the world from the position of a victim, otherwise psychological instability will only worsen.
In close proximity to a positive self-image is a person’s inner integrity. This question is worthy of writing a separate book, but, in short, a person must, firstly, live in harmony with himself, his principles, beliefs and worldview. Secondly, he should do what he likes: work, sports, recreation, communication - everything should be in maximum accordance with the person’s vision. Thirdly, he must strive for self-development and spiritual self-improvement, because this has a direct constructive impact on both a person’s personality and his life.
If we ask ourselves about the formation of psychological stability in more detail, we can note that a person should pay attention to the following components of his life:
- Social environment and immediate surroundings
- Self-esteem and attitude towards oneself
- Self-realization and self-expression
- Independence and self-sufficiency
- Correspondence between the present self and the desired self
- Faith and spirituality
- Having positive emotions
- Having meaning in life and determination, etc. and so on.
Naturally, only a part of those factors that have a positive effect on psychological stability are listed here. The presence and development of them in the life of any person will have a huge impact on his worldview, behavior, development, activity, mental state and mood. Their absence, on the contrary, has the opposite effect and contributes to psychological instability.
Of course, in order to learn to support all this, you need to purposefully activate every structure of your personality and always remember your goal - the development of psychological stability. However, despite the apparent complexity of this process, it has invaluable practical significance, because It is psychological stability that can give any person a state of satisfaction with life and a sense of harmony, normalize the psyche and increase performance, give new incentives, peace of mind and the ability to become a whole and strong person.
Write in the comments about how you improve your mental toughness, what helps you stay positive, and what you do when everything seems to be going wrong. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
We also recommend reading:
- Storytelling
- Psychological picture
- Coping strategies as a way to deal with stress
- Psychological intervention
- Resilience: The Seven Day Challenge
- Human attention: what it is and how it works
- Mental toughness: what it is and how to develop it
- How to become more resilient
- Crisis psychology
- Emotional and psychological trauma
- Mastery of Self-Control
Key words:1Psychoregulation
