Mental Toughness Is Totally Overrated
And our current obsession with it is actually pretty toxic
A few hundred years ago, living required performing truly challenging tasks often: hunting and gathering, or migrating over a pass in winter. Quitting could lead to dire consequences.
For much of the world, that’s no longer the case — and yet we love to pretend otherwise. In a society that is increasingly comfortable, we’ve become enamored with doing things that are hard for the sake of being hard, such as the military-style training camps and exercises that have attracted corporate executives and everyday people seeking self-improvement. You see it in the “grit” renaissance and in society’s fixation on Navy SEAL culture.
While writing my book The Comfort Crisis, I spent months researching the concept of “mental toughness”: the belief that by persisting through self-imposed psychological and physical suffering, a person gains a reservoir of resilience that transfers to everything else in their life. The idea — which rose to prominence in military, sports, and fitness culture and has bled over to the larger world of “productivity” and self-improvement — is often pitched as the secret that makes a person a good athlete, good leader, good parent, good anything.
