Building Mental Fortitude

Welcome to Career Advise, the newsletter providing career advice, how-tos, and life musings through an optimistic and intriguing lens.

Today’s Pillar: Navigate the Gray

Though we should, to a degree, protect our mental health from situations that can lead to stress and depression, we can never escape them nor should we. I am struck by the parallels between mental health and physical health. On one hand, we wouldn’t actively seek out areas filled with contagious diseases, yet we have to be exposed, at least somewhat, in order to protect ourselves via immunity. The same goes for our mental health. We shouldn’t seek out things that are going to cause mental distress; however, this world is full of it, and we have to be exposed so that we aren’t defenseless against the inevitable stress and strife life produces.

We must become antifragile, i.e., something that actually gets stronger by stress. In the book, The Coddling of the American Mind, authors Haidt and Lukianoff warn against shielding all of the stressors of life from ourselves and especially from children. They go on to say that we need to be able to handle “Black Swan” events or events that are unforeseen and unpredictable as discussed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

We don’t want to be unable to function by the introduction of a stressor. We must be able to bear it at least to a certain level. By mental fortitude, we become impervious to situations and ideas that may have debilitated us earlier in our lives and give us the strength to pursue even greater challenges and reach greater heights.

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