15 signs you’re mentally stronger than you think

What does it mean to be mentally strong?

Is it having the discipline and mental toughness to have perfect grades, earn several degrees, create amazing businesses, and maintain a bodybuilding physique?

While these are all examples of mental strength, there are many ways you can be mentally strong in your own personal journey.

Mental strength can be seen in everyone, in all the decisions and obstacles we face.

You don’t have to be the best version of yourself you can be; we all have our own journeys, and the way mental strength manifests within us can appear in even the most subtle signs.

Here are 15 signs that you are mentally stronger than you think:

1) You Can Be Kind Even When Things Are Tough

The world isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.

Sometimes you have to deal with the storms; the challenges and obstacles, the parts of your life that make you reconsider everything you care about, everything you’re working towards.

And these traumatic, difficult events in our life shake us — they make us doubt what we’re capable of, what we’re meant to do, and whether we’re good enough.

But if you can stay kind even in your most difficult moments, you are truly mentally strong.

You understand that your kindness to those around you is still an important trait to have in everyday life.

Just because you’re going through the most challenging parts of your life doesn’t mean you should take it out on anyone around you.

Your kindness still trumps your personal problems, and only mentally strong individuals can do that.

2) You’re Not Afraid to Analyze Your Weaknesses

You accept the fact that you have weaknesses.

You don’t let your ego take control of you and hide those weaknesses away; you look them straight in the eye, so that you can understand them to the best of your ability.

Why?

Because you know that only by studying what makes you weak can you ever hope to improve.

You don’t let your weaknesses hold you back by letting them rot and fester in the back of your mind; you force them to come out and confront them with your full consciousness so that you can work on them in the ways they need.

3) You Know When To Ask For Help

Some people think that `mentally strong individuals don’t need to ask for help.

They can simply focus, concentrate, and do everything themselves.

But this isn’t the case — no matter how strong you are mentally, you’re not superman.

You’re still just one person with one set of hands, and you know when you’re at your limits.

You know when it’s time to take a deep breath and accept that this isn’t a one-person job.

You know when it’s time to ask for help.

Help doesn’t scare you. It doesn’t make you feel insecure about yourself, as if you’re a lesser version of yourself simply because you acknowledged your limitations and asked other people to give you help.

You know that your worth isn’t in your ability to do things by yourself; your worth is in your presence, your goals, and your objectives.

Calling other people for help will simply get you to where you want to be faster.

4) Your Emotions Don’t Scare You

There’s this idea that to be mentally tough, you need to ignore all your emotions.

As if just allowing yourself to process emotions other than determination and willpower is enough to show that you’re mentally weak.

But it’s not about repressing your emotions; it’s about how you handle them.

As a mentally strong individual, you don’t let your emotions scare you.

You let yourself feel them, allowing your mind and body to process them as necessary, and then take the best course of action after your emotions have been allowed to live.

5) You Can Walk Away

Many of us simply don’t know when to walk away.

We feel like we’ve put too much time and energy into something — whether it’s a relationship or a project — to the point that leaving would be too much of a loss, and we need to get working on it until it finally clicks.

But a mentally strong person knows that sometimes it just wasn’t meant to be.

So they calculate their odds and cut their losses when it makes the most sense.

They know that their life is bigger than whatever this is that they’re working on, so they’re not going to let this timesink take another minute of their time.

6) You’ve Let Yourself Fail Without Giving Up

No one likes failure.

The idea of putting all your heart and soul into something, only to watch it come crashing and burning back down to earth.

The failure of a business, a project, an idea; is that not a reflection on yourself, on you as being a failure yourself?

A mentally tough individual won’t let those negative voices drown out their motivation.

They don’t let failure keep them down.

They feel the failure and accept it, and then accept that they have the rest of their life to keep improving, keep learning, and keep trying.

As Rocky Balboa said, it ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.

7) You Know How To Be Patient

Rome wasn’t made in a day, and neither are the careers and successes of everyone around you.

In this age of social media, it’s so easy to get that sense of FOMO — to feel like you’re doing everything wrong while everyone else is doing everything right because you’re flooded with pictures and videos of their accomplishments and triumphs.

But what you aren’t seeing is how much time they put into their success. You know that at the end of the day, it’s just about being persistent and patient.

Just keep putting in the hours; don’t let your impatience get the better of you.

You’re on your path, and it’s simply a matter of time until you can show it to the world.

8) You Control Your Feelings; They Don’t Control You

We talked earlier about emotions, and how mentally strong individuals allow themselves to feel and process their emotions instead of repressing them and hiding them away.

But there’s also an important note we have to talk about regarding your feelings, and how much you let them control the things you do.

Mentally weak people let their feelings change their plans on a daily basis.

They don’t prioritize their plans and goals, and instead let themselves fall victim to the daily whims of their latest feelings.

If they’re sad, happy, confused, horny, irritable, or whatever else, they’ll let that feeling define the rest of their day.

Mental strength requires persistence, no matter what you’re feeling.

Being mentally strong means being a person who is in control of their feelings; you can feel what your mind wants to feel, but you don’t let that blind you from what your mind wants to accomplish.

9) You Don’t Let the Noise Distract You

There’s so much noise out there, a million things aching to get your attention: video games, movies, social media, celebrity gossip, news feeds, chat apps, dating apps, work and school, and so on.

It has never been easier to simply turn off every active part of your brain and just live passively, consuming media from morning till night, day after day.

It’s never been easier to forget you actually want to do things.

But mentally strong individual doesn’t let the noise distract them.

They know that their goals are more important than whatever is trending on Twitter today, or the front page of Reddit.

They may show interest from time to time, but they don’t let the media consume them.

10) You Always Try To Steady the Ship

It doesn’t matter how mentally tough you are — you’re always going to go through hardship. Failure will always happen and dark days will always come; you can’t change that.

You will have phrases or moments in your life where you’re not mentally tough at all; where you’re weak, falling into vices and old habits and unable to crawl out of the hole getting deeper every day.

But as a mentally strong individual, it’s not about staying as close to perfect all the time.

It’s about having the ability to fall all the way down, but at the end of the day, you’re still a person who wants to make things right.

No matter how bad things get, you’ll eventually always find yourself back in a place where you’re trying to put things together again.

Because to you, mental strength isn’t a hobby or a short-time thing. It’s a part of who you are, even if it gets buried in hardship from time to time.

11) You Only Compete Against Yourself

You aren’t doing this to be better than anyone else.

You’re doing all this to be better than yourself — yourself yesterday, yourself last month, yourself last year.

You want to progress, to improve, to continuously push yourself to greater heights.

It’s not about being better than anyone; it’s simply about being better.

Because you care about who you will be tomorrow, and you understand that certain things need to be done if you wish for tomorrow to be better than today.

12) You’re Honest

Honesty is a rare trait these days. People are always trying to be something they’re not.

But a mentally strong and honorable person knows who they are and what they’re not. They speak their truth and not what they think other people want to hear.

This also means that mentally strong people are consistent in their behavior. Everybody likes them for the person they are. Because they stay who they are.

So if you’re not contrived, and you genuinely express what you’re really thinking and feeling, you’re probably a mentally stronger person that other people listen to for advice.

13) You Take Action Even When You’re Fearful

Fear is a powerful feeling that can stop people from taking action.

It takes real courage to act in the face of fear.

Any mentally strong person has had to face challenges in their journey. It’s inevitable, but they stick at it because they know that is the only way forward.

So if you take action even when you’re fearful and going through hard times, then you should be proud of yourself and you’re surely stronger than you think you are.

14) You Have Fought Back

Everyone fails, but the difference between mentally stronger people is that they can push on despite their failures.

Being able to fail and then keep going is a sign of an iron-willed individual with nous to succeed in life.

So if you’ve kept persisting even after failing countless times, then you’re probably a mentally stronger person than you realize.

15) You’re Disciplined

According to Jim Rohn: “Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”

Some people are motivated by a specific goal, but if they have no discipline they likely won’t get there.

So if you’re able to stick to your goals even when you’re not feeling motivated enough, then you’re definitely a stronger person than you realize.