7 Reasons You Need Big Mental Muscles to Succeed
Mental strength is the key to reaching your greatest potential.
Posted February 5, 2020 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Mental strength is something everyone possesses to a certain degree. But no matter how strong you are, there's always room to build bigger mental muscles.
The stronger you become, the more likely you are to create the life of your dreams. After all, you need mental strength to achieve big goals.
Here are seven ways building bigger mental muscles will help you succeed:
1. Mental muscles regulate your emotions.
Life is full of emotional highs and lows. A major key to being successful is controlling the way you react to those inevitable ups and downs.
Without healthy emotional regulation skills, your feelings will cloud your judgment and affect your performance. Knowing how to calm yourself down, face your fears, and cheer yourself up is key to getting through challenges.
2. Mental muscles help you keep going.
Motivation comes and goes. Your mental muscles will help you keep moving long after your desire to press on has ceased.
When you have big mental muscles, you'll be able to dig deep when you're tired or when you lack ambition. It will help keep you moving toward your goal, even when you don't feel like it.
3. Mental muscles extinguish self-doubt.
Whether your ambition is to double your business revenue or to conquer a new fitness challenge, self-doubt will likely creep in.
But when you have big mental muscles, you'll know you can't believe everything you think. While you might never eliminate all self-doubt, building more mental strength will help you ignore unproductive self-talk.
4. Mental muscles give you courage.
It takes confidence to step outside of your comfort zone and face your fears head-on. Even when you're taking a calculated risk, there's no guarantee that you'll come out on top.
Build mental muscles so big that you have the confidence to know that you'll be OK, even if you fail. Knowing that you can handle whatever life throws your way is key to challenging yourself to do hard things.
5. Mental muscles help you ignore unhelpful advice.
Placing too much value on other people's opinions can have a detrimental effect on you. You might be tempted to prove someone wrong or to please others.
Becoming mentally stronger will help you tune out bad advice and unhelpful criticism. Bigger mental muscles help you focus on the best decisions based on your own values, regardless of anyone else's opinion.
6. Mental muscles help you learn from your mistakes.
A big ego makes excuses for mistakes. Big mental muscles, on the other hand, only look for explanations. And when you look for explanations about why you messed up, you can learn from your mistakes.
Humbly accepting responsibility for your actions and truly learning from mistakes turns a misstep into an opportunity for growth. And that growth can be key to helping you succeed.
7. Mental muscles help you bounce back from failure.
Failure can cause most people to give up on reaching their goals. But mentally strong people bounce back from failure.
They are able to tolerate failure because they understand that failing is often part of the journey. Big mental muscles will help you turn failure into a stepping stone to success.
Build Mental Muscles
Just like building bigger biceps requires daily exercise, building bigger mental muscles requires exercise, too. Do some mental push-ups every day by challenging yourself to step outside your comfort zone and prove to your brain that you're stronger than you think.