Reading books makes us mentally stronger.
Reading books helps us understand others’ struggles enabling us to learn from their experience and gain their strength. Books also help us understand ourselves, allowing us to build resilience and persistence in our values.
In a world on fire, books are an antidote that can guide us to better lives through the persistence of our will.
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Stories enable us to learn from others’ struggles.
When we are going through something difficult, it is helpful to hear about how other people have dealt with similar situations and lived to tell their stories.
There are sorts of struggles that no one should have to go through and may require help beyond the scope of this website.
However, for our everyday struggles, the examples of others can help provide some encouragement.
Reading about others’ hardships helps us put our difficulties into perspective.
Books give us a chance to learn from others’ experiences; we can learn about what they did in response to their situation and be inspired by their resolve.
The more books we read, the more life experiences we are exposed to, and the better we can deal with the challenges we find in our own lives.
Reading helps us relieve stress.
One of the easiest ways we can develop grit is by finding balance in our lives. Most people know that stress is a motivation killer, so the more stress we have, the more difficult challenges become.
Reading can provide us with an escape, but it can also give us a chance to relax and get our minds off of what is bothering us.
Books help us deal with stress, which gives us the resolve to deal with challenges.
While reading a book can’t always solve our problems, it can help us get our minds in the right place and thus be better positioned to solve problems.
If you want to be more mentally robust, you need to get into the right state of mind, which can be enabled by having a reliable way to deal with the stress in our lives.
Books give us a better understanding of other people.
For myself, many of the difficulties I encounter stem from interactions with other people.
It is easy to isolate ourselves and focus on our work or studies, but we often need to understand people to get anything of significance done.
By reading books, we get exposed to different people, so we learn about their motivations and what makes them tick.
This knowledge can then helps us understand why people do the things they do, translating into a better understanding of our interactions.
Books help us understand people, giving us the power to deal with the challenges that others bring into our lives.
While we can’t control the people around us, we can prepare ourselves for the challenges they can bring and thus better deal with difficulties.
Books are a great way to learn about people and figure out ways to deal with the problematic situations that people create.
Reading books before bed will help you sleep.
When it comes to being mental toughness, an essential factor is that you are getting enough sleep. When we are tired, our minds are slow, and we don’t have the willpower to stick with what we are working towards.
Looking at a book rather than your phone before bed will make it easier to sleep and wake up more rested. Books also allow us to slow down our minds and focus on things that aren’t our work from the day.
Reading books before bed helps us sleep better, giving us the resolve to deal with everything else in our life.
Sometimes after a long day, it helps to look at a book cause it isn’t the same dopamine suck that a phone can be. For this reason, reading a book may help us sleep better and wake up with more strength.
Some people say that books make them sleepy; if you are one of those people, reading a book every night will help you sleep sooner.
Books show us that another way is possible.
When life gets challenging, we often look at our situation and feel like there is nothing we can do to change it. This feeling might come from previous experiences or the exhaustion of the obstacle we face.
Books allow us to live a little in someone else’s shoes and thus see another way.
These visions can serve as inspiration for our situations or help us think differently about what we are witnessing. Put another way, we can see our circumstances in a new light.
Sometimes what we think we need is different from what we need.
You might believe you have to make a massive change to your life to solve a current problem, which might be true. But equally possible, you might only require a subtle shift in perspective.
Books are the ultimate alternative perspective builder.
This can’t be said enough; the more possibilities we can see in a situation, the more options we have to solve it.
You might not have all the answers, but more experience is better than less.
Mental toughness comes down to a willingness to try out possibilities till you find one that sticks.
Books can help us understand our emotions and feelings.
When we are young, we tend to experience new and unknown things; for this reason, it is often difficult to make sense of how they make us feel.
In my mid-20s, the world seemed dark, everything was stupid, and nothing made sense. During this time, I got into existentialism and read some absurdist books.
While people might think of these books as dark and depressing, they helped me find peace in what I saw in the world around me.
Our emotions are complex, but books help us empathize with fictional characters, thus helping us understand ourselves better.
Not everyone is into reading books, but those who are realize that the more we read, the more we understand ourselves. So much of what we know about the world comes from the ideas we consume.
The more we consume, the more lenses we have to apply to what we are seeing.
Books give us a chance to experience other’s emotions, which helps us make sense of our own.
Books allow us to see things that we would not otherwise perceive.
At my first ‘real’ job, I lived and worked in the city, and I hated my job, making me miserable. I remember writing in my journal on the bus ride home every night, decompressing all the rage for the day that had passed.
My life was to wake up, go to work, go home and repeat. Life was an endless cycle, and I couldn’t see any way to break the process or make it better.
In a sense, everything around me was the same, so seeing from another perspective felt impossible. But at least I had books.
Life can feel exhausting, but books show us that something else is possible.
While my day job sucked, at least I had books to read on the subway ride home. I got through so many books on that long commute, but the escape helped me cope and eventually helped me discover a viable alternative.
Mental strength is simply an ability to see another way, so books can sometimes be exactly what we need.
Books help us build resilience and the power to push through.
Some books are hard to read; they force us to think and dedicate more time than we planned. But pushing through a book builds our mental resilience.
Getting through the challenging parts of life is slightly different from reading a book, but that doesn’t mean books have nothing to offer.
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
Reading a problematic book might not help you build physical muscles, but it will undoubtedly help you build mental muscles.
Many people don’t like to read, but that is probably because it is difficult to read books. But this means reading books is doing something that others consider difficult; thus, it requires strength.
We don’t always realize that what we are doing is hard work.
In a more challenging world than ever before, we need to have the resilience to push through and keep going despite the odds. Luckily this is something we can gain from reading books.
Do you feel like you are mentally strong? What do you do to build your cognitive strength? Do you agree with the suggestions from this article? Or do you think something else would be better?