Mental Toughness: Think Like a Navy SEAL / Spartan Warrior

Developing your mental toughness or hardiness can lead to huge changes in your training, productivity, and progress toward your goals. Success largely comes down to being able to motivate yourself to do what needs to be done, even when you don't feel like it.

Unfortunately, modern life is so comfortable, many of us have failed to develop any kind of mental toughness. This video provides some actionable tips you can use to change that, by using "discomfort training," as well as some meta cognitive strategies. This includes some of the techniques reportedly used by Navy SEALs to cope with Hell Week, as well as some training methods employed by Spartan Warriors.

Think like a warrior by developing mental toughness!

[TheBioneer]

Hey gang! Just wanted to give you a heads up that there is an error at the start of this video - Hell Week is actually five days and five nights (and a bit) and is part of Basic Conditioning! My apologies!

[animegamernerdo]

I needed this. My mom coddled me all my life and my dad, well he wasn't around. Leaving me completely unprepared. And my mom still actively doesn't want me to do things that are uncomfortable. Now at 29, I feel like a weak old lady, and it sucks.

[rudycabrera]

I think the best way to start mental toughness, at least from absolute zero, is to take a manual labor job when you are younger. I work here in the united states in the fields, or agricultural labor. Here you are expected to learn heavy/repetitive work in about 3 days for minimum wage. If you can't, you're fired.

[dmdcykey]

You speak facts here. In my previous military career mental toughness and focus would always win the day over brute strength and dude bros. I always found it interesting that when we would begin a long grueling training mission you could never pick out the guys who would persevere, it was usually the ones that kept to themselves, had no bravado, and looked fairly 'normal' or unimpressive, for lack of a better word. The big loud guys always tanked out, made excuses, or gave up when shit got hard.

[YoutubeUser-mgtz]

hell week isn’t 4 days at the end of the training. hell week is nearly 6 days long with 4 hours sleep total for the week (not each night). Also, hell week is 3 weeks into the 6 month long training at buds.

[vajraman]

A strong feature of mental toughness is the “just do it factor”. Workout when your motivated, neutral, and completely unmotivated. If your constantly looking for the super motivated factor, sooner rather later that roller coaster is going to come down. If you’re not excited by a workout, consider the habit of brushing your teeth. You don’t need to be super hyped up to do it, nor do you skip it if your feeling down, sad, blue. You just brush your teeth. That’s how your mental toughness increases. Working out really sucks, sometimes so, “embrace the suck” and workout anyway even if it is of a lower intensity, or seems far short of your goals. Just Do It✌️

[kokujin]

This calls for honest self-evaluation. Knowing what your limits are and testing them out is what this is all about.

[franksgreen]

“The ones that had gone through the toughest education will survive" Ancient Spartan Proverb

[kkw-AmadeusArts]

My method of mental fortitude is imaging the toughest man I’ve ever known, Drill Sergeant Davis, a combat vet and a sniper, right there along side me cheering me on and asking me if I’m going to make it. To which I always reply in my mind: “Yes Drill Sergeant!”

[aurelienyonrac]

"I am trying to preserve my tiredness" so true.

[FallouFitness_NattyEdition]

Ever since the book Cant Hurt Me by David Goggins came out, I've noticed more people talking about mental toughness.

[ajaycease]

The eating the whole elephant thing is so true. During some workouts, training and tryouts I been through I broke every thing into parts and when I'm smoked i worry about doing one step or rep at a time.

[coachdan]

Yesterday a friend and I went to an outdoor archery range. It was already pretty cold but as we arrived it started raining. At first my friend turned to me and said "should we bail?" and I almost said "Yes" but then I thought about this video and was like "nope, we're doing this!"

[MissUlfang]

This video embodies pretty much everything I love about your channel. I think most other YouTubers would just yell out random slogans about enduring mentally, but you actually explain the science and how to apply it.
I recently started swimming and it's improved my mental toughness a lot, it's improved almost all my life in fact. Having not swam for over a decade I was terrified I would be terrible or even drown. The last time I had been in a pool a stranger grabbed me and pushed me to the wall before belittling my mother for how bad my swimming was. She explained that I'm disabled and this made him even angrier. So as you can imagine, I had a lot of anxieties about returning to the water. But going towards fear and embracing it really does help. Swimming even on the bad days, the days when my disabilities try to tether me to the sofa, the days when I don't want to, has taught me how much I'm really capable of.

All of this to say your videos are great and have really helped me. I think you're the smartest and most thoughtful YouTuber covering fitness to date, and I wish you all the more success in the future.

[bluekid]

personally i think that as long as you are not feeling dizzy nauseous or feel your heart beating to fast or even feeling too thirsty your still good to go.

[sfbuck]

I think maybe self-discipline is a quality a person must have in order to recognize and appreciate in others. A lot of folks who don't have it don't understand it, don't see the use for it, and sometimes they might see it as something pathological.

[Issvor]

Brilliant video. To add to your last point about “do something uncomfortable”, Jim Wendler says he forces himself to do something uncomfortable once a day, and pushes his students to make a list of things to dos. “It can be a list of 4, and they don’t have to be hard. You can have ‘shower before 7am’ or whatever, just write down 4 things and do them, and work up to more difficult stuff”. I’ve incorporated this with simple stuff life “study 30 minutes a day”, “stretch calves”, and “do hand exercises” and can say it’s helping me so far. I also try to do something that makes me uncomfortable at least once a day, and that for right now I’d walk my dog for a mile (times are tough, but are getting better). Even though I may not walk a full mile, I’m still getting some steps in and so is my dog, and I’m slowly building the distance up.

[dinninfreeman]

Due to life circumstances I've had to endure unyielding physical labor at breakneck pace on no sleep a couple of times, the two tools that helped me the most are the Wim Hof method and yoga nidra Wim Hof to get me through the work yoga nidra to maximize my efficacy of rest to be able to keep going. One time ( long story short) I was forced to move off of my property ( which I had lived on for 10 years) with only three days notice, as a result I only got 1 hours sleep in three days and had to Sprint while packing things and moving heavy furniture and boxes from the four corners of my half acre property, Wim Hof breathing massive amounts of matcha tea and ginseng and yoga nidra were what made it possible to endure.

[David-wlhx]

Hell week is 5 1/2 days, it is not the end. It’s only your ticket to the beginning

[jdaza]

I look forward to the days I do not feel like training, it gives me a chance to push and grow when I least want to.