6 Core Qualities of Mental Toughness

When you stop and reflect on what can make you happy, how much does rising above your challenges come to mind? There are many popular ideas out there about the necessary qualities to get through hard times, as well as personality traits that could feed that process. Having a bad day? Tell yourself to stop focusing on the negative. If you just push through, your woes will go away.

In psychology, this attitude reflects concepts such as “self-efficacy,” or the confidence that you can complete a task successfully, and “grit” or the ability to persist. Another concept, “resilience,” captures the sense of being able, literally, to bend under pressure. This is a popular idea in the stress literature, related to finding a way to "cope yourself out of a situation," no matter how terrible it is.

As you assess yourself on these qualities, see if a recent situation comes to mind in which you thought you would never get from A to B without tripping over all the obstacles in your way. Perhaps everything you had to get done in a given time period seemed like it was all too much. Yet you knew you had to, and would, manage and come out of it OK. Was being able to think you could persist and bend enough? Or maybe it was a one-off experience of having to go through some painful dental procedures. You had no choice, so you just found a way to be brave.

The Concept of Mental Toughness

According to Newcastle University’s Helen St. Clair-Thompson and Jessica London (2024), all three of these qualities are well and good, but they still miss the mark. Citing previous research they suggest that “mental toughness” can predict a range of positive outcomes above and beyond those associated with the other three concepts. As they note, “Mental toughness is known to be a useful predictor of perceived stress, anxiety, depression, burnout, wellbeing, mental illness recovery, and happiness.”

Mental toughness was a concept derived from the field of sports psychology as a way to explain how athletes deal with the stress and pressure of their intensive competition and need to train. However, as the concept spread, the British authors maintain that it needed to be more precisely defined and separated from the other three similar qualities. One way to do so was to test rigorously the connections among all four qualities by eliminating each one statistically in its relationship to happiness.

Taking on the Mental Toughness Challenge

Using an online young adult sample of 367 college students St. Clair-Thompson and London administered questionnaires intended to capture each quality. The mental toughness scale (MTQ) consists of items on the following scales (adapted from the original):

1. Challenge: Challenges usually bring out the best in me.
2. Commitment: I’ll do what it takes to keep my promises and achieve my goals.
3. Control of emotion: I can manage my emotions and the emotions of others.
4. Control of life: I really believe I can do it.
5. Confidence in abilities: I believe I have the ability to do it—or can acquire the ability.
6. Interpersonal confidence: I can influence others—I can stand my ground if needed.

As you can see, these items tap into some qualities that might seem related to self-efficacy (Confidence in Abilities) and grit (Commitment), but there is not complete overlap in terms of item content itself.

The authors used a simple prediction equation in which all four potential contributors to happiness were factored out to see which would be related to happiness. In support of the study’s hypotheses, the findings showed that only the MTQ scales significantly predicted happiness with grit, self-efficacy, and resilience removed from the equation. Indeed those six MTQ scales predicted a large percent (65 out of a possible 100) of the variations in happiness scores.

Although taken as a set of six, the mental toughness scales were more predictive of happiness than the other measures, there were some interconnections between the other scales and MTQ, suggesting that they are not completely separate entities. The main finding, that they disappeared as predictors of happiness when mental toughness was added, still shows the value of this construct above and beyond other components of resilience or determination.

Putting Mental Toughness to Work For You

You don’t have to be an athlete to benefit from the ways that mental toughness can make some of your problems go away, or at least be more bearable. This begs the question of how to tap into your own inner strengths.

Citing prior research, St. Clair-Thompson and London suggest that the pathway to greater toughness involves interventions that focus on positive thinking, goal setting, visualization, anxiety control, and attentional control. In some ways, these are similar to interventions based on cognitive approaches to stress and coping. For example, the idea that stress is in the “mind of the beholder,” a common mantra in stress psychology, can help people translate threat into challenge.

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A mental toughness intervention could also have you view your own abilities as capable of rising to the challenge while also helping you direct your attention to the task at hand. Letting your mind wander to how overwhelmed you are by a challenge can negate the value of drilling down into your layer of internal toughness. The main point is that, like coaching in sports, mental toughness appears to be highly trainable.

To sum up, revising the happiness formula to incorporate the six dimensions of mental toughness has the potential to give you new insights into not only what gets you through a stressful time, but how to build your own strength from the inside out.

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