Does this sound like you? You’ve mastered reliability and basic social skills. You’re gritty. You complete challenging projects and meet important deadlines. Your friends come to you for advice. You can smoothly navigate awkward social situations. Yet, these skills and qualities don’t shield you from mental health struggles.
Major events, like an unexpected negative performance review after years of consistent praise, can set off weeks of rumination and anxiety. Even minor events, like being left off an email thread about a project you’re involved in, or hearing another parent mention an enrichment activity you hadn’t considered for your child, can make you second-guess yourself.
This is the paradox many high achievers face: mental strength doesn’t guarantee mental well-being.
To help you better understand the distinction, and better access both, let’s break down the often overlooked differences between mental strength and mental health.
Struggling with Mental Health Doesn’t Mean You’re Not Mentally Strong
Here are five distinctions to keep in mind.
1. Mental Strength Can Mask Poor Mental Health
Someone can appear (and be) resilient while struggling internally, making it harder to recognize when they need help. In fact, there’s a surprisingly long lag between when people first experience mental health symptoms, like distressing anxiety, and when they might eventually seek therapy. The time gap is often years rather than weeks or months.
This hidden struggle takes a toll. Pretending you’re okay when you’re not is exhausting, and adds to the already exhausting experience of struggling itself. Imagine an elite athlete pushing through intense training while hiding their emotional struggles or accumulated fatigue from their coach. Eventually, the weight of that performance catches up.
Some people develop extreme resilience as a response to mental health struggles, using it as a form of control or survival strategy, masking deeper issues.
2. Mental Strength Is Socially Rewarded, While Mental Health Struggles Are Often Invisible
Society praises resilience and toughness but may overlook or stigmatize mental health struggles. Others often don’t know when someone is stuck in cycles of anxious thinking or rumination—over-analyzing, second-guessing, or replaying conversations in their head. Your colleagues often won’t know that you woke up at 3 a.m. thinking about your college friend’s LinkedIn post about the promotion they just got at work.
3. Mental Strength Can Create a False Sense of Invincibility
People who are mentally strong may underestimate their vulnerability to mental health struggles. This miscalculation can lead them to push themselves past healthy limits without allowing recovery.
The belief that mental strength can offer full protection against poor mental health can lead people to neglect proven strategies that might offer them more robust resilience. For example, many high performers fear self-compassion, believing it will weaken their edge and make them less self-disciplined, less motivated, and lazier. But, self-compassion is virtually an essential ingredient for mental health.
4. Mental Health Responds to External Factors More Than Mental Strength
Negative life events can rapidly deteriorate mental health, whereas mental strength is built more gradually. For example, if you were to experience a public failure that contradicts your identity as a highly competent adult, that might destabilize your mental health in ways your mental strength can’t counteract. Or, imagine a friend suddenly dumps you. You thought you both enjoyed your friendship but after this happens, you realize they were giving signs they found you too intense in some way. Their rejection and you losing trust in your social perceptions damages your mental health for months.
5. Different Development Patterns
Mental strength is something gained over time through challenges and experience, and a growth mindset. Mental health dips often follow an episodic pattern. As discussed, mental health can fluctuate based on stress, circumstances, and internal struggles. This difference explains why someone can be mentally tough yet still experience periods of mental health difficulty.
Don’t Let Mental Health Challenges Make You Doubt Your Mental Strength
The key takeaway of this post is that mental health struggles shouldn’t make you question your mental strength.
In fact, we wouldn’t necessarily expect groups of exceptionally strong, disciplined, and determined individuals, like Olympians, firefighters, and Navy SEALs, to have different rates of mental illness than the rest of the population.
To help you remain confident in your mental strength, while better protecting and nurturing your mental health, try these strategies:
- Release any shame you feel about episodes of rumination and anxiety.
- Try self-compassion when you’re anxious, even if you fear it will lead to mental weakness.
- Practice mental flexibility – Being strong doesn’t mean being rigid. Adaptability is key to maintaining both strength and mental health.
- Manage your mental health and mental strength somewhat independently. For example, in the self-improvement domain, you might work on embracing productive struggle so you can learn a very hard skill. In the mental health domain, you might work on skills for managing rumination. Check out these six strategies.
- Develop an awareness of the triggers that most affect your mental health, and develop coping plans for when these occur. For example, you might know that organizational change at work or criticism from your Mom are your key triggers. Keep this general pattern in mind: When an event triggers intense rumination, the emotional intensity you feel will typically naturally decay — you’ll ruminate a little less each day as you get distance from the event. Take especially good care of yourself while that process is occurring.
Both mental strength and mental health are vital for sustained high performance and personal well-being. Understanding their differences allows you to develop both aspects in complementary ways, creating a more sustainable and fulfilling approach to life’s challenges.
