Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, ‘How did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined?’
When you reach that elite level, 90 percent is mental and 10 percent is physical. You are competing against yourself. Not against the other athlete.
Imagine being a running back or a receiver. You get tackled, and then when you get up, you’re surrounded by a bunch of guys, and they’re all screaming and yelling at you… Mentally, it wears on you, like, ‘God, how long can I do this?’ It’s a mental thing.
I remember being in middle and high school and hearing Demi Lovato speak up about her mental illness, and that was comforting.
When you pump up your exercise, it makes you feel better and makes you look better, so you do a better job. It’s mental, too.
I have a funny mental framework when I do physics. I create an imaginary audience in my head to explain things to – it is part of the way I think. For me, teaching and explaining, even to my imaginary audience, is part of the process.
If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed.
I’m fortunate that my job gives me the motivation to be as fit as possible. I wound up in a profession that requires physical and mental preparation, so I get to prepare like an athlete for everything I do. I’m living the dream, man.
People take the mickey out of mental health, but it is very delicate.
As a veteran, you’re a little more poised on that mental side. But athletically, I didn’t really think I could get better.
I’m quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I’m a failed scientist, and because I’m interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.
From the physical point of view, a man is nothing more than a system of cells, or from the mental point of view, than a system of representations; in either case, he differs only in degree from animals.
So it must be my mental, because sometimes when I start on the tee, I still worry about whether my ball is going to hit right or left.
I had this idea that the coolest thing that could happen to you was talking with God. My father was always talking about God, and I idolized my father, so I’d spend hours trying to have mental telepathy with God.
Let come what comes, and accommodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal, and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens.
We must invest in affordable housing, quality education, safe parks and green space, good paying jobs, comprehensive mental health and trauma services, and other supports that will help all of our people.
Mental life is indeed practical through and through. It begins in practice and it ends in practice.
There are more than enough people with serious mental issues who really do need professional help without all the other Toms, Dicks and Harriets rushing to the therapist’s couch.
For the most part, we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs.
The American people deserve to have absolute confidence in their President. They deserve to know that he or she can perform the duties demanded of the office, and they deserve to have full transparency on the mental state of their highest elected leader.
By action and reaction do we become strong or weak, according to the character of our thoughts and mental states. Fear is the deadly nightshade of the mind.
There are people who are profoundly mentally ill. But we now have a very weird perspective on mental illness and what it means. I do think that people are overmedicated.
Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond fields of the mind.
Globalisation has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it.
My father’s very public life as Famous Amos was the opposite of that of his ex-wife, my mother Shirley, who was fighting a very private, solitary battle with mental illness.
So much of sport is that mental attitude.
One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.
The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form – the one of the particles, the other of the waves – are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.
A desire to be in charge of our own lives, a need for control, is born in each of us. It is essential to our mental health, and our success, that we take control.
Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.
Pregame, I eat pancakes for a meal. I always do mental visualization before the game to prepare myself. Postgame, I typically take ice baths.
Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish.
Sport is not just about entertainment. It is equally about winning and losing, pooling and galvanising the energy of the youth, upgrading people’s physical fitness and mental prowess.
A visual image in the hand of an artist is merely a tool to trigger a mental image.
A good 80 percent of the vault is still physical and another percentage of it, 20, 25 percent is mental. Mental is always the mental strength, the confidence building up to that contest or repetition, practice, practice, and practice.
The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.
An actress spends a lifetime observing people. You build up a mental library. No, not a library. Make that a repository.
I try to keep at a non-obsessive level of fitness. It’s not about looking great, it’s about just feeling good. So I do a lot of yoga. Bikram just blows my mind. It’s mental as well as physical; if I don’t train, I get very depressed.
Do you not see, first, that – as a mental abstract – physical force is directly opposed to morality; and secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces?
Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time – toward the same object, the same person – want to harm and want to do good.
You must consider, when reading this treatise, that mental perception, because connected with matter, is subject to conditions similar to those to which physical perception is subject.
Any other illness, any other disease that we’re faced with, there’s sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, ‘Oh, they’re crazy,’ to belittle the problem.
You can train your mental strength just like you train your body. If your body looks fit or ripped, it looks strong, and you can flex your muscles. So, physically, you have a certain strength. Mentally, it’s the same thing. You can train your psychological strength.
When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors.
I don’t get upset if people think I’m crazy. If you go to a mental hospital and someone calls you a name, would you get upset? Of course not. Well, that’s the way I think about the world. They don’t know any better.
We simply want gun legislation in this country that allows law-abiding citizens to still own guns or prevents people with a history of mental illness or a history of a criminal background from owning a firearm.
I realized I had to work on all aspects of my recovery, the spiritual, mental and physical.
Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking.
‘American Sniper’ is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war.
The secret is to nip any mental disorder in the bud. As soon as you’re not feeling yourself, reach out and get some help because you can quickly get better. If you get stuck in it, it’s so hard to get out.
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military.
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.
Tact is one of the first mental virtues, the absence of it is fatal to the best talent.
‘Salaryitis’ is when you become so accustomed to that salary that you no longer have the gumption to pull out of the rut and strike out on your own. It destroys the nerve of ambitious, imaginative men, and bowing to it has meant sure defeat for more people than any other sickness, mental or physical.
