What Mentally Strong People Do on Their Worst Days with Psychotherapist Amy Morin

Simon Sinek (0:00)

You do not want to relive any of the things that you have lived, those tragedies. What about you has changed because of those things that deep down inside, you're glad they happened?

Amy Morin (0:12)

So I grew up incredibly shy, but probably as a kid could have been diagnosed with selective mutism. I didn't talk for years, and public speaking would have been my number one fear.

I gave the eulogy at my husband's funeral, and in that moment, I was like, I don't care if I embarrass myself, if I stumble over my words, I don't care how I sound, it's not about me. I've been through the worst of the worst.

Simon Sinek (0:35)

Yeah, negative review just doesn't do it anymore.

Amy Morin (0:37)

Yeah, go ahead and do that. I'm okay now.

Simon Sinek (0:40)

The mental health industry is booming. There's all kinds of therapists out there, some of them legitimate, some of them not. There's all kinds of advice being dispensed across social media. But here's a question, if all that mental health guidance we were getting was working, wouldn't there be a decline in our anxiety and depression? But there's not. It's going up. So maybe, just maybe, the advice that we're getting or the advice that we're following is wrong.

That's why I invited Amy Morin on the show. She's a psychotherapist who wrote an amazing book called Thirteen Things That Mentally Strong People Don't Do, and her new book is The Mental Strength Playbook. She questions the advice that we're getting and the advice that we're following. She views mental fitness as something that we work towards, nothing that we'll ever achieve, but most importantly, there are very simple and practical steps that we can take to keep ourselves mentally strong, regardless of the ups and downs that we all experience in our professional and personal lives. If you like this content and are interested in more, please remember to subscribe. This is A Bit of Optimism.

This episode is proudly brought to you by SAP. Staying at one job for a whole career used to be the norm. Now, it's the exception. So when it does happen today, I want to know why.

Is there something wrong with the employee, or is the company doing something right? Given how rare a long tenure has become, I was excited to talk to David Robinson. He's been at SAP for over 20 years, and I wanted to hear what it takes to continue staying interested and inspired at one company. To learn more about SAP, the AI Cloud ERP for businesses of all size, head to sap.com/grow. Amy, thanks for joining me and coming in. I appreciate it.

Amy Morin (2:41)

I'm thrilled to be here, Simon.

Simon Sinek (2:43)

Let's talk about mental health.

I think you and I see the world very similarly. You know, I hate the term mental health. I use the term mental fitness.

Mental health sounds like some goal you have to achieve, which nobody ever will. And we're always falling short where mental fitness, like physical fitness, is something you're always working on. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind, but it's a practice that you commit to your life. But you are more qualified to talk about mental health than I am. You're actually sort of trained in this stuff. It's an obsession right now. Everybody's talking about mental health. People are dispensing armchair advice all over Instagram and TikTok, which I hope is well-intended. However, there's a problem with the mental health world in America today.

Amy Morin (3:27)

Yeah. Yeah, despite our increased conversations with mental health.

Simon Sinek (3:33)

It's a real topic now.

Amy Morin (3:34)

Right, as you've noticed, we're not getting better.

That over the years, it seems to be our mental health is struggling more and more. And despite a lot of these superficial conversations, I'm not hearing from a lot of people like, I'm so grateful that the more we talk about it, the better I feel. In fact, sometimes it's the opposite. And something I'm seeing in my therapy office is people are now going on a quest to be like, I can just figure out what happened to me when I was seven and somehow I'm gonna feel better today. Or they think that mental health is something to be achieved or something you have or something you don't. And when you think about it, like nobody walks around and says, well, I'm physically healthy, right? Or like physical health is not a goal.

Simon Sinek (4:11)

Less of a conversation, yeah.

Amy Morin (4:12)

Right, but when it comes to mental health, it's like people think, yes, I'm mentally healthy or you're mentally ill. But the truth is, if you looked at a scale of how people are on optimal mental health, the CDC at some point said about 17% of people are probably operating at optimal mental health at any given moment. And where we fall on that scale varies throughout the day. Depends what you ate for lunch, who you've been talking to, whether you're tired, so many of these factors. Yet we think you either have mental health or you don't.