Is it Grit or Self-Sabotage?
Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash
This article originally appeared on Medium.com 3/1/2021
The Double-Edged Sword or Tolerance
On one hand, our ability to tolerate challenges has been linked with our ability to develop grit. On the other hand, tolerating dysfunction can lead us to drain our emotional reserves that will hinder our progress.
What you are tolerating could be helping you develop grit.
or
What you are tolerating could be slowing you down from reaching your goals.
Each one of us must navigate through many demands to get to the finish line — the end of the day, reaching a goal, or some other place in space-time towards which we direct our effort.
Our ability to reach that destination depends on many converging factors, some expected and others unexpected. How we tolerate the challenges and setbacks along the way is a determining factor in whether we reach our destination or not.
We must learn to tolerate life to some degree or another. Maybe we have to tolerate a customer or client that is challenging, navigate the challenges of modern society, navigate conflict, or tolerate the friction that comes from moving towards our goals.
Our ability to tolerate life is a necessary component of what it means to live a human life. Learning to tolerate our emotions better can help us self-regulate better.
How we respond to our emotions can be the thing that helps us navigate various situations successfully or not. This is why we constantly hear that developing one’s emotional intelligence is important to life success.
Do the things you tolerate help you become a better person or rob you of your emotional energy?
One of the biggest challenges with tolerating minor annoyances and inconveniences is that it can lead to ‘death by a thousand cuts’. In the moment, small challenges may not seem like a big deal. But, over time, small challenges can add up to become something much larger.
When we start feeling stressed, depressed, frustrated, angry, or having a negative emotional response, this may be a sign that we are operating beyond our capability. While this can be a helpful place to improve our skills, it can also lead to burnout if sustained.
One literature review indicates that emotional labor is a job stressor that can lead to burnout. They suggest developing a stress management program and coping skills to reduce negative outcomes linked to emotional labor.
Ideally, we want to develop our skills, grow, and progress towards our goals without sacrificing our well-being in the process. Finding this balance can be incredibly helpful in our goal achievement process.
To develop grit, we must learn to tolerate challenging situations. But, tolerating dysfunctional challenges in life can slow us down. To improve the likelihood of reaching our goals, we must learn to differentiate between challenges that help our pursuits and those that needlessly drain us.
The reality is that the simple act of ‘tolerating discomfort’ drains our energy. It requires emotional work. In the same way that we have a limited reservoir of physical energy, the same can be said to be true about emotional energy.
One research study showed that sustained attention declines due to emotional fatigue. This means that our ability to focus on a given task will decrease due to emotional fatigue…which means decreased quality and efficacy.
Sustained attention is related to error processing and decreased attention is likely the cause of error processing impairment. I’m sure you can imagine what your life might be like without your error processing capacities functioning properly.
Another study showed that mental fatigue can modulate the higher-level cognitive processes. This leads to decreased speed in information evaluation and decision making. If you are experiencing mental fatigue your decision-making processes will be negatively impacted.
Another study showed that mind-wandering and difficulty focusing were correlated with negative emotional rumination. While not causally connected, mind-wandering and difficulty focusing can be indications that you are experiencing negative emotional rumination. At the very least, this may be an indication that you need to take a break (or get some sleep, as indicated by the study).
While tolerating challenges are a necessary part of reaching our goals and developing grit, tolerating events that drain our emotional reserves and slow us down could mean taking longer to reach our destination. Or, worst-case scenario, we disengage with the process altogether.
How can we spot the difference between being gritty AF and just plain ol’ deluding ourselves into self-sabotage?
According to Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, grit has 4 “psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common.”
Interest — are you interested in the endeavor which you are undertaking?
Practice — do you have the discipline to do things better today than you did yesterday?
Purpose — do you have the conviction that your work matters?
Hope — are you willing to rise to the occasion when things get difficult?
Here are some clarifying questions to help determine if the things you are tolerating are helping or hurting you:
Does the thing you are tolerating align with these qualities? If these qualities are missing, you may need to reevaluate the situation — specifically, assess your goal and the process. Have you set the right goal for yourself? Is the process working for you?
Another marker of grit is applying your effort towards long-term achievement without concern for reward or recognition along the way. Are you OK with continuing your course of action without concern for reward or recognition along the way?
Those developing their grit also have a clear hierarchy of their goals. Are you clear about your hierarchy of activity? Do you know what things need to get done to move you closer to your goal and what things need to be cut out?
These questions are by no means the be-all-end-all. However, they can help you clarify your intentions with your current activity. And, if challenges are getting in your way, they may help uncover where you may be getting stuck.
Here are some questions to help you identify any negative emotional states:
What are the things that nag you in your head?
What are the things that keep you up at night?
What are the things that you perseverate on?
What are you holding on to?
What do you need to let go of?
The things we have learned to tolerate, often, serve to weigh us down — they require emotional labor that could be invested in more important activities. I heard a metaphor from another therapist recently, it goes something like this…
If you are in a pool swimming and you have an inflatable ball that you are keeping submerged, you can swim around and interact but so much of your energy is going into keeping the ball submerged that you can’t fully attend to the process of swimming.
Tolerating unnecessary challenges is like trying to swim while simultaneously submerging the ball. Because our energy is attending to the ball, we cannot be fully present with, nor be fully effective, in the task at hand.
But, it can be hard to let go of the things that slow us down…
There can be meaning and value in holding on…the sacrifices we make to stay the course.
Are the sacrifices worth it? What cost are you willing to pay?
If the sacrifices are worth it, then keep doing what you’re doing and work to align your effort with the qualities of developing grit.
If they are not worth it, then it may be time to reevaluate some things.
What you can do
Fortunately, there are several things we can do to move from tolerating distress and dysfunction to developing grit.
Get adequate sleep — if your mind is wandering and you are having difficulty focusing, work on improving your sleep cycle or take a nap.
Exercise and caffeine improve sustained attention — one helps, both help better. Go for a walk, get in a quick workout, drink some tea or coffee and get back at it.
Set appropriate boundaries on negative influences in your life — too much dysfunction and distress from certain relationships and circumstances? How can you reduce your time and energy drain and use that energy on more productive pursuits?
Meditate — Focused meditation is effective training for emotion and attention regulation and used frequently as a mental health intervention.
Develop optimism — how are things happening for you, not to you? Congratulate yourself daily. Forgive yourself and others daily. Practice gratitude daily. Learn to trust the process.
Learn to label your emotions — learn to better identify and label your emotions, it improves emotion regulation.
Prioritize better — use the 80/20 rule to identify tasks that require significant energy with little payoff, eliminate those tasks, then reinvest that energy in higher leverage activities.
Have an active stress management program — have specific activities planned for when you get stressed. Go for a walk, practice deep breathing, or read my other post on how to Kill Stress to Death.
Develop your coping skills — if none of the above activities will work for you, take steps to identify what will work for you. Create a plan so that when push comes to shove you are prepared.
Hopefully this conversation sparked some ideas for you. Sometimes things can rob us of our precious time which we will never get back. It’s our most valuable resource. We trade it for everything that we have. Why trade it for things that serve to undermine your efforts and contribute to self-sabotage?
You are your most valuable investment. I hope you treat yourself as such.
