Insight alone won’t build your mental endurance. Your brain changes through repetition.
That’s something I’ve learned more than once in my life — not from books or theories, but from necessity.
The first time was when I was a teenager. I was deeply shy, anxious in social situations, uncomfortable looking people in the eye. I avoided attention and conflict, and I rarely stood up for myself. Not because I wanted to live that way, but because social exposure felt dangerous to me.
I wrote earlier about this in Feeling Stuck in Life — that quiet state where nothing is wrong enough to force change, yet nothing moves forward on its own.
What slowly changed that wasn’t confidence. It was exposure.
I did things that made me uncomfortable. Over and over again. Small things. Awkward things. Situations I didn’t feel ready for. And gradually, something shifted. Not overnight. Not dramatically. But the fear lost most of its authority. My brain learned that what it resisted didn’t harm me.
A Different Kind of Exposure
Years later, I found myself in a very different place — but the mechanism was the same.
I was deeply depressed. Numb. Joyless. Laughter felt foreign, almost impossible. I didn’t find things funny. I didn’t feel amusement. And instead of waiting for the feeling to return, I did something strange: I exposed myself to laughter anyway.
For nearly a year, I watched comedies and sitcoms with laugh tracks. Every day.
The added laughter mattered. It told me when something was supposed to be funny. When to laugh.
At first, my own laughter felt hollow. Mechanical. More like imitation than emotion. I followed along. Joined in. Almost like follow the leader. Not because I felt joy, but because I knew what laughter was meant to sound like.
But repetition matters.
Build Your Mental Endurance Through Repetition
It wasn’t a breakthrough moment. It was a retraining process. And in some cases, you have to meet the same resistance again and again — for a year, or longer — before the brain finally stops treating it as a threat.
Slowly, my brain relearned the pattern. Laughter stopped feeling forced. Emotion began to follow behavior again. What started as imitation became genuine.
The point wasn’t laughter itself. It was the principle behind it.
What both experiences taught me was this:
Repeated behavior teaches the brain what is safe, tolerable, and survivable.
This idea — that the mind adapts through repeated exposure and habit — is also reflected in how some psychologists describe training the mind through daily habits.
In my experience, when the problem is in the mind, the work sometimes has to happen through action and the body.
And when the body struggles, the work often has to happen in the mind.
We don’t always wait for readiness. Sometimes, we teach the mind what is tolerable by meeting it anyway. This isn’t about forcing yourself. It’s about gentle, repeated exposure. Doing things you don’t want to do. Things that feel uncomfortable. Things your instinct tells you to avoid.
Not to prove anything. Not to toughen up. But to slowly rebuild mental endurance.
Until Endurance Returns…
Avoidance teaches the brain that avoidance is necessary. Exposure teaches it that survival is possible.
Over time, resistance softens. The nervous system recalibrates. What once felt overwhelming becomes manageable. Maybe not easy — but bearable.
That’s how capacity grows.
I want to be clear about one thing. This wasn’t about becoming stronger. It was about becoming able again.
I’m sharing what worked for me, not as advice, and not as a universal solution. And if you’re in a place where things feel too heavy to carry alone, where life feels unsafe or unmanageable, that’s not something willpower or repetition should handle by itself. Professional support matters. This isn’t a replacement for that.
But for me, and at certain points in my life, this was the work: to meet resistance gently, repeatedly, and long enough for the brain to learn that life could be faced again.
Not all at once. But slowly — until endurance returned. And with it happiness.