In a previous post, I looked at mental toughness as it relates to stress.

In particular, I covered how mental toughness operates to insulate the mentally tough person against the ill effects of stress.

And this happens because when you have higher levels of mental toughness, you are more likely to interpret potentially stressful circumstances positively rather than negatively.

So, you are more likely to believe that a potentially stressful situation is something you can deal with, or which is even an opportunity for growth, rather than to see it as a threat.

As a result, mentally tough people will often not be affected detrimentally by stressful circumstances in the same way that those who are more mentally sensitive might.

And this, in many ways, is the central idea of mental toughness – that it facilitates an adaptive rather than a maladaptive response to challenging circumstances.

But, there is a warning about the downside of mental toughness that you need to be aware of.

Like all strengths, and like positivity generally, mental toughness, when overdone, can become a weakness.

In other words, just because you have the mental strength to keep on pushing on, whatever the circumstances, it doesn’t mean that you always should.

You still need to exercise good judgement and restraint, or you’ll be in as much danger of burnout or poor performance as you would be if you were hampered by significant sensitivity to stress.

All of this is backed up by research conducted by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr, who tested their ideas originally with athletes and later within the workplace.

Schwartz and Loehr make the point that elite athletes work to reach peak performance at specific times, i.e. during competition. This is the performance zone. They also have structured periods of ritualised training and recovery between performances (the recovery zone).

And it is the recovery periods that are critical.

In business and daily life, we risk falling into the trap of trying to operate at full stretch the whole time – packing more and more into every day, and more and more onto our to-do lists. And, of course, the more resilient you are mentally, the more of this you can do.

But if you are in the performance zone for extended periods you risk physical harm and mental burnout.

What Loehr and Schwartz’s work tells us is that there is a need for what they call “energy oscillation”. This means managing your energy by alternating periods of intense activity with periods of rest.

Of course, you can’t always take time out during the work day to kick back and relax. But what you can do, is shift between tasks that are more and less intense.

So if you have been working on tasks that take up lots of physical or emotional energy, change down to something more mundane or less taxing from time to time.

And, equally importantly, when you’re not working – don’t work. Set aside genuine, no-work, recovery time.

So whilst, I’m all about helping people build the mental toughness they need to maximise their performance and manage their lives well, I’m also very much concerned with helping you to recognise how to use the capabilities that you develop wisely.

The Making of a Corporate Athlete, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review 2001.

Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure, Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan Harvard Business Review 20016.

My other posts on mental toughness are listed with my posts on performance.