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The Curse of Psychological Strength.

Everyone has a limit. An end to the amount of discomfort they can cope with.

This is obvious physically - some people can lift more and run further than others.

But how much emotional pain, upset or disappointment a person can endure is subtler and harder to detect.

It’s not apparent in the size of someone’s arms but the capacity of their nervous system. It’s not a weight you can see on a squat rack, it’s their ability to carry a heavy emotional load.

This psychological strength can be a good thing: You’re able to handle more than most, you don’t balk at pain and keep pushing through, regardless of how you feel.

But too much strength can be a weakness.

High performers are particularly vulnerable to this trap.

Psychological strength is rewarded almost everywhere. In the gym it’s discipline, in business it’s grit, in public it’s composure.

You become the person who can handle it, who doesn’t complain, who pushes through when others would quit.

Your ability to ignore how you feel and keep moving forward earns admiration, builds your career and creates momentum.

But what you are praised for in public, you often pay for in private.

Relationships don’t reward endurance, they require attunement.

If your default strategy in life is to absorb discomfort and override warning signs, you will do exactly that when someone repeatedly hurts you.

You’ll rationalise it, reframe it, decide it’s your job to make it work.

And the stronger you are, the longer you can stay.

What looks like strength from the outside becomes self-abandonment on the inside.

You’ve trained yourself to believe that struggle is noble and difficulty is meaningful, so when love feels destabilising it doesn’t register as a warning, it feels like a challenge. And challenges are your thing.

But a relationship isn’t a marathon to be endured, it’s a place to feel safe.

The qualities that make you formidable in the arena can quietly make you miserable in your own living room.

Let’s say you’re dating and feel like a side-character in your own relationship. You put them 1st and they put you 6th.

The rupture is regular and the repair is absent.

Lower resilience, less stubborn people would have broken long ago and said “I’m out” - but not you, you’re the David Goggins of psychological suffering.

Forget carrying the boats, you’ll carry the whole fleet. Forever.

In these situations, you’re faced with a much tougher problem - not how much CAN you tolerate, but how much do you WANT to tolerate.

Perhaps this is what you had to do as a child.

If your needs weren’t noticed, your sadness was ignored and your feelings didn’t matter then you became accustomed to pushing through disconnection in order to make those relationships function.

If Child You learns “I need to work hard to be loved” then Adult You believes “if I’m not loved, I just need to work harder”.

You’ve achieved 10,000 hours of ignoring your own needs.

You can’t tell people how you feel without first worrying about how it will make them feel.

You unconsciously believe that suffering is the price of connection, and that silent subjugation is noble.

“I should be able to tolerate the intolerable in order to make this work.”

And when you try to connect with somebody who doesn’t see your needs, you don’t notice “this person isn’t attuned to me”, instead you sense “this relationship pattern feels familiar, this must be what love is”.

You have been trained at your core that your needs don’t matter, so you always must work to prove your worth.

And importantly - that if you don’t have to work for it, then you can’t trust it.

So we push away people who are easy, ready and open. And instead pursue those who are distant, difficult and disconnected.

“I have to prove that I am worthy of loving” becomes addictive and completely disorienting.

The psychological strength that once enabled you has now entrapped you.

This capacity to endure emotional pain without protest is what happens when your nervous system learns that discomfort is safer than confrontation.

In totality, this obscures your ability to understand what you do and don’t want to tolerate.

Perhaps your ego doesn’t want to admit defeat.

Shame spirals in this way. If you believe you are the problem then you also have to be the solution. So you stay, you tolerate, you try harder.

But just because you’re suffering does not mean you are noble. It just means you are suffering.

No one is going to congratulate you on your deathbed with a medal for “never making a fuss”. No one is going to thank you for quietly lifting what should never have been yours to carry.

The answer isn’t less resilience but less denial.

A boundary isn’t an intellectual decision. It’s an emotional limit, and if you can’t feel it, you can’t enforce it.

So… is it any surprise if you use “fuck your feelings” as a mantra and then wonder why you can never connect with your emotions?

Psychological strength doesn’t always make you strong. Often it just makes you stay too long.

You risk one day waking up in a life you built entirely around what you were willing to tolerate. And then you finally break.

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MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Rick Glassman - I wore a cute cardigan, we discuss deep emotions, social awkwardness and fart jokes. Cosy. Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
Oliver Burkeman - one of the world’s best writers on how to balance productivity and happiness. Chase and presence. Spectacular.

Saturday.
Dave Evans - what does the leading science say about how to engineer meaning and reinvent your life? Find out.

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THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Can immigrants make the native population happy?

“The gender composition of immigrants affects the subjective well-being of native citizens.

Female immigrants are robustly positively associated.

In contrast, male immigrants are negatively associated with the life satisfaction of the native population.” — Rob Henderson

(horrendous news for me, a male immigrant)

​

2.
​The Alpha History Fantasy.

Modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe that they would have done better in medieval times.

They are somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant #3,582 whose favela was sacked and destroyed.

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3.
​A lot of it is just timing.

Most people who say “I finally found a partner who could handle me” forget just how much of an asshole they were to their exes.

It often takes a lot of clumsy mistakes to form immature people into someone finally datable, the glory gets taken by the final partner, but most of the work was done by the broken hearts that came before.

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LIFE HACK

UK border hack.
​I came up with an idea for how to defeat the British Border Police.

​O​utwit immigration.​​
​

Big love,
Chris x

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PS
I wonder how many relationships have deepened or ended due to those Valentines Questions