Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Amy Morin on How to Build Real Mental Strength | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fri, 28 Mar 2025
Losing her mother and husband fueled Amy Morin’s quest to understand mental strength—an essential part of Mental Health, positivity, and wellness. On one of her darkest days, she published an article titled "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do." Read by 50 million people, the piece catapulted her to ‘self-help guru’ status. Now, she trains people to build their mental strength. In today’s episode, Hala and Amy discuss tools and strategies for maintaining mental strength. In this episode, Hala and Amy will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (00:59) Early Passion for Mental Health (02:06) Personal Tragedies and Resilience (04:41) The Turning Point: Writing the Viral Article (08:57) Becoming a Thought Leader (12:25) Understanding Mental Strength vs. Mental Health (15:21) Tools for Building Mental Strength (24:56) Dealing with Anxiety and Past Memories (29:08) Reframing Your Story (30:02) Dealing with Traumatic Memories (33:26) Healthy Ways to Treat the Past (34:52) Turning Negative Days into Positive Experiences (37:00) Overcoming Jealousy and Social Comparisons (40:12) Understanding and Managing Entitlement (44:37) The Importance of Solitude (47:55) Advice for Introverted Entrepreneurs Amy Morin has been dubbed "the self-help guru of the moment" by The Guardian. She is a psychotherapist, popular keynote speaker, and international bestselling author. In 2013, she wrote a viral article "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," picked up by websites like Forbes, Business Insider, and Psychology Today. Her debut book of the same title is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller. In 2015, she delivered one of the most popular TEDx talks of all time, “The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong,” now viewed more than 23 million times. She’s a contributor to Inc., Forbes, and Psychology Today, reaching more than two million readers each month, inspiring them to develop a stronger mindset and tap into their motivation. Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify OpenPhone: Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at openphone.com/profiting Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - Receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold Factor - Get 50% off your first box plus free shipping at factormeals.com/factorpodcast Rakuten - Save while shopping at rakuten.com Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at aka.ms/profiting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at linkedin.com/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services - yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset, Mental Health, Health, Psychology, Wellness, Biohacking, Motivation, Mindset, Manifestation, Productivity, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self Healing, Positivity, Happiness, Sleep, Diet
Chapter 1: What inspired Amy Morin to focus on mental strength?
Yap gang, sometimes it's your darkest days that teach you the most about your true potential. Losing her mother and husband fueled Amy Morin's quest for understanding mental strength. Now Amy is a psychotherapist and best-selling author who trains people to build their resilience.
And in this Yap Classic episode, we're revisiting my conversation with Amy from last year about the secrets to building unshakable mental toughness. We explore how to reframe setbacks, develop psychological armor, and create a mindset that doesn't just endure entrepreneurial storms, but thrives in them. So let's get those mental muscles loose and ready. It's time to get to work with Amy Morin.
Chapter 2: How did personal tragedies shape Amy's career?
Amy, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I am very excited for this conversation. And when I was learning about your story, I was surprised to find out that you knew you wanted to be a therapist pretty early on. You know, most people I talk to, they take twists and turns to finally figure out what they want to do.
But you had a passion for mental health pretty early on. So can you tell us about that?
I knew I wanted to go in the health field and do something, but originally I thought I was going to be a doctor. And it was my first day of college. We had to dissect cats. And everybody in the room was super excited to dissect a cat except for me. And I realized maybe it's not actually the medical part that I'm excited about.
I wanted to help people, but perhaps being a physician was not my thing. So I called my sister. who was a psychology major. And I said, quick, I need a new major. I think psychology, what do you think? And she said, go into social work, because at least then you get a degree in social work where you get a license, a bachelor's in psychology is kind of broad.
So I switched my major on day two of college. But I always thought maybe I'll switch it to something else down the road, but absolutely fell in love with it, decided to get my master's and knew at that point that I really wanted to become a therapist.
That's amazing. And it ended up coming pretty in handy for you because your 20s ended up being a really traumatic decade for you, a really grief-stricken decade. So I'd love for you to share with us what happened because I know it's a core part of your story.
Yeah, I am so grateful that I became a therapist not knowing what was going to happen next. But early on in my career, in the first year of being a therapist, my mom passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. She had a brain aneurysm. And it was really this first huge loss in my life where I thought, how am I going to deal with this?
I had all the skills and tools I'd learned in college, but now to put them into practice and figure out how do you go through grief was a completely different experience. And then on the three year anniversary, it was three years to the day that my mom died, my 26 year old husband died, and he had a heart attack. I didn't even know you could have a heart attack at 26.
It was nothing I would have ever imagined in a million years, but it felt like such an extra cruel thing that it happened on the anniversary of my mom's death. So I wake up and I'm a widow and I don't have my mom. And I thought, ooh, how do you get through this one? And I'm supposed to be a therapist who goes to work every day and helps other people with their problems. But
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Chapter 3: What was the turning point for Amy's career as a thought leader?
And I just remember just thinking, what next? I spent a long time in a pretty dark place.
It's really sad. So how did you end up taking what you've learned in school and then maybe applying your own knowledge of how you actually got out of grief to do something productive with all of that sadness and everything that was going on?
Well, it was really one of the worst days of my life. It was shortly after my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. And we figured out it was terminal that I wrote myself a letter of what mentally strong people don't do. And it was a combination of things that I had learned through my own journey, things that I had learned as a therapist, and some of the things I learned in college too.
But all combined, figured out if you just don't do these certain things in life, you can get through almost anything. So wrote myself that letter. And by then I had become a freelance writer. And that became out of necessity because my husband had been the primary breadwinner.
So back in the day when I needed more money, I was freelance writing in the evenings and on the weekends again so I could keep my house. So once I had this letter to myself, I thought, ooh, this is helpful. Maybe it will help somebody else. So I published it online, got paid $15 for publishing it online. But 50 million people read the article. It was 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do.
And that just opened everything up for me. From that article, I got a book deal and the opportunity to do lots of things that I probably wouldn't have been able to do or ever thought I could do. And it turned into something amazing. And I'm so glad that I now get to share what I learned about from my own personal journey, from my work as a therapist.
And I get to talk about mental strength on a completely different level than when I was in a therapy office in rural Maine back in the day.
Yeah, when I read your story, it just made me light up because you're in my podcast network. We've done a lot of work together over the years. And I've always just known you as this thought leader in your niche. Little did I know that it all started with this viral article. Now you're telling me you just got paid $15 for it. And that led to a book deal, led to a TED Talk that had 23 million views.
How did all that feel? Like it seemed to happen pretty quickly.
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Chapter 4: How does mental strength differ from mental health?
I think it's about adding something of value that doesn't already exist. So I hear a lot of people say, well, with AI now, there's no sense in even writing things because there's too much content out there or there's going to be so much out there that you just can't compete. But the truth is, your story is going to be different than everybody else's. You always have your story.
You can use your life experiences to put a different spin on something that is already existing. Clearly, the topic of mental health is not new, but I was able to add to it and change it in a way that was interesting to people. I talked about what not to do rather than what to do. I talk about mental strength as opposed to just mental health. Those slight changes make a huge difference.
So I think for somebody who feels like, I don't know what to put out there, And know that it can be kind of controversial too, that you don't have to say things to just stay in the middle of the road because most people will say it has to evoke some kind of emotion. And you don't want to put content out there just to be provocative and try to irritate people, but it's okay to have an opinion.
And when my article first came out, there was actually another article that first landed on Psychology Today, and it was about all the things wrong with my article. And I remember thinking, I think I've just ruined my therapy career. Psychology Today is a really reputable website. And now I have this person saying that my article has problems and that perhaps I wasn't right.
But it actually led to Psychology Today reaching out to me and saying, do you want to write for us? And a good thing became of it. And yeah, definitely not everybody agreed with the things that I said. But for the people that you repel, you also attract other people.
So I think to have that faith that not everybody's going to be your audience and that's okay, but you can still create amazing content and you'll attract the people that you're meant to attract.
Yeah. And I love what you're saying about how you took this concept of mentally strong, right? Nobody was saying that. Now it seems like you hear mentally strong. I don't know. Maybe I've just heard it so much from your stuff that I feel like it's like a term that people say mental strength, but people weren't saying that when you coined that phrase. Is that right?
Yeah. So if you look at Google Trends and the back end of Google, it was Googled a few times before I said it. So I certainly wasn't the first human being to say it. But you can see that once my article came out, huge spike in traffic. And since then, it stayed up there that people use that more like an everyday phrase.
It's a good point. So if you're trying to stand out in your field, what is your conviction? What is your thing that you're going to talk about that's different and unique that makes you an expert on that specific topic? So I love that. Okay, so let's dig into this topic of being mentally strong. You've said that mental strength is not the same thing as mental health. So what do you mean by that?
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Chapter 5: What tools can help build mental strength?
Physical strength, yeah, it's cool to be physically strong and it does prevent a lot of health problems, but it doesn't guarantee you won't still get arthritis in your knees or you might still develop high blood pressure. Mental strength and mental health is the same. Becoming mentally strong can improve your mental health. It can prevent a lot of problems.
But if you do develop something like anxiety or depression, it's not a sign that you're weak. And you can still keep building mental strength too. It's a complicating factor. It makes it a little more difficult perhaps, but mental strength is all about the choices you make every day. There's tons of opportunities to keep growing mentally stronger.
And no matter how strong we think we are, there's always room for improvement and life will show you that over and over again.
I love what you're saying right now. And I personally am on this journey to have way stronger mental health. I just feel like as I become a leader, I just constantly find myself needing to be in a place where like, I'm cool controlling my emotions that I don't show emotions, whether that's online or on stage or like, I just feel like it's getting more amplified for me.
So I love the work that you do. And I definitely want to dig into all of it. Before we do that, Let's talk about the stories that people have told you. You mentioned earlier that it's sort of a motivator for you to hear all the stories. And you had this really popular book, this article, a TED Talk, like I said, with 23 million views.
What are some of the stories that you heard from people who've applied your framework?
I just got a message yesterday from a woman who said, I lost my mom a few years ago, but it really didn't all click with me about what I was going through and how to heal from it until I read your book. And I'll hear from people who will say things like that, like they felt a lot less alone or they finally felt like they had tools.
Like I have hope that now that I know these tools exist and that these strategies are out there, I feel so much better. Or I'll also hear from people who say, you know, I think I got it wrong. I think all these years that I was pretending like nothing bothered me, I thought I was acting tough, but really, I wasn't dealing with the things that were.
So they realized that building mental strength looks different than they thought, that it's about sometimes asking for help and about being vulnerable. And about acknowledging pain and saying, oh yeah, actually, I struggle with this and I'm going to work on managing it too.
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Chapter 6: Why is it important to avoid self-pity?
Otherwise, we convince ourselves, this is 100% true that this thing is going to happen. So you just want to expand your mind to say, or maybe something amazing will happen too.
Yeah, and I feel like a lot of us, a lot of the time, we create these imaginary obstacles anyway, when it comes to our projects or things that we have to get done. A lot of it is just mental. So this exercise, I imagine, will help break through those barriers and maybe even help us think of creative solutions if we need them.
Yes, just opening our minds to that idea of maybe it will go well. And here's some evidence that perhaps it's going to turn out better than I would expect. It's like if somebody said, there's a one in a hundred chance you're going to get a deadly disease, you might think, oh, I'm going to be that one in a hundred.
But if somebody said to you, there's a one in a hundred chance you're going to win a million dollars, we're much more likely to think, well, that won't happen to me. So just recognizing that we tend to underestimate ourselves and our chances of Our emotions get mixed in there. When we're nervous about something, we are convinced it's gonna happen to us.
When it's something exciting, we can be easily convinced it's not gonna happen to us. So we wanna mix some of the emotional reactions in with some logic sometimes.
Okay, so I wanna read a quote from you that really hit deep for me. You said, you won't hear a mentally strong person complaining over lost luggage or traffic jams. Instead, they focus on what they can control in their lives. They recognize that sometimes the only thing they control is their attitude.
So I really like this because like I said, I'm just trying to work on my mental health and I hate it when people complain. And I think a lot of people hate it when other people complain. It's irritable, but I'm sure and I know that I also complain myself. So why do people complain? Why do we complain? And how can we get better at not complaining anymore? And why is that so bad for us?
There's a misconception that venting is good for us. People tend to think, if I don't get all of this out, then I'm going to blow up like a pressure cooker. And we know you don't definitely want to suppress your feelings. It's okay to feel them. You don't want to pretend I'm not sad, but at the same time, you don't have to entertain whatever it is that's annoying you.
The more that you talk about those things that annoy you, the more real estate you're giving them in your life. So if we took the example of a traffic jam, talking about it, complaining about it, spending a lot of time thinking about how this shouldn't be happening to me, means I give that way more power in my life than I need to.
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Chapter 7: How does reframing negative thoughts empower us?
oh, you know, I'm kind of special. I'm kind of deserving. For honest, we have those moments. But to recognize that, again, just because you're nice to somebody doesn't mean something great is going to happen to you tomorrow. Or if you go through something bad, it doesn't guarantee something great's going to happen.
I think the more that we come to those conclusions and the more that we accept, yep, bad things do happen. Sometimes good things happen to people that we don't think deserve it too. And that's life and figuring out how do I cope with the emotions that get stirred up when those things happen.
Yeah, I feel like what you're saying about expectations is so important because I feel like that's really what it boils down to. It's like having these expectations that something is going to happen. Are you saying to lower our expectations? What's your advice there?
It boils down to just recognizing what can I control today? I can control how much good I put out into the universe. And even if it doesn't come back to me tenfold, I can wake up tomorrow and do it again. And when we just recognize that I have the power to impact somebody's day, it might be smiling at the cashier at the store or complimenting a stranger on their shoes.
But those little things can certainly put out tons of positive vibes, but I don't need to do those things just because I then think I'm going to win the lottery next week because I was a good person today. So I think just recognizing every day, what do I have control over? How do I want to be in the world today? No matter what kind of curveballs life throws me, what are my core values?
Who I want to be? We can also just choose to say, I'm going to act like the person I want to become. If I want to be a mentally strong person, I'm going to act like a mentally strong person today. If I want to be a kind and confident person, I can choose to act like that.
Even if I don't feel like it, I might be grumpy because I woke up on the wrong side of the bed or because something else happened yesterday that I wasn't thrilled about, but I still have choices every day. When we start to recognize that, that I have choices, I think it also frees us up to recognize that, all right, no matter how many bad things happen to me, I have choices in that too.
And I think related to that is this idea of really taking agency over your life. And I know for me, when I was younger, I used to always need to be around other people. I used to always want to be with friends or my boyfriend. I couldn't ever be alone. And it wasn't until I decided to start being alone, like when I was 19, 20, that's when I really started to develop.
I was able to listen to books that helped me develop starting to work out by myself, taking walks by myself. And it made me a better person, I think. So why is it important for us to spend time alone?
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Chapter 8: How can we reduce complaining and focus on control?
For a lot of people, the only time that they really spend any time alone is when they go to sleep at night. And we find that so many people are listening to podcasts even to fall asleep because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts. So sometimes it's just about letting yourself be alone with your thoughts because how else do you plan your life?
How else do you reflect on things and think, what did I do today that was a great job? What do I want to do better tomorrow? Where am I growing in life? What do I want my life to look like? We spend so much time planning little things or planning a vacation or planning our wedding, but we don't plan for the long haul. How do you want your life to be different?
It's really tough to do that because when you're around other people, they influence your decisions from what you're going to eat to where you're going to go to how you're going to spend your time. And it's really the alone time that helps us better figure out who we are and what we want to be like in this world.
And when I was writing this question, this wasn't in your book, but I know that your book was written. When did it come out in like 2018 or 2016? The first book came out in 2014. So it was written a while ago. And when I read this be alone part, I was thinking, you know what? I feel like nowadays, probably a lot of 20 year olds spend a lot of time alone.
Maybe it's the opposite now that they need to go out and proactively be comfortable with meeting other people. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, it's all about a balance because there are people who say, you know, on the weekends, I don't leave the house. I come home and I just read books and I stay at home. We all need that balance. We're social creatures. And we know from the research that social media is not giving us what we need when it comes to connecting with people. We need to be face to face and in person.
as much as we can and it becomes the default though sometimes I think especially since COVID that people say you know I'm just more comfortable staying home but it's so important for us to have connections and not just superficial connections because the cure for loneliness isn't to just be around people it's to really connect with people that means being vulnerable finding people that you can talk to being able to ask somebody questions or somebody that you can ask for help or
Who would you call if you have a problem at two in the morning? A lot of people would say, I don't have anybody I could call or anybody I'd feel comfortable calling when I have a crisis. We need that in our lives.
And then it becomes much easier to then appreciate alone time because it becomes that balance of saying, I do have time alone with my thoughts, but I also have plenty of human connections who can help me balance things out and help me feel good too.
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