What is mental toughness, and can you train it?

By Relentless · Updated October 18, 2026 · 3 min read

Mental toughness isn't about never feeling nerves or doubt. Here is how sport psychologists define it, what it looks like in athletes, and how to build it.

How do sport psychologists define mental toughness?

For a long time, coaches and athletes used the phrase without agreeing on what it meant. In 2002, Graham Jones, Sheldon Hanton and Declan Connaughton interviewed ten international performers to pin it down. Their definition describes mental toughness as a psychological edge, natural or developed, that lets you cope better than your opponents with the demands of your sport, and be more consistent at staying determined, focused, confident and in control under pressure.

The same study listed twelve attributes of the ideal mentally tough performer. They grouped into self-belief, desire and motivation, dealing with pressure and anxiety, staying focused in and around competition, and handling pain and hardship.

Another common model comes from Peter Clough, Keith Earle and David Sewell, who described mental toughness with four Cs:

• Control: feeling that you have influence over your life and your emotions.
• Commitment: sticking with goals and finishing what you start.
• Challenge: seeing setbacks and hard situations as chances to grow.
• Confidence: believing in your abilities.

What mental toughness is not

Mental toughness gets confused with toughing everything out. It doesn't mean ignoring injuries, training through pain your body is warning you about, or hiding every emotion. It also doesn't mean you never feel nervous. The athletes in the 2002 study described dealing with pressure and anxiety, not living without them. Asking for help, from a coach, a teammate or a professional, is part of handling pressure well.

Can you train mental toughness?

Yes. Mental toughness is made of skills, and skills improve with practice. A 2022 review by Marc Lochbaum and colleagues pulled together 30 meta-analyses in sport psychology and found that factors such as confidence, cohesion and mindfulness had a moderate positive relationship with performance. Randomized trials of specific programs, such as the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment approach, have found improvements in mindfulness, emotion regulation and rated performance.

There is also good evidence that your mind plays a direct role in physical performance. In a 2009 study by Samuele Marcora and colleagues, sixteen people cycled to exhaustion after either a demanding 90-minute mental task or 90 minutes of watching documentaries. When they were mentally fatigued, they stopped about 15 percent sooner on average, even though their heart rate and lactate responses were basically the same. The difference was how hard the effort felt.

How do you build mental toughness?

1. Practice a little every day. Short, regular practice works better than a long session once in a while, the same way it does in physical training.
2. Train under some pressure. In a 2009 study by Raôul Oudejans and Rob Pijpers, expert basketball players who practiced free throws under mild anxiety for five weeks kept their performance when the pressure was real, while players who trained without it did worse. Add stakes to practice, like a challenge with a teammate or a timed rep.
3. Work on your self-talk. Notice what you say to yourself when things go wrong, and practice short, useful cues you can use in the moment.
4. Learn to accept discomfort. Rather than waiting to feel confident, practice noticing nerves and doubt and acting on your plan anyway.
5. Reflect after competitions. A few lines in a journal about what you felt and what you did shows you patterns you'd otherwise miss.
6. Get help when you need it. A mental performance coach or sports psychologist can tailor this work to you.

How long does it take to build mental toughness?

There isn't a fixed timeline, and it's never really finished. Many of the programs tested in research, including MAC, run for about seven weekly sessions with practice in between, and the skills keep improving after that with regular use.

How Relentless helps you build mental toughness

Relentless gives you a short lesson every day, usually two to five minutes long, built by a mental performance coach. Lessons pair a coach's voiceover with an exercise and a reflection, and the app tracks your mindfulness, acceptance and commitment as you train. A journal keeps your notes before and after competitions, and your profile counts down to your next one.

Train this with Relentless. Short daily lessons from mental performance coaches, on iPhone. Free trial for new subscribers.

References

1. Jones, G., Hanton, S., & Connaughton, D. (2002). What is this thing called mental toughness? An investigation of elite sport performers. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 14(3), 205-218. doi.org/10.1080/10413200290103509
2. Clough, P., Earle, K., & Sewell, D. (2002). Mental toughness: The concept and its measurement. In I. Cockerill (Ed.), Solutions in sport psychology (pp. 32-43). Thomson.
3. Lochbaum, M., Stoner, E., Hefner, T., Cooper, S., Lane, A. M., & Terry, P. C. (2022). Sport psychology and performance meta-analyses: A systematic review of the literature. PLoS ONE, 17(2), e0263408. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263408
4. Marcora, S. M., Staiano, W., & Manning, V. (2009). Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans. Journal of Applied Physiology, 106(3), 857-864. doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.91324.2008
5. Oudejans, R. R. D., & Pijpers, J. R. (2009). Training with anxiety has a positive effect on expert perceptual-motor performance under pressure. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(8), 1631-1647. doi.org/10.1080/17470210802557702
6. Josefsson, T., Ivarsson, A., Gustafsson, H., Stenling, A., Lindwall, M., Tornberg, R., & Böröy, J. (2019). Effects of Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) on sport-specific dispositional mindfulness, emotion regulation, and self-rated athletic performance in a multiple-sport population: An RCT study. Mindfulness, 10(8), 1518-1529. doi.org/10.1007/s12671-019-01098-7

This guide is for general education and isn't medical or mental health advice. If you're struggling, talk to a licensed professional. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.