Today I have a special guest on the channel the author of international best-selling books "The Happiness Equation" and "The Book of Awesome", Neil Pasricha, and he's gonna talk to you about how to become tougher.

Take it away, Neil.

In my late 20s my wife told me she didn't love me anymore and asked me for a divorce a few days later I lost one of my best friends from a suicide.

I was in complete shock and ended up losing a lot of weight suddenly due to stress.

People at work would ask me what's your secret is this keto and I'd say no it's just no food no sleep.

I had the raccoon eyes and dazed zombie look to prove it too.

My parents became very worried about me so they put me in touch with a therapist.

I had never seen a therapist before and I didn't want to start.

I thought they were for people with serious issues, real problems, but then when I started seeing one I basically bounced off the walls feeling great after each session.

Why?

Well, therapy helped because it allowed me to spill my thoughts—my anxious thoughts, my bizarre thoughts, my wild thoughts whether they made sense or not.

And my body felt the high of that crystallization and elation, that mental orgasm.

The process helped me sort, clarify, and confirm my feelings and that ultimately helped me get tougher and move forward.

I gained confidence to move out on my own, eventually begin dating again and slowly after working through a ton of confidence and comparison issues meet someone new who I fell in love with.

Very few of us have any kind of practice, where we speak to a pro about her thoughts or where we do something really proactive to help ourselves process them.

Therapy is great, but it is very hard to access, I mean it's expensive and there are often cultural or social stigmas.

So, I developed a simple science-backed tool so that you can get many of the same benefits without having to go to therapy.

It's a two-minute morning practice that help stuff in your mind each day.

How does it work?

Every morning you grab an index card and write three prompts: "I will let go of...", "I am grateful for..." and "I will focus on...".

I do this every morning now.

So, for example, in a recent entry I wrote: I will let go of comparing myself to Tim Ferriss, I am grateful for the smell of wet leaves on my driveway, I will focus on writing a new chapter of my next book.

It takes only two minutes to do and it will help your mind toughen and ready itself up for the day.

Why does it work?

Well, for the first prompt "I will let go of...".

Research published in Science magazine, by neuroscientist Stephanie Bryson and her colleagues, called Don't Look Back in Anger: Responsiveness to Missed Chances in Successful and non-Successful Aging, show that minimizing regrets as we age creates greater contentment and happiness.

The research also shows that holding on to regrets causes us to take more aggressive and risky actions in the future.

So, the strongest and happiest people are aware of regrets they harbor and then choose to let them go.

What does that mean?

Well, it means, crazy as it sounds, whenever we write out our little anxieties they disappear.

I have five pounds of blubber on my stomach, I'm worried about what school my kid will go to next year, I think I said the wrong thing in an important email yesterday.

Want to know what happens when I flip back in my journal weeks later?

Oh, I think to myself, what email was I worried about again?

I often can't even remember what the cause for concern was.

What about the big anxieties?

Say your mom is sick, gravely ill these may be her final days, will the two minute morning practice still help?

Yes, it will because you're saying it, you're moving it, you're processing it.

You're admitting how you feel about it, so the heaviness can be examined and acknowledged.

For the second prompt "I am grateful for..."

Research by professors Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough show that if you write down five gratitudes a week you'll be measurably happier and even physically healthier over a 10-week period.

You are really helping your brain build stronger neural pathways towards the positive rather than the negative places our minds naturally want to go.

And the more specific, the better.

Writing down family, food, and job or something similarly vague over and over doesn't actually cause any spike in happiness.

Take the example I just mentioned about your mom being gravely ill even, writing down gratitudes will force your brain to find little positives even amidst a bigger negative situation.

I got to read my mom the book she read to me when I was a kid, nurse Jasmine brought me a coffee, my kids all came home for the weekend for the first time this year.

It's a simple practice that allows for a quick therapeutic strengthening and little moment of presence from our future focused minds.

And now, finally, the last prompt, what does "I will focus on..." help us do?

Well, one thing that causes anxiety is your gigantic could do or should do list that you face every morning.

The last prompt helps you strip away the endless lists of things you could do and focus instead on the thing you actually will do.

Why?

Because if you don't, you will mentally revisit your could-do list all day and that will only cause decision fatigue.

Decision-making uses a particularly complex part of the brain and we are wasting energy anytime we're unfocused.

As Florida State professor of psychology Roy Baumeister and New York Times journalist John Tierney said in the book "Willpower, Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength..."

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes buy junk food at the supermarket and can't resist the dealer's offer to rust-proof their new car.

No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be you can't make decision after decision without paying a biological price.

it's different from ordinary physical fatigue you're not consciously aware of being tired, but you're low on mental energy.

The simple two-minute warning practice helps develop mental toughness right before you get out of bed.

"I will let go of..." helps avoid revisiting a worry throughout the day.

"I am grateful for..." helps be more positive every day.

"I will focus on..." keeps your attention on a big goal.

Do this every day and I guarantee that you'll find that less things bother you.

Your mood becomes improved overall and you become tougher.

I hope you guys learned a lot today from Neal.

The strategy he just shared is only one of nine powerful different concepts that he talks about in detail in his latest book "You are Awesome: How to Navigate Change Wrestle With Failure and Live an Intentional Life", which just came out.

I highly recommend you guys to check it out by clicking on the link in the description box below. Besides that guys, stay tuned.