Mental health: do we just need to toughen up?

Sunday, 16 November 2025

Life is hard and the emphasis on comfort, self-expression, and emotional safety has left us ill-equipped to face adversity, Australian author and psychophysiologist Dr Paul Taylor says.

And Taylor is tough - he was born in Northern Ireland to a Catholic father and Protestant mother, and served in the military.

His thesis is resilience must be built through discomfort and that overemphasising mental health talk, trigger warnings, and diagnoses can unintentionally teach fragility.

He sounds a lot like the father in A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash, a 1969 hit recorded before San Quentin Prison inmates in 1969.

Knowing he’ll abandon his son, the father calls him Sue so he’ll grow up fighting, not folding. “It was the name,” Sue snarls in the song “that made me a man.”

Taylor says the goal to achieving in life is not by making it easier, but making yourself harder to break.

“The best treatment for anxious people is exposure therapy, not avoidance, and we're actually teaching our kids that it's OK to avoid anything that makes you uncomfortable, and then they land in the real world.

“One thing is to get your head around the fact that life is going to be hard, life is amazing, but it's also going to be hard, and you will be guaranteed to get shit sandwiches from the universe,” he says.

You're better off to prepare yourself for those shit sandwiches with hardiness training, he says. “To take that to another level … view life as a contest and a series of tests, and to actually embrace the challenges, as a way to test and develop your character.

“That's what we need to do, embrace the challenges, embrace the shit as well as the great stuff.”

But he is wary of coming across like a marine sergeant bellowing “toughen up” amid a wave of spit.

Are you a hard ass? I ask.

“Maybe on some things, but not others. So not completely,” he says. “I'm certainly not a David Goggins [an American motivational speaker]type person. That's for sure, but I do think we're a bit too comfortable.

“We’re destroying our kids… it's not just the wokeness, but the huge flashlight on mental health,” he says.

That mental health focus does have the benefit of making more people are aware of it and having more people talk about it, but there are unintended consequences, especially for children, he argues.

“Research is showing the more you talk about emotions, the more people start to reflect on their emotions and actually identify with negative emotions,” he says.

“We need to ban outright in schools talking about mental health levels, talking about this is what anxiety looks like, this is what depression looks like, kids should not be exposed to that because there is an element of suggestibility to all of this,” he says.

“Research is now saying the more you talk about mental health issues, the more that people, especially children, who are very impressionable, start to identify with it.

“There's a lot of well-intentioned stuff that we're doing around mental health, just like there was in the self esteem movement in the 80s … well intentioned, but ultimately with very significant, unintended consequences.”

Combine that with “molly coddling”, with trigger warnings, and you heighten people on the lookout for negativity.

But are we really too soft — or are we just allowing ourselves to acknowledge pain that’s always been there, I ask.

“Hardiness” is not macho denial, but engagement with struggle as a normal part of being human, Taylor tells the Sunday Star-Times.

“I don't want people to misunderstand the word hardiness. Hardiness isn't meant to be all macho and stuff like that. It's just a descriptor … a lot of people will understand a hardy plant that grows in tough conditions, it’s a bit like that.”

Without embracing life you’d be living in an existential vacuum, not really thinking about the meaning of life, and your purpose, he argues.

But don’t over think it either, he says.

“Some people think it has to be massively grand, and they're searching. And a lot of people are waiting for what I call the purpose spirit,” he says.

“For me, it's pretty simple. It's about being a good human and being a useful member of the tribe, socially integrated and useful to other people. Everybody bears a responsibility that builds value to humanity.”

So modern society is too individualistic and self absorbed then?

“Yes, and there's a couple of things that are behind this. One is the rise of individualism, which has come out of capitalism, and America particularly has pushed out individualism, and it's just got into our culture,” he says.

On top of that religion is breaking down “and I'm not religious at all”.

What he means is if you are an atheist or a non-believer, or spiritual, you have to do the work yourself by discovering meaning, purpose and values, which is what religion did provide.

All religions help people believe that they're a part of something bigger than themselves, there is a shared sense of purpose, values and behaviours. Without that they end up rudderless without a moral or values-based compass to guide them.

Taylor grew up with religion, then started reading philosophy, and about other religions, he backpacked to poorer countries, he joined the military and lost two friends in a helicopter crash.

“I was quite lucky not to be in one of those helicopters. So you start to then think about your own mortality, often it's unfortunate that it needs something like that or a brush with death to start to think about all of these existential questions.”

His time in the Royal Navy.spiked his interest in resilience/hardiness and he’s now working with the Australian military, helping them to build hardiness and cognitive fitness.

Mental Health Foundation chief executive Shaun Robinson says it supports the promotion of resilience and mental wellbeing.

He says science confirms lifestyle habits associated with the five ways to wellbeing - connecting to people, giving time and attention to others, taking notice of the moment including connecting with nature, keeping our bodies moving on a regular basis, and keeping our minds open to new things and learning - build stronger wellbeing and help to manage tough times.

“Neuroscience is increasingly showing that diet and connecting to nature have strong positive effects on mental health,” he says.

“It is important to promote these positive mental health approaches to children, young people and to adults to empower them to build good mental health, wellbeing, and resilience, as much as they are able.

Services and support were very important but there was a need to go hand-in-hand with the promotion of positive mental health.

Robinson says he had not read the Taylor book, “but there appears to be some alignment to these concepts”.

“However, we caution leaning too far into blaming people for their mental health struggles on the basis that they are not resilient enough.“

The Hardiness Effect, Wiley, $34.95, Dr Paul Taylor.