What Mentally Strong People Do on Their Worst Days with Psychotherapist Amy Morin

About this episode

Be honest: you've taken a mental health day that made you feel worse. You stayed in bed, you avoided the thing, and by evening it was still waiting for you—with less of the day left to face it. Amy Morin thinks the problem starts with the word. We treat mental health as something you either have or you don't… and framed that way, there's nothing to actually do on a bad day. Her work runs on the opposite premise: mental strength is a practice, and you build it like you'd build anything else. Amy is a psychotherapist, a clinical social worker, and the author of the bestseller 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do and the new The Mental Strength Playbook. She became a therapist at 22 and lost her mother at 23. Three years later—to the day—her husband died, and the mental health agency where she worked gave her three days of bereavement leave. She built the practices that became her book in real time, from there. In this conversation, Amy walks through exactly what she did to get mentally fit. Not as theory, but as the small, unglamorous things that got her out of bed. And I press her on the question nobody in her field says out loud: whether an industry built to help us has any in