What Mentally Strong People Do on Their Worst Days with Psychotherapist Amy Morin
September 22, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readWhat Mentally Strong People Do on Their Worst Days
"Nobody walks around and says, 'Well, I'm physically healthy,'" Amy Morin points out. Yet when it comes to mental health, people treat it as a binary—you either have it or you don't. Morin, a psychotherapist and author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do and the new Mental Strength Playbook, prefers the term "mental fitness" because it frames psychological wellbeing as something you work on continuously, like going to the gym, rather than a destination you reach. The distinction matters: despite all the mental health content flooding social media, anxiety and depression rates keep climbing. Something is off with the advice people are following.
The Difference Between Solving Problems and Solving Feelings
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of A Bit of Optimism
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Opening: Why Mental Health Advice Isn't Working** - Simon Sinek introduces the paradox that despite more mental health conversations, anxiety and depression are rising, not declining.
- 2 (02:40) **Mental Health vs. Mental Fitness** - Amy Morin explains why she prefers the term "mental fitness" over "mental health" and how this reframes the entire approach.
- 3 (04:40) **The Confusion Between Feelings and Disorders** - Amy clarifies that normal emotions like sadness and anxiety are not mental health problems, but we've pathologized everyday feelings.
- 4 (06:26) **A Real Success Story: Treating Depression** - Amy shares a case study of a client with actual major depression and the practical strategies that helped him recover.
- 5 (09:10) **The Irony of "Mental Health Days"** - Simon and Amy discuss why common coping strategies like staying in bed actually make things worse in the long run.
- 6 (11:13) **Why the Mental Health Industry is Booming** - Amy and Simon discuss the financial incentives that may keep people in therapy longer than necessary.
- 7 (17:16) **Amy's Personal Story: Losing Her Mother and Husband** - Amy opens up about her own tragedies and why she is qualified to speak on this topic from lived experience.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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 incentive to finish the job.
In this episode you'll learn:
➡️ Why the mental health day you take to feel better isn’t helping
➡️ How to tell whether to solve the problem or solve the feeling (most of us pick wrong)
➡️ The 15-minute daily exercise Amy's clients say lifts the weight of the world
➡️ Why "I am anxious" and "I have anxiety sometimes" build two different lives
➡️ How to compromise with yourself on a bad day instead of going all-or-nothing
➡️ Why "I'm just staying busy" is avoidance we've learned to compliment
➡️ What playing the victim actually gives you (+ why it's so hard to give up)
➡️ Simon's rule for hard days: no crying alone
Amy's argument is a hopeful one: the feeling follows the action. Do one small, ordinary thing today, and you've already started.
This… is A Bit of Optimism.
+ + +
This episode is brought to you by SAP. Bring it with SAP GROW. The AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Learn more at https://SAP.com/GROW
+ + +
If you’d like to buy Amy’s new book, The Mental Strength Playbook, head to: https://amymorinlcsw.com/bo
More from this podcast
A Bit of Optimism →