 Boy, this is literally where I was surprised. Today on AirmanVision, we asked newer Airman, how hard was BMT mentally? Also, if you're a new Airman and you wanna get involved with videos like this, use the contact information in the description below. How hard was BMT mentally? Now think about Air Force Basic Training, why it's quote the hardest basic training is because it's the hardest mentally. No other basic training I don't believe that has the courses that we take. We take a lot of courses. Hold on, this is the study guide and this is how big it is. Those are my page flags, a warrior ethos. Yeah, this is about how big it is. In comparison, here's a tube up just Burt's Bees Chapstick. It's about that thick. It's a pretty hefty book. So that's why basic training is the hardest mentally because I don't know about Marines or Army or whatever boot camp, but to be able to do all this stuff and have a lot of highlights and such. Mentally, it was a piece of cake because I was just ready to be a machine and then don't let things get in the way. Don't let things get in the way with your mission, just get things done and don't be bothered by stuff. Any good? A lot of times at basic training, your mind would play tricks on you. So for example, we would be in flight. I'm at parade rest right now and we would have to stand there for, I don't know, 10 minutes at a time. I believe one time we were just standing for like a half hour. It was ridiculous. And the thing is we can't move. Let's say I wanna itch. I can't move. I literally can't, I eat my statue. I can't move. If I have an itch on my nose, you're just gonna have to get over it and you have to realize that your mind is playing tricks on you. You have to realize that itch isn't really there. It's just your mind trying to get you to itch. And when you move in the itch, that's a lack of discipline. And that symbolizes the fact, let's say you're doing some, your job, some mission. You have to focus on that mission and you have to focus on what it is you need to do. And if you itch, that's a lack of discipline. That means doing what you want is more important than your job. But your job is more important than anything else. I'd say it was pretty mentally challenging over physically. Being away from your family for the first time in my situation, I'm 19 years old and I just graduated high school. So it's the first thing I've done away from home, going all the way from South Carolina to San Antonio, Texas was a big change. And then you have to deal with your MTIs. I was screaming at you for the first couple of weeks. And yeah, it was pretty mentally tough. You definitely have to push through it. You have nights where you just stay up for a couple of hours and just think. And the first night is definitely the hardest for sure mentally. You're thinking, what did I get myself into? After the first couple of weeks, it gets a lot easier mentally. I like to think of myself as a pretty strong person mentally. It's, it all, it just depends on where you come from, how you're raised, how you think about yourself because the MTIs will break you down before they build you back up. But if you don't let them get through your skin and you do what they say and you don't get in trouble, it's mentally easy. Some people, you'll see them break down and you'll hear people crying. People missing their families. It's just, if you haven't been away from home ever in your life for more than two, three weeks, it might be rough for you, but you get used to it. It's especially getting those letters. It's like, hey, this is my first contact with you guys after leaving. So it's pretty nice getting those letters from your family and things like that. At first, it wasn't that mentally hard. I was prepared to take all the yelling. I felt I was mentally ready to go through this, but it was really, it was hard at some points. You know, everybody was up and down for me. It wasn't that mentally hard. The mental aspect kind of plays into emotion sometimes, especially when you get letters from family and friends. It'll lift you up, but at the same time, you feel sad. I think the mental struggle was the biggest struggle of it all for me. During BMT, you kind of have to tell yourself, this is all a mind game, it's only temporary, but when you're in BMT and when you're cut off from everything, I feel like everything just seemed, like the problems seem escalated. Everything seems so much bigger than what it is. If I had a bad day back in the civilian world, I would just call my dad or my sister in vent and not being able to do that whenever I wanted, got to me at times. And yeah, I just, like, you have no idea what's going on at all, so that was hard. I personally struggled with this at the beginning just because I had zero communication with my family, and I knew a lot of stuff was going on at home that I wasn't gonna be a part of. Your biggest enemy in basic military training is gonna be the mental aspect, your whole mindset, because that's just life in general as well. There's two types of people in this world. You could be proactive or reactive, and if you're taking all the things in basic training that they're feeding to you as some sort of personal attack, like the criticism, and stuff like that, you're gonna go ahead and be beating yourself down. Also, one thing that a lot of people have a hard time with or never experienced is being separated from family or away from home. I've been away from family before. I've been yelled at before through JROTC. I mean, I had some discipline in my home growing up. For that, I understood that basic military training was only gonna be eight weeks long in the grand scheme of my whole life. I understood that it was just gonna be a little drop of water in this entire ocean. So I just took it day by day, wrote letters home, back to family, got that little boost of motivation every other day or so, and it was relatively simple for me. For me, that was probably the biggest thing. Like I said, missing family, being yelled at more often than you're used to, if at all, working with people you've never met before, having to work as a team with these people, it's just, it can be really stressful and mentally draining over and over again every day. Make your bed, be on the wall in five seconds or everybody needs to be done showering in 10 minutes. It sounds easy, but when it's 30, 40, 50 people doing this all at the same time, it can be really difficult. So mentally, I'd say it was definitely more difficult mentally than it was physically. Boy, this is literally where I was surprised. This is literally where I learned how much harder BMT was gonna kick me in the butt, mentally. BMT was actually pretty challenging for me when it came to the mental aspect. That's probably because I've not been away from my family for that long and it was probably because I was missing my girlfriend a whole lot. Challenging, I would say a seven, seven. Definitely the letters helped out, but I give it a seven when it comes to how hard BMT was mentally.