Having climbed Everest twice and skied solo to the South Pole Mollie Hughes knows a thing or two about bouncing back from difficult situations, and in her new book Breathe she shares some of what she’s learned. Interview by Roger Cox

There is a scene in Breathe, the new book by adventurer Mollie Hughes, which manages to be both achingly poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. It’s December 2019, and Hughes is in the early stages of a record-breaking attempt to ski solo to the South Pole. After days on end of being hammered by ferocious gales, she isn’t covering anywhere near as much ground as she’d hoped, and she can feel her physical and mental strength starting to ebb. Following a long, dark night of the soul in her tent, hundreds of miles from the nearest human habitation, she decides that what she needs are some affirmations. So the next day, when she hits her first hill and the going gets tough, she starts shouting her new mantra into the wind: “I am strong! I am inspiring people! I am a f***ing badass!” She may have “felt stupid” doing it, and in purely physical terms all the shouting did nothing to move her closer to her objective, yet it caused her to crack a smile, raised her spirits, and proved to be a turning point in her expedition.

Mollie Hughes crossing the Khumbu Icefall during her first ascent of Mount Everest in 2012 | Contributed

Inevitably perhaps, in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, resilience has become a hot topic. As a society – as a species, even – we had to show a remarkable degree of it in order to bounce back from a period of enormous suffering. At the same time, however, the pandemic left in its wake a severe and worsening mental health crisis, and there have been heated discussions ever since about to what extent resilience (or the lack of it) might be at the heart of the matter.

Resilience is also a key topic in Hughes’s book, published this month by Birlinn, and having summited Mount Everest from both sides and skied solo to the South Pole, it’s something she’s eminently qualified to discuss.

Titled Breathe: Life Lessons from the Edge of the World, the book is structured in such a way as to operate both as a memoir and as a series of essays on different areas of psychology. So, for example, in Chapter One, “Control Fear”, Hughes uses the terrifying act of crossing gaping crevasses on the Khumbu Icefall on her first Everest expedition in 2012 to provide context for understanding and mastering the fight-or-flight response; in Chapter Two, “Find Self-Belief”, the story of her ascent to the summit (and the very nearly fatal return) provides a jumping-off point for an exploration of where self-belief comes from and how, aged just 20 and standing five foot four in her socks, she had enough of it to feel she could take on the world's highest mountain.

Mollie Hughes on her way to the South Pole | Contributed

Hughes focuses on resilience in Chapter Five, alongside an account of the gruelling, gale-lashed start to her 700-mile solo ski from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole. The resilience that got her through that ordeal, she writes, was something she had been building up “all her life.” She also writes that “resilience can be learned, moulded and used to create success” and – on a video call from her home in East Lothian – she characterises this as a gradual, continuous process.

“When I was on the south side of Everest aged 21,” she says, “there’s no way I would've had the amount of resilience I needed to go to Antarctica and spend 58 days alone – there’s just no way I could have done that at that point in my life. But throughout my twenties, doing more expeditions, challenging myself on the north side of Everest and on other trips, I think I just slowly built up that resilience. Maybe I didn't realise it, actually, until I got to Antarctica – but that's where I really needed it.”

Early on in the book, someone asks Hughes’s mum if she’s scared about her daughter climbing Everest, and she replies “if anyone can do it, Moll can.” Are some people just naturally more resilient than others? “Everything in psychology is a mixture of genetics and the experiences we have in life,” she replies, “but something like resilience is such a learned quality. I think genetically there will be something there – I can't imagine anyone can pinpoint what it is – but it's more about how you’re brought up, how you’re treated, what’s happened to you, the challenges you had throughout your early life.”

Mollie Hughes after becoming the youngest woman to ski solo to the South Pole, January 2020 | Contributed

According to Hughes, however, simply having lots of difficult or challenging experiences isn't enough to build resilience – it’s how you process them that's important. “It’s about experiencing emotions as they come up,” she says, “be it fear, anxiety, self-doubt or anger, then viewing them as a challenge. How am I going to rebound from this? Deal with the adversity, move on and grow.”

Also vital, Hughes believes, is “recognising the control you have over your own outcomes.” Is this something you can teach? Is there a trick? “I don’t think so,” she says, “I think it’s something we all have to understand and discover. You can tell somebody ‘you're in charge of your destiny’, and you can tell them that if they can turn their negative thoughts into positive thoughts then everything is going to be so much better, but they have to realise that for themselves.”

And so we circle back to positivity. Does Hughes still do her affirmations? She laughs. “Not as much – I’ve never needed them as much as I did when I was in Antarctica, but I will if I need to, and I try to teach other people to use them too.”

Breathe: Life Lessons from the Edge of the World by Mollie Hughes is published by Birlinn, price £14.99

Adventurer Mollie Hughes on how to build resilience: 'deal with the adversity, move on and grow'

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