What is Resilience?
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of resilience, but it can be an essential skill to have. At its core, resilience is the ability to bounce back and recover from a stressful situation, difficult event, or an anxiety-producing moment. It’s the ability to cope with things in a healthy way, allowing us to move forward and not to get stuck.
The good news is that as a skill, it’s something that you can develop with some practice and effort.
Possible signs you have Low Resilience
People with low resilience can experience several different problems such as:
Insomnia and sleep problems
Moodiness
Irritability
Memory Problems
Experience frequent illnesses (because the immune system is suppressed)
Tendency to overreact to stressors
Crying spells, feeling sad more than usual
Feeling isolated (or conversely, being clingy)
Decreased hope for the future
You will notice these issues arising during times that you are experiencing stress, and only decreasing once the stressful situation resolves itself.
Unhelpful Ways of Coping with Stress
People who have low resilience my find unhealthy ways of coping with their stress. These attempts may help a bit for a short time, but ultimately will fail causing increased distress. Some of these unhealthy coping strategies include:
Drinking alcohol or using drugs
Isolating yourself away from family & friends
Ignoring your problems with the hope that they will just go away. One way of ignoring your problems is to sleep excessively.
Emotional eating as a way to stuff down your feelings
Self-abuse such as cutting or hitting yourself
Negative self-talk
Engaging in risky behavior such as driving excessively fast or gambling away your rent money
Engaging in over-working (this can also be thought of as a way of avoiding the problem)
What Does Resilience Look Like?
Well, being resilient means that you have several different skills that you can use when you find yourself in a difficult situation. It means that you are self-aware of your strengths and weaknesses, of your emotional reactions and of other people’s reactions to you. You also display self-control and good problem-solving skills. You take care of yourself physically as well as emotionally. And lastly, you are willing to reach out to people for help and support.
Now that I’ve convinced of you of how important and desirable resilience is, let’s get down to how you can improve it for yourself.
How to Build Resilience
Try some of all of these suggestions to begin building your resilience today!
Write daily in a gratitude journal, but do so with realistic expectations. This isn’t going to completely change your life, but it just might help you to be a little more optimistic in your outlook.
Practice deep breathing. Or EFT tapping. Or meditation. Any of these can help you to feel calmer and more centered.
Practice good self-care. This includes things such as eating right, getting a good night’s sleep, and exercising.
Build a community for yourself, or strengthen the support system you already have. Connections will lose their strength if they aren’t tended to regularly.
Limit your use of devices, especially social media. I think we all know how harmful these can be to our bodies as well as to our emotional well being.
Examine your thinking. We are all guilty of negative thinking to some extent. When you notice yourself engaging in it, gently change the thought to something more positive (or at least neutral). Change the thought “I’m so stupid!” to “I try to make things better” so some similar thought.
Practice self-compassion. This goes hand-in-hand with examining your thinking. We all are so mean to ourselves in our heads and it only causes more pain and anxiety. Instead, treat yourself as you would a beloved friend. Practice kindness to yourself.
Learn to forgive past grievances. The anger can only hold you back and make you miserable. Forgiving someone for hurting you doesn’t mean that you approve or are OK with what happened. It just means that you refuse to carry it around with you any longer and are letting you go. If you need help with this, please find someone to talk with about it like a trained therapist.
Learn from your failures. We all have them! Nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes. It really is OK and doesn’t mean you are less of a person. Again, learn to treat yourself with compassion and make a commitment to do better next time.
Develop problem solving skills. Try strategies like defining the problem, brainstorming solutions, and keep an open mind.
Closing Thoughts
Resiliency is a skill that we can all improve to make our lives better. Try one or more of the strategies listed above and let me know if it was helpful. If you need someone to talk to further on this subject, or if your anxiety has gotten out of hand, please contact me by following the link.
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