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— By Dr. Sandip Roy.Strong-minded people don’t just battle hardships to emerge winners, they also come out stronger to take on another battle. Their suffering gives them lessons and a new meaning in life.
How do these people build resilience—the mental ability to recover quickly from unforeseen hardships?
But first, you need to know the two biggest myths about resilience:
- Resilience is nature-given, and either you have it or you don’t. Truth: All people have resilience, though some have more and some have less.
- You cannot teach or learn how to be resilient. Truth: Everyone can learn to build their resilience, no matter how much they have it now.
Learning to “grin and bear it” or “get over it” is not resilience.
Resilience means four things:
- confronting challenges and processing difficult feelings rather than suppressing them,
- ability to bounce back and return to a stable state after experiencing adversity,
- seeking to understand and find purpose in the struggles for self-growth, and
- being open and prepared for future challenges, using past lessons.
While resilience is a uniquely personal journey, studies suggest certain behaviors can help build it. Read on to find out.
How To Cultivate Strong Personal Resilience
Here are 15 evidence-based strategies to cultivate your resilience:
- Cultivate Optimism: Look at the brighter side of life and the future possibilities.
- Discover a Sense of Purpose: Find out what gives your life meaning and purpose.
- Set Meaningful Goals: Establish realistic and achievable stretch-goals that inspire you.
- Reframe Failure as Feedback: View setbacks as opportunities for growth and learning.
- Regulate Your Emotions: Learn the art of managing your difficult and negative emotions.
- Build A Supportive Social Network: Be friends with people who uplift and encourage you.
- Believe in Your Abilities: Trust your gut instincts and keep faith in your skills and potential.
- Update Your Skills: Never stop learning. Keep enhancing your skills and core competencies.
- Embrace Negative Emotions: Accept and process difficult feelings while adapting to change.
- Prioritize Self-Care: Make sure you are eating well, sleeping enough, and exercising regularly.
- Focus On What You Can Control: Focus on aspects within your control and let go of the rest.
- Nurture Positive Relationships: Invest in relationships that give support and encouragement.
- Take Calculated Risks: Approach problem-solving with boldness and thoughtful risk-taking.
- Maintain a Positive Mindset: Keep a constructive attitude, especially in difficult situations.
- Practice Mindfulness: Mindfulness techniques can remarkably boost resilience and grit.
Resilient people use their psychological flexibility to reframe mental patterns and learn to work through barriers using a strengths-based approach.
Resilient people often have the advantage of these two situations:
- They have supportive relationships to buffer the ill effects of hard times.
- They have successfully avoided intense, frequent, or prolonged stress.
Maysoon Zayid is a comedian with cerebral palsy who personifies resilience.
How To Build Resilience At Work
According to Paula Davis-Laack, M.A.P.P., resilient employees do these seven things differently:
- Develop high-quality connections.
- Manage their stress and avoid burnout.
- Are authentic, and work on their values and strengths.
- Take care to pursue their passions.
- Stay, and try to keep themselves, inspired.
- Have mental toughness and flexibility.
- Manage changes and setbacks.
Facts About Resilience
Resilience in the face of adversity is not rare, but fairly common. A study found that even when 50-60% of the U.S. population is exposed to traumatic events, only 5-10% of those develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The remaining 90-95% bounce back to normalcy.
- As humans, we are naturally resilient.
- All of us can make ourselves more resilient through practice.
- Resilience is not a permanent state. Showing resilience in one situation does not mean we have been hardened for all other hard times.
- Resilience in one area (like professional life) may not hold good for another (say, personal life). A person may feel equipped to manage one stressor and still be overwhelmed by another.
- Resilience is a dynamic state of physical and mental health. It needs maintenance because stressors come in varying sizes and kinds—and they often come out of the blue.
- Resilient people can be anxious, angry, afraid, or sad, which doesn’t make them any less resilient. It makes them only human.
- Resilience is a process of learning how to manage stressful situations, work around them, and transform ourselves for future moments that may require stronger resilience.
- What’s clear from the research is that there is no single “hardy personality” type. It’s not that certain people are more capable than others, but that we can all be resilient. Though it may not always feel that way in all areas of our lives or all at once.
Happiness helps resilience. When we’re happy, we’re more likely to stay unaffected in difficult situations. Some researchers even suggest that ice-cream also makes us happy. Even small wins are vital.
Gratitude practice has been shown in studies to rewire our brains to be more optimistic and resilient.
Positive emotions such as thankfulness, according to Dr. Rick Hanson, “have many physical health benefits, including boosting your immune system, preserving your cardiovascular system, and increasing the chance of living a long life.”
The goal of thankfulness practices is not to minimize whatever difficulties you are facing; but, taking the time to concentrate on the positive aspects of your life can transform your perspective and give you a greater feeling of self-control.
6 Characteristics That Make People Resilient
According to The Resilience Institute, here is a short list of attributes when we seek to recover from serious adversity, in approximate order of impact:
- Strong relationships of respect, love, and trust
- Impulse control and positivity
- Physical fitness, good sleep, and nutrition
- Capacity to stay calm under pressure
- Ability to focus attention and be situation-aware
- Ability to plan and execute effective solutions
We can learn to improve each of these.
3 Sources of Resilience In People
1. Personal Factors
- Personality traits — openness, extroversion, and agreeableness
- Mastery, self-efficacy, self-esteem
- The positive interpretation of events, positive self-concepts, and mindset
- Optimism and Hope
- Intellectual resourcefulness
- Psychological flexibility
- Social attachment and adaptability
- Emotional regulation and internal locus of control
- Positive emotions
- Spirituality
Some other personal factors that influence resilience are age, gender, race, ethnicity, and stage of life.
2. Biological Factors
Findings from recent research on biological factors in resilience reveal harsh environments at an early age (as children growing in war-ravaged Syria) can affect the development of brain structure and function.
There can be changes in brain size, nerve networks, receptor sensitivity, and neurotransmitter production.
These changes in our brains during our childhood can reduce our ability to regulate negative emotions and lower our resilience to adversity.
Past and current life and social experiences can lead to sizable and long-term changes in genes. Later on, one can transmit these genes to the next generation. So, resilience as a trait can be genetically inherited.
3. Environmental Factors
The factors in one’s environment can sufficiently increase or decrease their ability to show resilience.
- Social support, including family, teachers, and peers
- Stable family, good parenting, non-abusive father/mother
- Depression or substance abuse in the parents
- Good school and supportive community
- Sports and artistic opportunities
- No exposure to violence near home or neighborhood
Example of Psychological Resilience
Amanda Lindhout, a Canadian freelance foreign correspondent, was kidnapped while reporting in Somalia in 2008. She was just 27 then.
Amanda was held captive for 15 months and subjected to every form of torture, including rape. What we’re experiencing right now, isolated in our homes in self-quarantine, is nothing compared to hers.
She wrote about the harrowing experience in her 2013 bestseller A House in the Sky: A Memoir of a Kidnapping That Changed Everything.
The normal trajectory of human experience is that life will bring you to your knees at some point, if it hasn’t yet.
We try to ready ourselves for what life might throw our way, but I know that not everybody is building that muscle of resilience, and it is that which carries you through.
— Amanda Lindhout
Final Words
Think of resilience as a process. Resilience is an ongoing process.
Resilient people are not born with the mental toughness to cope with challenges. But they know how they can learn fast and bounce back to normalcy after handling traumatic situations and difficult emotions.
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23 Rare And Brilliant Quotes On Resilience
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