In the last blog I shared a lot about stress and how the physiological response is created and how that is a challenge in modern day life. As promised this blog is about what we can do about it – resilience. Something we talk a lot about in terms of our technology, but actually it’s a key differentiator in the human response to stress.
WHAT IS RESILIENCE?
Different people have different abilities to manage stress, and individuals have different abilities to manage different stressful events. The key to understanding these differences is the concept of resilience.
Resilience is the ability to thrive under difficult circumstances. Resilient people can continue to act at their optimal capacity, even when circumstances seem to be against them. To be clear, resilience is not the same as coping; when we cope with difficulties we survive them, but sometimes at the cost of our own health and development. When we are resilient we find ways that allow us to continue to thrive and develop to our full potential.
Resilience relies on different skills and draws on various sources of help, including rational thinking skills, physical and mental health, and your relationships with those around you.
Being resilient does not mean that you don’t experience difficulty or distress. Emotional pain and sadness are common to anyone who has suffered adversity or trauma in their lives. In fact, the road to resilience is likely to involve considerable emotional distress.
Resilience is not a trait that you either have or do not have. It involves behaviours, thoughts and actions that can be learned and developed in anyone.
HOW CAN I CHANGE OR ENHANCE MY LEVELS OF RESILIENCE?
There are five ingredients to resilience:
1. Awareness – noticing what is going on around you and inside your head;
2. Thinking – being able to interpret the events that are going on in a rational way;
3. Positivity – a positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities;
4. Help – how we call upon others to help us meet the challenges that we face, because resilience is also about knowing when to ask for help; and
5. Fitness – our mental and physical ability to cope with challenges without becoming ill.
1. Awareness
You can't change the fact that highly stressful events happen, but you can change how you interpret and respond to these events. The first thing to be aware of and accept is that things will never go 100% according to plan - change is a part of living. The second is that there will always be some things you cannot change and accepting this helps you focus on what you can alter.
Psychologist Albert Ellis created a simple model for this, which he called A-B-C for Adversity – Beliefs – Consequences. This model sets out a process:
Sometimes an emotion is so visceral that there is no time to go through this process rationally: you simply react immediately to the situation by running away, screaming, or similar. But your brain has almost certainly gone through the process subconsciously. The key is to practice tracking your reactions consciously as often as possible, so you can increase your awareness.
2. Improving Resilience Through Thinking
Having considered the elements of resilience, and the process of responding to situations, it may now be helpful to talk about what we can do to help develop resilience.
Here are a couple of useful techniques:
a) Gather More Information
You want to engage the rational part of your brain in your decision-making about a situation. One of the best ways to do so is to actively gather more information on which to base your decision.
Example:
Suppose that you see a snake by the side of the path. Your immediate reaction might be fear: “A snake! It must be poisonous! I’d better run away!” [A-B-C] But pause for a moment and gather more information. It might be dead. It might not be poisonous. It might be cold, and therefore only capable of moving very slowly. Oh hang on, is it a toy snake, so it isn’t even real? There are all kinds of reasons why you might not need to run away.
Your brain, based on your experience and your belief system, will present you with what it considers to be the most obvious explanation, based on its primal driver of survival. But it may not be correct!
b) Alternative Scenarios
We’re all prone to imagining the worst, that’s called catastrophizing, and it is completely natural. It’s based on the brain’s driver to survive; the same instincts that are creating the stress response are also working on a worst-case-scenario planning programme. This is clearly not ideal, but it is what it is. As we’ve established, in modern times, more often than not the worst-case scenario is not the one you need to be reacting to.
Here’s an approach you may want to try if you’re a catastrophizer:
Imagine the worst – let your imagination run riot. What could have gone wrong? What might have happened?
Now think about the best possible outcomes. How good could it get?
Finally, think about the most likely outcomes – probably somewhere between the two.
3. Improved Resilience Through Positivity
a) Move toward your goals
Develop some realistic goals. Do something regularly — even if it seems like a small accomplishment — that enables you to move toward your goals. Instead of focusing on tasks that seem unachievable, ask yourself, "What's one thing I know I can accomplish today that helps me move in the direction I want to go?"
b) Look for opportunities for self-discovery
People often find that, as a result of their stressful situation, they learn something about themselves and that they have grown in some respect. Many people who have experienced failure, hardship or loss, have reported better relationships, greater sense of strength even while feeling vulnerable, increased sense of self-worth, a more developed spirituality and heightened appreciation for life.
c) Nurture a positive view of yourself
Developing confidence in your ability to solve problems and trusting your instincts will help to build resilience. If you need to address this as part of your resilience work, why not start with this self-esteem/ self-confidence test. https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_84.htm
d) Additional ways of strengthening resilience may be helpful
Some people write about their deepest thoughts and feelings relating to trauma or other stressful events in their life. They find the experience of expressing themselves, getting the thoughts and feelings out of their head, to be cathartic. Meditation and spiritual practices help some people build connections to their calm inner resources and restore hope. Personally, I meditate and do a daily gratitude practice. If I feel overwhelmed – by a situation, by an emotion, by a commitment I’m taking on - then I let my unconscious share where it is at using Stream of Consciousness writing. I love this as it’s a non-judgemental flow, I don’t think, I just open a word doc and let my fingers flow over the keyboard and see what comes out. It gives me a sense of relief, can help me problem-solve, helps me connect with why I feel troubled by the situation, and I often find it insightful as it is a good way to connect with one’s intuition. This is a great video to explain the process: https://www.lavendaire.com/write-stream-consciousness/
You will become more aware of what is going on around you, and inside your head. These steps help you to apply rational thinking to the situation, climbing out of any thinking traps into which you have fallen, and understanding and rationalising your emotional response to a situation.
4. Improving Resilience Through Reaching Out
“No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… “ - John Donne (English Poet)
There is no shame in asking for help. We all need help and many of us function much better when we are working with others. A good part of resilience is knowing when and how to ask others for help. This doesn’t always mean they have the answers, support can be as diverse as listening, brainstorming with or reviewing your plans for a second opinion, all the way through to distraction through shared passions or hobbies.
Accepting help and support from those who care about you, and will listen to you, strengthens resilience. Assisting others in their time of need can also benefit the helper too.
5. Improving Fitness and Health
The final element of resilience is physical and mental health. As per the blog on stress, your diet can impact your stress levels, as can the amount of exercise and quality of sleep you get, which means they also have an impact on your resiliency.
a) Sleep quality
The importance of sleep should never be underestimated – it is an incredibly essential time for the body – and in terms of regulating stress it is when the body goes fully into its sympathetic and anabolic mode – repairing, rebuilding and rejuvenating. The body will eliminate the toxins, inflammation and so on all of which is using up your stress tolerance load. So, sleep is in many ways better for you than exercise. Very few of us get enough sleep, or enough quality sleep. It is worth educating yourself about the best sleep environment, understand how much you need and what times are best for you. There are even some sleep quizzes to help you assess if you’re getting enough. This is my favourite one: http://www.sleepcouncil.org.uk/how-much-sleep-do-we-need/
b) Nutritional basics
The primary goal of eating – from a physiological point of view, i.e. for survival purposes – is for you to get nutrients into your body to enable growth, repair and energy production. In order for you to accomplish this goal, you must put food in your mouth, be able to digest it properly to break it down into the nutrients, which can then be used as your body’s innate wisdom sees fit.
We consume nutrients in all we eat - meat, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, grains and so forth – and your body digests and absorbs them and sends them to each cell where they are converted into ATP (the body’s energy unit) via a series of complex chemical reactions. Every metabolic process in your body depends on energy, whether it is digesting food, thinking, making sperm cells, blinking, talking, beating your heart, breathing and so on. If nutrition is not optimal – meaning what you eat, when you eat, how you eat – efficient energy production is virtually impossible, and for your body this is probably one of the most stressful situations it could imagine in terms of preparing for survival.
I am highlighting this as for many people eating is way down on their list of priorities. Due to hectic lifestyles, many of us don’t focus on eating. If you want to improve resilience and better deal with stress, then it is time to ensure you are eating well.
Did you know that digestion begins with your senses – thinking about food, seeing food, smelling food, hearing sounds when food is cooking, and touching food stimulates something called the cephalic response. The cephalic response switches digestion ‘on’, by which we mean flips the autonomic nervous system into sympathetic mode (digest and relax) so that everything needed for the proper digestion and absorption of nutrients is stimulated:
Saliva secretion
Stomach acid secretion
Pancreatic enzyme secretion
Gallbladder activity
The problem is that when your stress load is too high, and when you’re rushing around, this response can’t be properly switched on. In fact, the opposite side of your autonomic nervous system is switched on – the parasympathetic side - and as such the key processes above are not initiated.
How you eat determines how much energy exchange you derive from your food. If you rush around, put no time aside to eat, eat on the go, eat when over-stimulated etc. - you are in parasympathetic mode and you are negatively impacting your digestive system’s ability to process food into nutrients. This means you are impacting the means to overcome your stress load and repair, rebuild and rejuvenate your body.
So in these uncontrollable times where stress is running wild, I really hope that you feel more in control through understanding more about how stress and resilience works and are armed with some practical things you can to further your individual understanding of your body’s needs around resilience and have some practical things you can apply today to help your resiliency improve, such that you can survive isolation with your mental and physical capacities at strength.
Until next time...
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