What is Resilience?
Resilience in this context refers to psychological resilience. Whenever there
is a crisis, someone who is resilient can bounce back from it rather quickly,
and not deal with any long-term effects. You’ve probably known someone like
that. They’ve dealt with the worst cards life could throw at them, and yet they
keep on living the best life possible. Over time, a person may develop ways to
deal with a problem and not have to suffer too many consequences.
Why is Resilience Important?
Being resilient doesn’t mean you can’t express your emotions about an event.
Keeping your feelings bottled up is not resilience. Resilience involves
protecting yourself against experiences that can be too stressful or difficult
for others. It’s not about ignoring the trauma, but not letting it affect you.
Resilience can help prevent sickness, can keep you concentrated in your work,
and prevent you from using drugs and alcohol to address the pain worse.
Resilience Types
There are quite a few resilience types that psychological resilience can be
divided into. Here are a few examples.
Emotional resilience. This is when you learn how to deal with the
emotions of trauma, stress, and various other problems you may face in your
life.
Inherent resilience. This is resilience that people naturally have.
Some people are born with more than others, and many young children have quite
a bit of it.
Adapted. This is when someone learns how to adapt to a situation.
You move to a new job that’s hard. At first, you struggle. However, with time,
you eventually adapt. This is the body’s natural way to deal with a challenge.
It can help you recover when you’re faced with a tough trauma.
Learned. Finally, we have resilience that you can build. The
process of building resilience is a hard one for many, but people who weren’t resilient at all
can eventually learn how to build it up and it helps them the next time they’re
dealing with stress.
How to Build
Resilience
If you want to be more resilient, here are a few ways to get started:
Have a good social circle. We tend to think of a hard, resilient person
as one who is a loner, but that’s not always the case. People who have friends,
family, and a community to help them tend to be more resilient. That’s because
they have people who can teach them how to survive when all hope seems lost.
Accept change. Life is a journey and sometimes, that journey
requires change. You have to move, you have to deal with the fact that you must
adjust, and while some emotion is okay, it’s not going to change the problem.
Learn how to respond to problems. When you’re dealing with a crisis,
figure out your best course of action. Instead of worrying about the future or
regretting the past, focus on the present. Practice mindfulness and mindful
techniques. They can help you improve your resilience.
Make decisions. While you shouldn’t decide on them immediately, don’t
wait and decide when it’s too late. This is a great way to accept
responsibility. And sometimes, you need to decide rather than sitting on the
fence for a while.
Accomplish some goals. We all have our dreams and our plans to succeed.
They don’t all need to be big goals. Set some small, realistic goals. They can
teach you about success, but also teach you the importance of failure. Sometimes,
you have to fail if you want to succeed.
Make a trauma into a teachable moment. While going through a trauma is a
challenge, and one that you shouldn’t take lightly, it’s also something that
you can learn from when you deal with it. Learning how to deal with trauma is a
great step.
Take a good, hard look at your situation. Is it really that bad? Are you
possibly overblowing things out of proportion? If you made a bad grade, for
example, it may still be totally possible to pass the class with flying
colours.
Be healthy as well. If you haven’t had much sleep, have been eating
terribly, and haven’t been exercising much, you may not be able to handle
stress as well as someone who has.
Write down your traumas and learn how you recovered from them. Writing
about them can reveal a lot, especially if you’re speaking to a therapist about
it.
Try practicing meditation. Meditation, alongside mindfulness, may be a
good way for you to shrug off any challenges you may face and learn how to
tackle them.
While comparing suffering is not the end all, sometimes, it’s worth it to look
at yourself when compared to others and realize that maybe, you have it better
than some other people. That’s okay.
Remember, showing weakness is okay. Resilience is not foolproof;
sometimes, the hardest person can crack, and that’s okay. There is no shame in
showing emotions and weakness.
Online tools & training to build resilience see: https://eapassist.com.au/resilience-training/