“On the other side of a storm is the strength that comes from navigating through it. Raise your sail and begin.”
– Gregory S. Williams
Life is tough – all of us experience complex events that we struggle to cope with: The death of a loved one, loss of a job, serious illness, failure in school, unemployment, financial burdens, rape, and other traumatic events. These are all examples of very challenging life experiences.
Many people react to such circumstances with solid emotions and uncertainty.
What enables some people to bear such burdens and rise again despite immense challenges? It involves resilience and adapting to a highly stressful situation or crisis. Resilient people can cope despite setbacks, barriers, or limited resources.
According to Marc Chernoff, who writes about Life Truths, mindset is half the battle. He writes that ”expecting life to be wonderful all the time is wanting to swim in an ocean in which waves only rise and never come crashing down. However, when you recognise that the rising and crashing waves are part of the same ocean, you are able to let go and be at peace with the reality of these ups and downs. It becomes clear that life’s ups require life’s downs.”
He implores you not to become negative or allow life to get you down. His advice is to ”take pride in the fact that you still know the world to be a beautiful place. Change your thoughts, and you change your reality.”
“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
– Alain de Botton
The bounce-back can be explained by comparing it to an elastic piece, which can be stretched and bent and return to its standard size after being let go. A person with a back injury who learns to walk again is an example of resilience. (American Psychological Association)
Resilience is a psychological strength. We are not born with it – we learn it.
It involves the:
- Capacity to make realistic plans and take steps to carry them out.
- A positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities.
- Skills in communication and problem-solving.
- The capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses.
How do you know if you are resilient?
You believe in yourself. As a result, you have a clear sense of your ability and potential without being overconfident. You are a self-efficient person who can access resources to get the help you need when you need it.
You can see what is possible. You have an optimistic outlook on life and expect good things from the world and others. However, if you genuinely believe that nothing and no one good is left, you won’t be able to function, let alone thrive.
Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny. C.S. Lewis
You have control over your impulses and feelings. You can experience intense emotions, yet you also know when you may need to avoid experiencing emotions to continue functioning. Resilient persons don’t combust efficiently – they can keep their cool. However, if you lose your cool and give in to emotions like despair or anger, you have switched to your reptilian brain, which puts you in fight, flight or freeze mode. The part of the brain that helps you be resilient is your frontal lobe. Thinking, logic, language, intuition and self-awareness are centred in the frontal lobe or cortex.
You aim high and reach out. It is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of resilience. You can step forward and take action to deal with your problems and meet daily living demands, and you can also step back to rest and re-energise yourself. A resilient person doesn’t curl up and die when facing significant issues.
How can I build and develop my resilience?
Make connections. Many studies show that the primary factor of instability is having caring and supportive relationships within and outside the family. Make sure to connect with family, friends, support groups, faith-based organisations, or society and accept their help to get through your tough time. It is challenging to get through adversity alone.
Resilient people view difficulty as a challenge, not as a paralysing event. Avoid seeing crises as overwhelming problems. You can’t change the fact that highly stressful events happen, but you can change how you interpret and respond to these events. It helps to look at the bigger picture, the future, and how circumstances can change. So often, in a crisis, we get stuck in the issue and can’t make plans around it. Other people might be of help – to help us see what is possible if we take a step back from the problem.
There is no better teacher than adversity. ”Every defeat, heartbreak, and loss contains its seed, its lesson on improving your performance the next time.” Og Mandino
Resilient people accept that change is a part of living and that they cannot control everything. It means we must focus on the events and situations we can control. It is empowering and builds confidence. Some goals may no longer be attainable due to adverse conditions. Accepting circumstances that cannot be changed can help you focus on circumstances you can alter. On the contrary, those who worry about uncontrollable events can often feel lost, helpless, and powerless to take action.
Resilient people are committed to their lives and goals and have a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning. 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 unachievable tasks, ask yourself, “What’s one thing I know I can accomplish today that helps me move in the direction I want to go?” Resilient people commit to their relationships, friendships, the causes they care about, and their religious or spiritual beliefs.
Take decisive action. Get up and decide one step at a time what you can do on this day to move towards a solution and a better future. Take decisive steps rather than completely detaching from problems and stresses and wishing they would disappear.
Look for opportunities for self-discovery. People often learn something about themselves and may find that they have grown due to their struggle with loss. Many people who have experienced tragedies and hardship have reported better relationships, a greater sense of strength while feeling vulnerable, increased self-worth, a more developed spirituality, and a heightened appreciation for life.
“Sometimes life takes you into a dark place where you feel it’s impossible to breathe. You think you’ve been buried, but don’t give up because if truth be told, you’ve been planted.”
Karen Gibbs
Nurture a positive view of yourself. Resilient individuals never see themselves as victims. Building confidence in problem-solving abilities and trusting instincts helps foster resilience.
Keep things in perspective. When facing challenging situations, consider the stress in a broader context and maintain a long-term perspective. Avoid exaggerating the problem.
Maintain a hopeful outlook and expect good things to happen. Focus on visualizing what you want, not on worrying about your fears. Remember: “This too shall pass.”
Take care of yourself by being kind, paying attention to your needs and feelings, engaging in activities you enjoy and find relaxing, and exercising regularly. It will help keep your mind and body primed to deal with situations requiring resilience.
There are more ways to strengthen resilience, and each one differs from individual to individual. What works for you?
You can write about your trauma and share your deepest feelings and emotions on paper.
Meditation and spiritual practices help some people build connections and restore hope.
You can seek help beyond family and friends, for example.
- Join self-help or community groups
- Read books about your issues.
- Online resources – websites can be a valuable source of ideas.
How can I stop my negative thoughts and thinking patterns?
People with little or no resilience will often think up the worst-case scenario possible. They believe everything is their fault. It can become a way of thinking that paralyses you. These negative messages we create in our heads are also called cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are inaccurate thoughts that reinforce negative thought patterns or emotions. They are wrong ways of thinking that convince us of a reality that is not true and drags us down.
There are a few central cognitive distortions that you need to know about and perhaps recognise in yourself:
Filtering refers to how many of us can ignore all the positive and good things in our lives and focus solely on the negative. It can be far too easy to dwell on a single negative aspect and ignore many good things.
“Black and White Thinking” is all about seeing black and white only, with no grey shades. It is all-or-nothing thinking with no room for complexity or nuance. As a result, if you don’t perform correctly in one area, you may see yourself as a total failure instead of merely unskilled in one spot.
Over-generalisation: taking a single incident or point in time and using it as the sole evidence for a broad general conclusion. For example – you went for a job interview. It was a bad interview, and you didn’t get the job. So now you assume you are bad at talks – period.
Jumping to conclusions is the tendency to be sure of something without evidence. For example, you believe someone dislikes you without the flimsiest of proof.
Blaming assigns responsibility for an outcome by blaming others for what goes wrong.
Crazy-making: When confronted by others, they tell them they are wrong and off-track with their observation – thereby telling them they can’t trust their perceptions.
Compartmentalising: The person divides life into compartments, where one has nothing to do with the rest. It keeps thoughts, feelings, and behaviours separate from others’ parts of your life.
Hopeless & helplessness: The person believes nothing can improve the situation and feels all is lost.
The beliefs people have about themselves and the world around them come in 2 categories
1. Sensible or rational thoughts: they are right; they make sense or are helpful.
2. Foolish or irrational thoughts are untrue, don’t make sense, or are not helpful.
Becoming aware of these in your life and questioning these thoughts and beliefs is essential. Learn to separate them. It requires thinking before speaking. Your goal is to stop negative thinking and practice positive rational thinking. To counter negative thoughts, you can turn them into a question. Here are a few examples:
Irrational thought: My boss never appreciated my work
Question: Has my boss never appreciated my work?
Rational Answer: My boss was okay with most of my work but didn’t like my work on that project.
Resilient people don’t see themselves as failures just because they performed poorly in one area.
Irrational thought: I am no good at anything because I can’t do my job.
Question: I need to improve at something.
Rational Answer: I can do many things, but I messed up that project because I needed more support to finish it successfully.
Resilient people don’t let setbacks or bad events affect other unrelated areas of their lives.
Irrational thought: I am useless
Question: Am I useless?
Rational Answer: I value my family and friends in what I do and mean to them; therefore, I cannot say I am useless.
Resilient people do not solely focus on the negative aspects; they also see the good and positive in their lives.
Exercise for you:
Start writing down your negative thoughts. Question every thought. Write down the rational review and re-read it if the idea reappears—practice banishing negative thoughts and instead thinking positive thoughts that will help you get ahead.
Resources:
https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience
https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-to-know-if-youre-truly-resilient/
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/resilience.htm
https://www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/cognitive-distortion-thinking-that-drags-you-down/
(2017). Relationship between Trauma, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Resilience, and Posttraumatic Growth among Adolescents in Gaza Strip. https://core.ac.uk/download/336842572.pdf
Resilience. Do you have it?, Sandy Loder. http://insights.peak-dynamics.net/post/102hzfw/resilience-do-you-have-it
Resiliency That Transforms Your Setbacks. https://www.validuscoaching.com/post/resiliency-that-transforms-your-setbacks