Building Resilience: Strategies for a Stronger, Happier Life

Building resilience. This is one of the most important things I think that you can do in life. We are all going to come across challenges and trauma and some of us more than others in different ways and stress is an unfortunate part of everyday life.

There's varying degrees depending on our lives. But the way we can manage that is by building our resilience. So first, let's understand what resilience is. It is the ability to bounce back from stress, from adversity, from difficult situations. And like I mentioned, trauma is a big piece of this, but if you haven't experienced some specific trauma doesn't mean, you're not still stressed and having a challenging time or struggling or suffering. And so resilience is absolutely needed. Another piece of understanding what resilience is, is it involves adapting positively to challenges, being flexible maintaining a mental wellbeing, and being able to move forward despite these setbacks.

When individuals, it helps individuals recover from hardships and from that, those hardships potentially even grow stronger through those experiences and be able to handle difficult situations better and cope than you did before. That can be a silver lining to a challenge is you now have gone through it, you've built these coping skills, you've built this resilience, and now you're more equipped and better adept to handle challenges in the future.

Characteristics of Resilient People

We've all probably seen resilient people. We've met them, maybe we're even one of them. So some characteristics of resilient people are being adaptable to change, being flexible to change. Change, any sort of transition, even something as what could seem benign as moving moving where you live could...

That's a massive change, right? And so some of us handle that better than others and those that are resilient look at that as a new experience as something positive. So again, it's how you frame it. So when you maintain a positive outlook, when you're able to see a silver lining or see that an experience has both positive and negative, but you're choosing to focus on the more positive piece, that is a form of resilience.

And those are people that tend to be more resilient. And lastly Someone who's resilient, they're much better at problem solving. They have great effective problem solving skills. They look at a challenge and they see, How can I solve it?

Benefits of Resilience

Some of the benefits are you have an improved ability to cope with stress. You're able to manage the emotions that come up, the anxiety that comes up when you're stressed.

And just being able to be flexible and not be so bothered when there's a challenge. You have overall enhanced emotional well being. You have probably less anxiety and depression. Relationships are better, they're more supportive. Your job doesn't really feel as stressful, maybe you even enjoy it. Just overall there's enhanced well being.

And then lastly, there's just greater overall life satisfaction. You have joy in things. You experience that you feel happy. You are able to do your day to day without getting overwhelmed and feeling like when things come up, you have the confidence to manage them and deal with them.

Factors that Influence Resilience

So what are some of the factors that influence resilience? Some of the personal factors are you have that self efficacy piece, that confidence, when something difficult happens there isn't an immediate anxiety of what am I going to do? How am I going to do this? Just that there's less self doubt. The self talk looks very different. It looks more like I've been through something difficult before. I can handle this. I can do this. Okay. Is this something I can change? Okay. How can I change it? Is this something I can't change? Okay. How can I begin to accept it? And what does that look like?

And then some external factors are the supportive relationships and community that you have.

Strategies to Build Resilience

Lastly, the strategies to build this resilience.

We talked a lot about what it is, what it looks like. Now how do we build it?

So you're developing a growth mindset. These challenges that come up, they are opportunity to learn. The phrase growth mindset got a lot of popularity these past couple of years. How do we look at these difficulties and take it more as a positive and challenge ourselves.

Another one is practicing self care. So we're going to do that by prioritizing our physical and mental health. So that means having good boundaries with people, with work. Knowing when we need a break for something. Knowing that we need to exercise and eat well and have healthy relationships.

All of those things. The more we practice our self care, the more resilient we are when a stress comes up. If we're exhausted and hungry and stressed out, and then some sort of challenging thing happens at work we usually don't have the bandwidth to deal with it. And so we just lose all that resilience.

But if we have all of those other things in place, we're feeling confident and resilient and then it just becomes alright, how do I handle this project that's due next week and I don't know where to begin. Okay, I'm going to problem solve around it.

Another one is we're going to strengthen social connections. The more supportive relationships that we have, the easier it is to ask for help, to get help, to be supported, to have positive support in our lives.

And lastly, we're going to cultivate that optimism. Situations that happen, that are challenging, they can be looked at from so many different perspectives and depending on the person and who they are it will do that.

And when you see someone who is more resilient, they often are focusing on those positive aspects. And it doesn't mean they're ignoring the negative aspects, but it also means that's not where they're putting all their weight into it. If you can begin to notice the more positive things, you have a mindset shift. Things start to look different. They become less stressful.

If this all seems too challenging and we've had a lot of difficulties in our life and maybe resilience isn't something we know how to do Therapy Now SF is great. Our therapists are great about building that resilience. That's one of the main things that we do. You can reach out and talk to somebody and get that support that you need.