Resilience in our life
Resilience, put in very simple terms, is the ability to get back up on our feet after getting knocked down by adversities in life.
The adversities can be in any form — mental health, physical health, loss of a loved one, loss of a job or a failure in any situation in life.
How exactly a person becomes resilient? Is it in their nature? Is it something the person learns and builds consciously? It is actually a mixture of both. Early life experiences, how a child’s set up deals with the situation are all healthy pointers that helps a child build resilience from a very young age. They subconsciously learn from the way their parents, teachers and other relatives react to a situation and get tuned to those adaptive processes.
How to build resilience ?
I am providing a very basic framework, so feel free to add your wisdom too.
Basic framework that builds resilience in a person:
1. Understand that setbacks are part of life:
The approach that I am not the only person suffering with a certain situation helps man as a social animal to accept the same suffering as a part of human being’s life. It is not a permanent state but just a single scene and can be changed.
I remember in my ninth grade, seeing a kid breaking down in front of my biology teacher about a certain situation at home and my teacher immediately shared her story from childhood and made the kid feel that such sufferings are to be a part of life. That is a golden moment etched in my memory. It gave the kid hope and I could visibly see the kid understand that he/she is not the only victim in life and is certainly not alone.
2. Tuning into goodness:
Consciously we need to tune into the goodness in life. The will to dig deeper into the goodness you have accrued over a period of time. It need not be in the immediate past, it could be from your childhood or it could be from your young adult days. Start writing gratitude posts and record them going forward. This way you will have a journal to look back and cheer yourself up.
You will have some cues fixed in the brain on what triggers your happiness. Observe those clues, record and keep them handy. Good sleep, good food, music, wearing clothes you like, being with nature are all some helpful goodness that you have immediate access to during a down time. Create a resilience file and keep it accessible to you.
3. Is the way I am thinking helping or harming me?
Resilience and self control go hand in hand. There can be some internal or external emotional responses that can trigger unhealthy thought patterns. Dig into your core values, write them and keep them with you. These core values of life will guide you immediately on how to think in the positive direction. Recall a beautiful memory and start breathing slowly in and out remembering that memory. This will help you to channel your thoughts and to be thankful for remembering that memory. Keep breathing until you are able to divert your thoughts to something positive. A brief meditation for 2 minutes to start with will help you calm yourself down and take control of your thoughts.
How do you get back up?
You do feel like giving up on whatever that you are doing more than once. You are not alone. There are so many people out there including me who have felt like that. It is completely okay to feel not okay. But when do you decide to get up and keep moving? How do you develop this mental toughness?
Step 1: Accept your emotions for what they are:
Looking at the situation as a feedback to do it better or just accepting the situation along with your emotions without suppressing them helps you identify your state quickly and stops you from going into this ruminating trap. To change your current state of mind, you can act on one positive movement. A spot jog, twist and turn at the hip, a small pulse of exercise, breathing out through your mouth in a pattern, all these immediately change your state of mind and will help you do more.
Step 2: Keep a short term goal and achieve it to become optimistic again:
Once you have crossed the first step, the second step would be to set a short term goal. This kind of short term goals reinforce a calling inside you to just get up and do something. I am providing a simple list of examples:
a. Do 1 lesson of any hobby that you wanted to pursue everyday for 1 week. Once you follow it through for a week you will feel happy and that instills the confidence that you can do more.
b. Try reading any book you like everyday for 15 minutes a day for a week.
c. Self care in the form of skin care, exercise, hair care routine works wonders for our good mental health.
d. Fitness routine for just 10 minutes everyday
e. Connecting with one friend a day every week
f. Waking up 10 minutes earlier than your usual time.
You can’t control everything that happens in your life, but you can change your attitude towards it. Even if your day has been going downhill from the very moment you got out of bed, always remember to treat the people around you fairly. You never know what a person is going through, so the least you can do is to be polite. Work on building a positive mindset even when things get tough. A good attitude will help you make better choices during the most stressful times. Learn to accept the things that cannot be and move on from it. Life’s too short to keep worrying about the bad days when you could be spending your time making it better.
