Learning to Be Resilient

Dear Resilient,

Thanks for your timely and universal questions. We all experience our share of twists and turns as we move through life. 

Let’s start with a definition of resilience since “being resilient” is your goal. The American Psychological Association explains that resilience is “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demand.” Whew! That’s a whopper of a sentence. Let’s unpack it.

Ideally, we will not only learn to withstand adversity but to survive and bounce back from these events in our lives. This is a skill set we can develop. It requires that we tap into our inner strength and our support systems. It sounds like you’re already making an effort to do this.

As we learned from the lengthy definition, resilience can be physical, emotional, or social. 

—Physical resilience is our body’s ability to recover quickly from health stressors. This could be disease, exertion, or injury.

—Emotional resilience is our ability to respond to stressful situations with realistic optimism. This is how we handle crisis.

—Social resilience is the ability of groups to respond to, cope with and recover from natural disasters, health risks like Covid, or violence.

Over our lifetime, most of us discover that we’re stronger and more flexible than we thought we could ever be. We learn that how we react to adversity can influence how our life unfolds. I can tell you’re critically aware of this fact. 

When we have meaningful causes, relationships, and passions in our lives, this “something bigger” will give us strength to face the obstacles in our path. The important thing is to not give up. We may encounter the same obstacles more than once, but the goal is to improve over time. This growth helps us face and overcome future challenges. 

The Mayo Clinic Staff suggests six tips to help you improve your resilience.

1. Get connected. Having a strong connection to friends, loved ones, and a faith or spiritual group will give you needed support.

2. Make every day have meaning. Do something every day that will give you a sense of success and purpose.

3. Learn from the past. Use how you’ve coped with difficulties in the past to help you move forward now and in the future. 

4. Stay hopeful. Being open to change makes adapting easier and new challenges less worrisome.

5. Take care of yourself. Eat, sleep, and exercise with intention. Learn relaxation techniques. 

6. Take action. Don’t ignore problems but figure out what to do. It may take you a while to recover from your “life-changing situations” but know that your life can improve if you work at it.

Resilience is a tool that contributes to the process of building a full and meaningful life. Hang in there!!