Never has resilience—be it physical, emotional, mental, or financial—been more important to our lives than in the past year and a half.
Resilience is a psychological principle that blends optimism, flexibility, problem-solving, and motivation. Resilient people not only bounce back when times get tough, but they also thrive in the best of times. Thankfully, resiliency is something that can be developed and strengthened like a muscle, and we’ve already got your routine covered. Check out the quick tips below, so you can start getting the reps in.
Think small. Win Big.
When it comes to building your resilience muscle, it’s the small wins that can have the biggest impact. We often assume that really difficult, exhausting challenges are required to build resilience over time, but it’s actually how you respond to the small disappointments or frustrating moments that more effectively build resilience. For example, let’s say that you’re late for an appointment and someone cuts you off in traffic, causing you to be even later, or you wait for over an hour to get your favorite takeout delivery and the order is wrong. Instead of losing your cool and making a rash decision, you could alert your appointment that you are running behind or grab a snack while you take the steps to reorder your takeout delivery. Maintaining a sense of control over our emotional state is a core element of resilience, and if we practice doing this on a smaller scale, we have the muscle memory when it really counts!
Build A Menu of Options
The foundation of resilience is mental agility, which is our ability to be flexible and pivot when needed. Mental fitness is important, because we are always going to encounter new barriers that require us to find new ways to work around them. What we’ve learned from the pandemic is that we may not be able to do the things we typically enjoy doing, so we have to be creative and improvise by building a menu of options. If you can’t go to the gym due to lockdown restrictions, what do you do then? It will be different for different people, but when we are confronted with something that we can’t do, start making it a habit to compile a list of things you can do instead.
Rigorous work. Recovery. Repeat.
Any good strength and conditioning coach will tell you that building muscle requires periods of rigorous work followed by periods of rest and recovery. If workouts fail to incorporate a good recovery routine, athletes run the risk of injury due to overtraining. Pacing is everything. Much like physical fitness, building resilience requires training and rest, to ensure that you don’t burn out. Experiencing long-term adversity, such as the pandemic, is physically exhausting and emotionally draining. Enduring these stressful times can feel like rigorous work to our minds and bodies. When looking to strengthen your resilience muscle, make sure that periods of rigorous work are followed by periods of rest, self-care, and recovery.
Sometimes the best way to learn something is to teach someone else. For more on how to build resilience, check out The New York Times article, The Secret to Raising a Resilient Kid.