Rengganis Rizka Prasanti Be it something small like getting bad grades, or something big like losing your job, we all have been through difficult times in our lives.
Some people can go through difficult times with ease, while others struggle more. The skill to bounce back from these challenging times is called resilience.
When facing adversities in life, resilience helps you keep a positive outlook and persevere. Contrary to what people may think, resiliency is not something you’re born with; it is a skill that anyone can build and practice.
To understand how to improve our resilience, we must first understand what resilience is and how to practice it in everyday life.
Understanding Resilience
According to the APA Dictionary, 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 demands.
In short, resilience is how successful we are in adapting and bouncing back during tough times. Resiliency itself is tied to various factors, including our perspective and worldview, the social support we have, and the coping skills we have.
Misconceptions About Resilience
There have been times when resilience is oversimplified into toxic positivity. Toxic positivity overly emphasizes a positive mindset during difficult times, therefore ending up belittling the difficult situation itself and minimizing the negative emotions that come with it.
Someone with resilience will be optimistic about the future and have hope that things will be better, but they will also acknowledge the negative emotions as well; the anger, sadness, guilt or fear they feel.
Resilience is also not something people are born with. A paper discussing the theories of resilience by multidisciplinary experts defines resilience as a conscious effort, not a personality trait or a tendency someone has (Southwick et al., 2014). Therefore, it’s a process we all can learn and build over time.
Building Skills to Improve Resilience
It takes time and effort to learn resilience, but in general, there are several strategies anyone can use to improve.
According to the American Psychological Association (2020), here are some strategies to build resilience that are proven to work.
1. Practice Self-Care
You may have heard this many times already: Taking good care of yourself improves your well-being. It may seem very simple that it’s almost cliche, but it works.
Having a regular sleep schedule, doing your favorite workout routine regularly, and switching to a healthier diet will improve your physical health, and a healthy body leads to a healthy mind.
Read More: Self-Care and Knowing When to Rest
2. Maintain the Right Perspective
When you’re in the middle of a difficult situation, sometimes it feels impossible to see the end of it. It becomes a warning sign once it starts developing into feelings of hopelessness; that no matter what you do, your life will never get better.
Journaling, keeping notes of your mood, your thoughts, and your emotions during these difficult times, helps you track your perspective.
Reflect on the tools and resources you have to help yourself now and remind yourself that no matter what happened to you in the past, you are still in control of your future.
3. Set Small Goals
We may want positive changes in our lives to be something big, but setting small, realistic goals enables you to move forward more easily.
For example, after a diagnosis by a doctor that requires you to live a healthier life, you may want to have it all. You may want a complete change of your lifestyle altogether: A strict and healthier diet, a regular exercise routine, a significant weight loss, all in a short time.
However, setting your aim too high risks a higher chance of failure, and a higher chance of being burned out fast.
Small goals such as keeping an exercise routine two times a week may not have immediate results, but they are doable. It’s easier to establish a routine with smaller actions, and the positive results of this routine will build up over time.
4. Anticipate Change
Sometimes tough times just go by, but sometimes they leave a significant impact on your life. The change that happens in your life after a hardship is what most people are not ready for.
We may want to strive towards the ideal, but it’s wiser to sit down and look at the most attainable options we have now. Change is inevitable in life, and it’s not always a bad thing.
When this happens, you can try focusing on your current situation, and list down all the possible actions you can take to get the best outcome now. What has already happened will stay in the past, and it’s best to focus on what we can control.
5. Stay Connected
Social connection is essential in helping you stay resilient through hard times, be it in the form of guidance or even just having someone to talk to.
There are multiple studies demonstrating that social support promotes better resilience in people who have gone through trauma (Sippel et al., 2015) and protects healthcare workers against traumatic stress and emotional distress during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (Labrague, 2021).
Getting the help we need from others is not a sign of weakness. Sometimes it’s what we need to bounce back faster.
Start your resilience journey today by sharing your story with us on HelloReyo.
References:
American Psychological Association. (2020, February 1). Building your resilience. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience/building-your-resilience
Labrague, L. J. (2021). Psychological resilience, coping behaviours and social support among health care workers during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A systematic review of quantitative studies. Journal of nursing management, 29(7), 1893-1905.
Sippel, L. M., Pietrzak, R. H., Charney, D. S., Mayes, L. C., & Southwick, S. M. (2015). How does social support enhance resilience in the trauma-exposed individual?. Ecology and society, 20(4).
Southwick, S. M., Bonanno, G. A., Masten, A. S., Panter-Brick, C., & Yehuda, R. (2014). Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives. European journal of psychotraumatology, 5(1), 25338.
VandenBos, G. R. (Ed.). (2007). APA Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association.
