GUEST POST: BUILDING RESILIENCE

BUILDING RESILIENCE

Life is often complicated and demanding, and the dark, cold, long month of January can add to low levels of energy and feelings of stress and gloom. Resilience is an essential skill to manage stress, difficult feelings and experiences, and feel resourced and stable, regardless – or maybe in the midst – of the circumstances of our life.

Resilience is our capacity as humans to recover from difficulty, and our ability to pursue our goals in the face of obstructions. When we have resilience we cope well with life’s inevitable challenges, and we’re able to develop strategies to be adaptive, manage stress and reactivity, create solutions when faced with problems, and still look after ourselves and connect to others in a meaningful way.

Our propensity for resilience depends on:

• Genetic factors
• Our natural attitude, inclination, determination, and emotional intelligence
• Whether we have a social network in the real world
  And societal and structural factors

From a psychological perspective, every human being has three basic needs – safety, satisfaction, and connection. They are grounded in our evolutionary history. If they’re not met, we feel stressed, worried, frustrated, and hurt, and experience less well-being.

When we become more resilient, we are more able to meet our needs even as we move through life’s challenges, and we support our sense of well-being. Then we:

• are able to maintain a positive mind-state as challenges arise
  are open and able to learn from adversity – and therefore grow, which is essential for life satisfaction
• and we have the emotional intelligence to accept difficult feelings without being overwhelmed by them.

Challenges will still come up of course – from minor hassles to old age, disease, and death. But we can then deal with them better because we have more internal tools to cope.

The good news is that humans are naturally resourceful, and the human body wants to be in balance – that’s its natural tendency. And resources can also be learned, we can grow and cultivate them and consciously bring them into our life.