Three surprisingly effective ways to train your resilience muscle.
It is 5 pm, you just got off work and there are still a million things you have to do before your sweet reencounter with your secret lover — the pillow.
The bed is undone, the dishes are giving you the stinky eye (pun intended), that pile of clothes on the chair is starting to look more and more like the Pisa tower and there are probably one or two personal phone calls that you have been putting off for some time now.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stuck in the chorus of a bad sad song, or if the road you’re stepping on is starting to feel a lot like a mouse wheel, you, my dear friend, are definitely not alone.
Life can get hard sometimes, words become too much to speak, everyday actions seem to have no meaning, and slowly but surely you seem like you’re starting to fade away into the background.
Wake up — Work — Eat — Sleep — Repeat …and there it goes, day in and day out.
And yet, somehow there is something inside of you that doesn’t allow you to completely give up on the possibility of a future change and a better and brighter tomorrow. The dreams you are fighting for are still alive even though they haven’t been the star of the show in quite some time.
One of the words that psychologists use to describe this is “resilience”.
Resilience is the “positive adaptation or ability to maintain or regain mental health despite experiencing adversity” (Herrman, Stewart, Diaz-Granados, Berger, Jackson, & Yuen, 2011)
In other words no matter how hard things get you still find the strength to pick up the sword and fight yet another day.
Being resilient doesn’t mean that you don’t have days in which all you want is to give it all up and go live in the mountains. No, it means that no matter how lost you get along the way, you always find a way to get back on track.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy or pleasant but you are worth the effort of not giving up on yourself and so are your dreams.
Is resilience something you are born with or a skill that you can teach yourself to master? In short, the answer to this question is, both. It depends on your personality traits but also on the effort you put in to cultivate this power. Just like a muscle, it needs training.
I’m going to leave here some scientific information that can help you understand better this concept.
Next, I’m going to tell you about three ways that I have found effective in helping me train my resilience muscle when the idea of giving up on my dreams reared its ugly head.
1. Talk about it
I know what you’re going to say. Really? Talking. That’s all you’ve got? How’s that going to help? You would be surprised just how important can be to take everything off your chest and put it out in the open. It can get pretty crowded in these heads of ours and sometimes we are unable to think clearly because of all the tabs that we keep open at the same time.
I’m so grateful for the friends and family in my life who have, on more than one occasion, bared with me while navigating the tangled web of thoughts in my head. I’ll be forever grateful for their patience, it’s saved me more times than they will ever know. So, yes, talking. We are so good at talking about trivial things but what about starting to give the important topics in our lives room on the main stage for a change?
Is talking too much of a big step right now? That’s OK. Write it down, put everything on paper just get it all out. You’ll feel so much better afterwards and sooner than you think you’ll find the strength to share it with someone else too.
2. Get your bad emotions out like a rotten tooth
Why is it that we are so quick to fix our physical pains but so dam stubborn when it comes to our emotional ones? I’m guilty of this myself so once again we are right in the same boat. No emotion is a bad emotion in itself, it’s what we do with it that counts. Do we let sadness and hopelessness drag us down or use it as fuel to find options that will get us out of the bad place we are stuck in?
Again you don’t have to go through this alone. Chances are that there are more people around you who feel the exact same way but that are just afraid of speaking out like you are. Keeping bad emotions in it is just like having a rotten tooth in our mouth and hoping that it will magically fix itself on its own. All we get from it is bad breath and maybe even a nasty infection that’ll make us even more insecure and isolated.
3. Do something for someone else
You may ask yourself “How can I think of helping others when I can’t even seem to help myself?” The thing is, if you are like me, you are much harder on yourself than you should be. The reality is we all have skills that can help the people around us in one way or another, the trick is we have convinced ourselves that it’s probably not worth the effort. Maybe that has happened because of bad past experiences or just because we’ve never done it before and don’t know where to start.
There’s nothing compared to the feeling of contributing to somebody else’s happiness. That is the most powerful fountain of meaning and strength that I have found so far.
That is the most powerful fountain of meaning and strength that I have found so far.
Not ready to take this step of getting involved in helping others? In this case, help the future version of you. He’s out there waiting for you to start making the right choices for yourself and he’s eager to meet you, so don’t keep her waiting. He’s counting on you to take care of him.
In one TED talk I watched a while back, the speaker Victor Kuppers said “Life is simple. Not easy but simple”. There are still going to be days when life will get the best of you and that’s ok. Anticipate it, plan for it, and most importantly be kind to yourself through it and if you need it, don’t hesitate to ask for professional help. The shame of being judged by others shouldn’t keep you chained to a life you don’t want.
Little by little, those dishes are going to get cleaned, the Pisa tower will get smaller and the clutter in your head will get sorted out. Sometimes a little bit of perspective is all we need to realize that we are much stronger than we give ourselves credit to be.
Michael J McCluskey 