Building Resilience in Challenging Times
Dr. Priya Pandit, PsyD—Sacred Heart University Counseling Center
“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” – Albus Dumbledore
The American Psychological Association (2014) defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of stress.” Simply put, when hard times hit, resilience is the capacity for people to “bounce back” and overcome challenges.
To be resilient doesn’t imply a person doesn’t suffer distress. In reality, building resilience is often a by-product of undergoing hardships and struggles and coming out the other side. Though some experiences/factors can make some people more resilient than others, resilience isn’t solely inherited or a personality trait only some people possess; it can be learned and built upon. Like strengthening a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and deliberate practice.
Resilience can reduce overall mental and physical health issues. You can build your resilience with the following strategies:
1. Positive Affirmations
Having confidence in your ability to manage a crisis helps to build resilience. Reflect on your strengths and accomplishments, building a positive sense of self.
Helpful Tip: Look how far you’ve come already. You have gone through tough situations before; you can do it again! You have survived X many weeks of social distancing already, you can do a few more!
2. Meaning Making
Having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life can help with healing through crisis.
Helping Others. Research suggests that altruism helps protect us by cultivating connections, empowering us, and fostering positive self-worth.
Helpful Tip: In these challenging times, consider how you can be helpful to others. Perhaps you can donate supplies, sew masks, help deliver groceries to elderly neighbors, etc.
SMART Goals. Creating meaningful and realistic goals gives us a direction in our life to work toward. Building a sense of accomplishment helps improve our confidence and belief in ourselves.
Look for Opportunities. As the old adage goes, “what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” Crisis can be a time for opportunity and growth. Hard moments can help us reflect on what we are grateful for and appreciate our lives. Tragedies can often improve our relationships, bringing people closer together, putting what is important to us back in perspective.
Helpful Tip: What are your opportunities for growth? We are in a unique time in history, consider creating a journal about your experiences in this time. Do you have any opportunities for growth? Use this as an opportunity to learn a new skill, take on a new project, read a new book…engage in something meaningful that you may have not previously had time for.
3. Cultivate Connections
Having a strong and positive support system can protect us from the negative outcomes of distress. Social distancing ≠ social isolation. In these challenging times it is more important than ever to maintain our connections with our loved ones.
Helpful Tip: Take this time to reflect on which relationships are truly important to you and consider cutting out those which may be toxic or lacking meaning in your life. You may even consider joining an online community or virtual support group that can further build you up right now. Use the various technology we have access to to stay connected.
4. Adaptation and Acceptance
The most resilient people tend to accept change as a natural part of life, and adapt accordingly. Flexibility is necessary to resilience. Sometimes you do not have control over changing a given situation, approaching it with an “it is what it is” attitude can be helpful in moving forward.
5. Positive Mindset
Maintaining a positive outlook during hardships can be difficult, nonetheless it is a crucial aspect of resilience. Optimism and hopefulness isn’t burying one’s head in the sand, but rather recognizing this too shall pass and focusing on the skills you possess to work through the challenges.
Maintain Perspective. In hard times it is easy for our heads to go toward the negative. It is an adaptive function of being aware of threats. What is much harder is reflecting on the positive. Imagine this: you may have a great day, filled with many successes, but somewhere along the way you encounter one criticism. What are you likely to remember from that day? If you are like most, you are likely to obsess over that one negative. However, resilient individuals reflect on the whole picture, keeping the positive and negative in perspective.
Helpful Tip: End the day with journaling or reflection of the positive moments you experienced that day, big or small. Writing things out helps make them more real and us more likely to remember them, helping fighting against the negatives.
Gratitude. Research on positive psychology suggests that gratitude can help fight against depression and anxiety, improving our positive feelings. Gratitude helps us be in the moment and savor the present.
Helpful Tip: Consider keeping a daily gratitude journal. Reframe your “Ugh, I have to…” attitude to a “I am blessed I get to…” attitude. (i.e. “Ugh, I hate having online courses.” → “I am blessed I have the privilege to access technology that allows me to continue my education during these uncertain times.”)
Hindsight is 20/20. It is easy to get down on ourselves for whatever our past choices after the fact, but remember, we can’t know what we didn’t know. However, we can build resilience by learning from our past and making new, more effective choices.
Helpful Tip: Remind yourself of previous challenges you have experienced, and what skills helped in those moments. How might you approach similar challenges differently?
Thought Stopping. When our negative thoughts get the better of us, we can begin to experience “cognitive distortions”—various negative thought patterns. These negative thoughts can influence our behaviors, which in turn can impact our emotions and mood.
Helpful Tip: Challenge negative thought patterns, using logic and evidence, in turn changing unhelpful behaviors and overall emotional distress.
6. Self-Care
When we are stressed, often times the first thing put on the back burner is our own self-care. But, by taking care of our needs, we can build our resilience by increasing our threshold for stress.
Helpful Tip: Please refer to the image below.
For more helpful information on self-care and stress management, please refer to next week’s blog: “Stress about Stress before there is anything to Stress about”
For more information on cultivating resilience, please take some time to watch this brief TED˟ Talk by psychologist Dr. Greg Eells, PhD:
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