Resilience is the ability to bounce back quickly from mental, emotional or physical energy drains. It is not an innate trait but a skill that anyone can develop. Resilience arises from a variety of skills and looks different from person to person.
Assessing Your Own Resilience
Here are ways someone can assess their own resilience:
- VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths: Completing this survey can help identify your signature strengths.
- Self-reflection: You can reflect on your emotions to increase mindfulness and self-care. Questions that can help you take a quick inventory of your life when you feel heightened anxiety, or if any of your emotions are intensified or suppressed, may include:
- How is your sleep?
- Are your intimate relationships healthy?
- How is work?
- How is your community?
- Are you facing uncertainty?
- What are your current beliefs about self-care?
- How many rejuvenating self-care activities do you perform on a daily basis?
- What gets in the way of your rejuvenating activities, if anything?
- Do you currently have a grounded and focused way to soothe yourself during difficulties or upheavals?
- Do you have any people or situations in your life that are resources for you?
- Life Audit: Undertaking a life audit on an annual basis, with quarterly check-ups, is a technique to help you identify the areas of your life you would benefit from changing. A life audit is a way of working out what in life you are happy with, need to get more of, or need to stop doing.
- Evaluate Your Relapse History and Level of Dependence: You can evaluate your relapse history to help with relapse prevention.
- Life Compass: You can emphasize values, identify actions that help you recover from life’s stresses, and emphasize their importance using a Life Compass. You can rate how many actual steps you’ve taken in an area over the past week. The scale is completely subjective.
- Burnout Assessment: Assess how well you feel your current diet, sleep schedule, exercise habits, and coping skills are working for you. Also assess whether your feelings about your self-care habits have changed over time.
- Self-Efficacy Evaluation: In order to assess your level of self-efficacy, first choose a behaviour pattern that you want to follow, then make a list of situations that tempt you to abandon the behaviour. For each situation, evaluate just how confident you are that you could still behave the way you want.
Inadvertent Actions That Lower Resilience
People may be inadvertently lowering their resilience through negative coping strategies. Such as:
- Wishful thinking
- Self-blame
- Avoiding
- Performing to avoid discomfort
Approaches to Boost Resilience
Individuals can take several approaches to boost their resilience:
- Self-Compassion: Use self-compassion to turn failures into first attempts in learning. Be kind and forgiving to yourself.
- Mindfulness Practices: Use mindfulness practices for nurturing your emotional genius. Grounding and focusing practices, or resourcing can be useful.
- Values and Strengths: When feeling threatened or anxious, think about your values and strengths.
- Positive Outlook: Adopt a hopeful outlook. If this does not come naturally to you, ask yourself how a more optimistic friend would look at the situation.
- Goal Setting and Action: Work on goals and take action to remedy or better your situation.
- Identify Protective Factors: Fleshing out a variety of protective factors can keep you on track with overcoming your anxiety. Identify what will be helpful to you when your anxiety starts weighing you down, the coping skills you can rely on to feel a little better or calm yourself in the moment, and the strengths in yourself that you can rely on.
- Tiny Habits: Identify what you really want so you can design efficiently.
- Havening: Self-haven just as people should learn how to meditate, or practice mindfulness, or exercise. Havening ultimately will be one of those tools that will help improve everybody’s well-being.
- Heart Rhythm Coherence: Increase heart rhythm coherence and manage emotional drain to increase resilience.
External Help to Boost Resilience
People can find external help to boost their resilience through various avenues:
- Helping Relationships: Use helping relationships by acknowledging that loved ones can see you as you cannot, and allow them to assist you to enter the cycle of change.
- Therapy: Specialist help can help with resolving emotional and mental distress.
- Social Support: Seek social support, especially when facing the demands and stresses of taking action. Build good supportive relationships.
- Community: A welcoming, functional, and loving community may have a protective effect on your emotions and your overall sense of well-being.
How These Approaches Work and Help
- Helping Relationships: Loved ones can dramatically increase your self-knowledge by calmly reporting their observations, their personal experiences, and any information about your problem that they have gathered through reading, television programmes, and so on.
- Therapy: Therapists spend their days helping people to resolve emotional and mental distress. Therapists learn what really works, and what doesn’t, in practice.
- Social Support: People who have good relationships with family and friends are happier and more resilient.
- Community: A troubled and troubling community may keep your emotions on guard, while a welcoming, functional, and loving community may have a protective effect on your emotions and your overall sense of well-being.
Resilience, the ability to recover quickly from difficulties, can be assessed through self-reflection, surveys, and life audits. Actions such as negative coping strategies and avoidance can lower resilience. Approaches to boost resilience include self-compassion, mindfulness, goal setting, and lifestyle adjustments. External support from therapists, social connections, and supportive communities can significantly enhance resilience by providing guidance, encouragement, and a sense of belonging.
Tags: Resilience, Self-Assessment, Coping Strategies, Mindfulness, Social Support, Therapy