We often hear about “resilience” and its connection to building a healthy lifestyle. Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover from difficult situations. It’s also known as the ability to “bounce back.” It is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.
However, knowing what resilience is differs from knowing how it works. Resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that anyone can learn and develop. Research has shown that it is an ordinary skill set, not an extraordinary one. However, just as with building a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and intentionality.
Resilience is not constant across all areas of life. You might demonstrate a lot of resilience when it comes to one challenge you’re faced with, such as a professional setback, but struggle more with being resilient when it comes to another challenge, such as a health crisis.
It helps to think of resilience via four core components, each of which can help you to cultivate it in different ways: connection, wellness, healthy thinking, and meaning.
Building Connection
One of the most important ways to build resilience is to build social connections. Connections can be a source of comfort, encouragement, a sense of belonging, and sometimes practical help, all of which can strengthen resilience. Some methods for building connections include prioritizing personal relationships, joining a community group of some kind, and developing support systems. Work on bolstering your existing social connections, and try to find opportunities to build new ones.
One point worth making is that quality matters more than quantity. You can know many people and have many nominal friends, and yet still feel isolated and unsupported. On the other hand, even just a small handful of sincere friends who are invested in the relationship can make you feel connected and supported.
Connection also requires a willingness to ask for and give support. This can be difficult to do for people who are accustomed to appearing capable or self-sufficient. But needing and giving support are not signs of weakness or a lack of resilience. They are key parts of how resilience actually works.
Supporting Wellness
Resilience is more difficult if the body and mind are not functioning healthily. We should therefore foster wellness by taking care of our bodies and minds and avoiding negative outlets. Eating well, physical activity, getting enough sleep, and having access to healthcare all influence a person’s ability to respond to stress.
Another way to support wellness is to understand how you typically respond to stress and adversity. This is an early step toward learning more adaptive strategies and avoiding maladaptive ones. Self-awareness also includes understanding your strengths and knowing your weaknesses.
Practicing Healthy Thinking
Healthy thinking does not mean “toxic positivity” or denying hardship. Rather, it means balancing how you look at a challenging situation. On one hand, you could look at it as permanent and hopeless. That may be an understandable viewpoint, but not an objectively correct one. On the other hand, you could acknowledge the difficulty of a situation while still choosing constructive responses.
Resilience Essential Reads
To practice this kind of healthy thinking, it can help to ask yourself some questions when difficulty arises:
- What aspects of this situation are outside my control?
- What aspects are within my control?
- What is one small step I can take now?
- What personal strengths or past experiences can I draw upon?
- Who might be able to offer any kind of support or expertise?
People who are more optimistic tend to feel more in control of their outcomes, of self-efficacy. Focus on what you can do when faced with a challenge, and identify positive, problem-solving steps that you can take. Try embracing healthy thoughts by keeping things in perspective, accepting change, and maintaining a helpful outlook. You can also draw from your past experiences, talents, and strengths. And don’t be afraid to seek help when you need it.
Finding Meaning
Finding a purpose in life guides us towards resilience by framing our experience in the context of something greater than ourselves. This can come in the form of helping others, ongoing learning, spirituality, community life, or having goals and making progress towards them. Creating more opportunities for self-discovery is also helpful.
A sense of purpose doesn’t have to be grand or permanent. It can be as small as caring for another person or animal, contributing something to one of your communities, or learning a new skill that excites you. It can also be temporary in the sense that your sense of purpose can change, or you can discover new ones.
Self-discovery and personal evolution can also provide a sense of meaning. Adversity sometimes leads people to reconsider their values, expectations, and priorities. As a result, they may end up making new choices that better reflect their new values and priorities. Resilience doesn’t always mean “bouncing back” to the way life was before. Sometimes it can mean bouncing forward towards a new way of being.
Resilience as an Ongoing Process
Resilience is not a single skill or trait that you either have or do not have. It is a set of numerous skills and behaviors that can be learned and improved. Building connection provides comfort, encouragement, and sometimes practical support. Supporting wellness equips the body and mind to effectively cope with stress and challenge. Healthy thinking helps people identify areas within their control and prevents giving up. And finding a sense of meaning gives people motivation and reasons to persevere.
You will not necessarily be able to make progress in all four core components of resilience equally at the same time. And sometimes, one or more areas may need more attention than the others. Someone can have a strong sense of purpose but be struggling with not feeling socially connected enough, for example. It is perfectly normal and healthy to focus more on certain areas depending on the current need.
Ultimately, resilience is not about always staying perfectly strong. If that were the case, there would be no need to “bounce back” from anything. Rather, resilience is an ongoing process through which, when challenges occur, you will be able to draw from the four core components, or to recognize which of the core components need more support and attention, whether it’s your physical and mental health or social connections. By working on these areas as needed, you can boost your ability to cope with life’s challenges. Situations may still cause stress or emotional turmoil, but you can move through them with greater flexibility, support, and confidence in your ability to persevere.
