Change Your Thoughts, Build Your Resilience
Change Your Thoughts, Build Your Resilience
You might have noticed that the past hard times of your life have been good training for the present hard times. That’s because resilience is not something mystical: it’s a concrete set of skills that anyone can learn and use in any future challenging time — and the best time to learn how to use these skills is when you are going through a challenge.
What is resilience?
While there have been multiple definitions of resilience proposed in the psychological literature, what they share is a focus on how we respond to the challenges that we face as we live our lives.
Studies have found that resilience leads to a host of positive outcomes, including less depression, greater psychological well-being/mental health, increased academic success, more successful life transitions (e.g., from childhood into adulthood), and stronger relationships.
Being resilient positively impacts nearly every area of our lives: whether that’s overcoming our childhood obstacles, navigating the everyday adversities of life, getting through major setbacks in adulthood, or even pursuing positive goals like more meaning and purpose, we need resilience to survive and to thrive.
It’s worth noting that most of the life events that require resilience are the things that we wouldn’t wish to occur in our lives. None of us want to suffer. But if you are in a place right now where deep resilience is required to continue getting up and moving forward, know that you are not alone. Remind yourself that most of our greatest heroes, both global and local, are those who exhibited the greatest resilience in challenging times.
How does resilience work?
One of the greatest discoveries in the field of psychology was that our thoughts drive our emotions and behavior. Certain thoughts tend to lead to certain emotions.
For example:
A perceived violation of your rights leads to anger
Real-world loss or loss of self-worth leads to sadness and depression
Violation of another’s rights leads to guilt
Anticipation of a future threat leads to anxiety
Negative comparison to others leads to embarrassment
In turn, these emotions lead to specific behaviors. Anger might lead to arguments or outbursts; sadness might lead to withdrawing oneself from your community.
Resilient people think differently from the rest of us. And by studying what it was that separated resilient people from less-resilient people, psychologists were able to identify specific thought patterns that the rest of us could learn.
And the more we practice these new thought patterns, the more of a default response they become. As we navigate our daily lives, we use cognitive shortcuts that we have learned over time. These, having been worn into such deep grooves, feel like they are the only way to think. In fact, part of learning resilience is actively re-examining our mental shortcuts, pruning the ones that no longer serve our goal of well-being and impact. While it isn’t easy to overhaul a life-long habit, it is absolutely possible.
How do you cultivate resilience?
Here are five key ways to strengthen and build your resilience skills.
Change your default answer to ‘why’ challenges happen
When something bad happens in our lives, we come up with a reason ‘why’ it happened. Resilient people have different answers to this ‘why’ question than the rest of us do. By changing your answer to ‘Why?’, what is known as your ‘explanatory style’, you can increase your resilience.
There are three specific explanatory styles that lead to reduced resilience:
Personalizing: believing that I am at fault for whatever happened
Pervasiveness: believing that this will affect all of the areas of my life
Permanence: believing that the challenge will last forever
Studies have found that if your beliefs are personalized, pervasive, and permanent, it will be much harder for you to bounce back from adversity. However, if you describe negative events as not being your fault, contained to one area of your life, and with an end in sight, then you will recover much more quickly. You’ll be more resilient.
Here’s how to start shifting your explanatory style.
When you face a setback, or think about an ongoing problem in your life, go through these three steps:
Step 1: Notice the voice in your head start explaining why this setback or problem happened.
Step 2: Listen to how the voice describes whatever went wrong. Listen for…
Personalizing: “This is all your fault” or “If you were better, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Pervasiveness: “Everything always goes wrong” or “I’m such a terrible person” or “This day is ruined”
Permanence: “You’ll never recover from this” or “This will last forever” or “This will never change”
Step 3: Argue with the voice, as though it is someone else who is on a mission to make your life miserable. Here are a few ways to do that:
Look for opposite evidence from what the voice is telling you
For personalizing voices, reminding yourself that even if you made a mistake, there were so many other factors that contributed to it
For pervasiveness voices, remind yourself that not all of the areas of your life are affected by this setback — for example, if you make a mistake at work, it doesn’t mean you’re also a bad parent or person
For permanence voices, remind yourself of past challenges that you felt would last forever and didn’t. Focus on the fact that things are always changing and that this situation will change soon, too.
Change your beliefs about negative emotions
One of the myths of resilience is that we have to suppress our emotions and be stoic to get through things. Studies have found that resilient people are actually more in touch with their emotions — what they do differently is they don’t get ‘stuck’ in those emotions. For example, a new study has found that, during the pandemic, people who stayed in touch with their emotions were better able to cope with the extreme stress they were facing. While many of us default to either suppressing our negative emotions or allowing them to sweep us away, staying in touch with your emotions is the gentle, mindful way to navigate challenging moments.
Here's a quick process for connecting with your negative emotions:
Notice when you feel a negative emotion (like sadness, anxiety, fear, loneliness, etc) and what thoughts or behaviors are going along with it (like lashing out, feeling tired, etc.)
Name that emotion out loud (say, "I am feeling [emotion] right now.")
Allow yourself to feel that emotion in your body and to fully experience it
Mindfully address that emotion through movement, meditation, journaling, or calling a loved one
Chop big challenges into smaller ones
An essential skill in navigating constant stress is something called self-efficacy, which is your perceived ability to be the master of your environment and solve any problems that you are facing.
Self-efficacy is absolutely not the same as self-esteem. A lot of well-meaning people believe that the best way to help those who are facing challenges is to direct many platitudes their way. (Interestingly, these platitudes can actually undermine people’s resilience and effective coping skills. Not what we want!)
Most of the big challenges that we will face are overwhelming simply because they are so big.
Ask yourself, “What is the smallest possible way I can impact this situation for the better?” You don’t have to solve it all at once. You just need to take a few steps forward.
Determine what is in your control and what isn’t
One of the tough things about challenging situations is that these are most likely the ones where we have little to no control. Getting laid off, suffering an illness, being dumped: these are all situations that tend to blindside us and leave us feeling bereft of control. In these moments, it’s so normal to feel that we have no control over the situation, and no ability to influence the outcome in our direction. Correspondingly, a lack of control (whether it is perceived or real) is a core feature of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
It can be helpful to draw out what is in your control and what isn’t. Try using this framework to help:
List out the challenge, then write down what is outside of your control. Next, write down what is in your control.
Once you’ve written it out, consider how you’re spending your mental and physical energy. Can you let go of trying to control what’s in the outer circle? Can you take action on something in the inner circle? Can you brainstorm other things in the inner circle that you might not see right now? Resilience is the process of looking at an uncontrollable situation and focusing on what is in our power to make the best possible action.
Change your belief that you have to ‘go it alone’
Positive relationships, empathy, and community have an enormous impact on our ability to be resilient. We need other people to be our most resilient selves. You do not need to weather this challenge on your own — and in fact, insisting upon it will only make it harder. Instead, try to lean on others, and allow them to lean on you, too.
There are two key ways to leverage the power of social support.
The first is to ask for help. Reach out to someone who you trust, and talk to them about a challenge you’re experiencing. Consider beforehand what kind of support would be most helpful for you (someone to listen? advice? cheerleading? actual help with something on your plate?) and ask them to give that to you. One easy way to do this is, “I would be really grateful if you could [just listen/share any advice or perspective with me/tell me I’m doing a great job/help me with this task]”
The second is to proactively help someone else. Research has found that helping other people actually strengthens your own resilience and reduces your stress. Do a favor, a random act of kindness, help a coworker, or do something kind for a loved one.
Hard times are hard for a reason. But, with a little bit of conscious effort and practice, we can transform the way that we see them, approach them, and navigate them. In doing so, we transform our resilience, too.