Why Resilience is Important
The ability to bounce back or recover quickly from adversity is an important skill to be cultivated. Building resilience helps us adapt to changes, cope with tragedy, and reduce our reactivity to everyday stressors. In fact, this process helps with neuroplasticity, keeping our brain healthy and strong.
We all face challenges in life. Sometimes these are related to our relationships, other times work. Issues come up in our health, our finances, or unexpected life changes. Learning to deal with these difficulties often involves a fair amount of stress. But they can also lead to exceptional personal growth. And it’s in the growth where we generate the capacity for resilience.
Resilience is more than bouncing back after hard times. It builds resistance to negativity, allowing us to become our own champion, conquer adversity, and create opportunity from the growth in order to improve our quality of life.
While our brain is one of the most resilient organs in the human body, learning to build resilience isn’t always easy. It comes through struggle, both internally and externally. The good news is, we can learn how to become more resilient by embracing life’s unpredictability and facing unforeseen challenges head-on. With this attitude, we can build our resilience throughout our lives, using every misstep or difficult time as a learning opportunity.
There has been a substantial amount of research done regarding resilience and the people who exemplify this characteristic. Through these studies, we can learn how to practice the skills and gain insight into building stronger resiliency.
Personal growth
One of the most important aspects of building resiliency is developing self-awareness.
Being self-aware creates the scenario where, if things are starting to go badly, we can activate our personal, resiliency skills to ensure we are prepared to deal with upcoming events. For example, if we notice we are worn out at work, snapping at our coworkers, dreading facing the next meeting or task, it might be time to practice some self-care by eating a nutritious meal, taking a long bath, and getting an extra good night’s sleep. Also, learning to ask for help and seek support is something many of us find incredibly challenging. When life is overwhelming, asking for help will help us endure tough times because we will learn that we can rely on others when the going gets tough.
Community and relationships
Having strong, positive relationships helps us to be more resilient by building a net of people we can turn to when we need help. It could be having a positive mentor or role-model, who gives us the opportunity to see how they handle difficult situations. Or, perhaps we can turn to larger groups such as a faith-based group or broader support group. Participating in a group helps us learn to see ourselves in a positive light, can keep our problems and difficulties in perspective, and can help ensure we keep hope and optimism as part of our daily mentality. These skills are essential in being resilient but often require a lot of practice that a support network can provide. Beyond simply talking to an individual or group, taking action in a community environment can be an amazing way to build resiliency. Helping others, especially in times of need can help us see that life is full of change and learning to adapt to it makes resilience possible. It gives us the ability to take action, helping us gain control and practice for situations we may find ourselves in someday. And helping others helps us to realize that crises can be solved, one step at a time.
Maintain a healthy attitude:
Having emotional and cognitive flexibility and activating positive emotions can go a long way towards increasing our resiliency and our emotional toughness. Cultivating healthy lifestyles which not only includes a nutritious diet, daily exercise, and good sleeping habits but also striving to stay positive and making mental health a priority, can result in excellent physical and mental fitness. All of which has a tremendous benefit when it comes to being empowered and prepared resulting in increased resilience enabling us to bounce back in times of stress.
Conclusion
Growing our resiliency gives us the ability to be more capable of handling situations in times of substantial stress or unfortunate events. Luckily, our brain is our most resilient organ, and learning to be more resilient is a neuroplastic process which we can develop.
