Introduction
Resilience is the ability to successfully adapt to different situations, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility. In simple terms, it means being able to adapt to life’s misfortunes. When an individual has resilience and utilizes the inner strength that helps cope-up with setbacks or challenges (job loss, family problems, illness). If an individual lacks resilience, he might feel victimized, become overwhelmed, or turn to unhealthy habits such as substance abuse or risky behaviors.
How Are Resilience and Mental Health Related?
When stress, difficulties, or challenging situations strike, we still experience pain, anger, and grief, but we are able to keep up with ourselves. Resilience is not about being stoic or figuring things out on our own. It is more than that, we can reach out to others for help as a part of being resilient. Resilience can protect us from several mental illnesses, such as stress, anxiety, and depression. It helps in offsetting the factors that increase the risk of mental issues. Stress is unavoidable, and this is the reason why we have to understand stress and learn tips to manage it. Whether we are resilient or not, we still experience stress.
What Is Stress Resilience?
It is an ability to acknowledge that a situation has become painful and respond in a better way to harness it. Everyone has different tendencies to cope with stressful situations. Some choose alcohol as a medium, while others eat or sleep a lot. When the body senses some threat, it sends alerts, responds to it, and as soon as the threat passes, the body quickly recovers. That is how it works. Stressors can be health matters, financial issues, work-related or daily hassles.
Stress is good as it keeps an individual on time, but when a constant state of high alert is faced, it can badly affect mental and physical health. With chronic stress, the body cannot return to normal functioning. Chronic stress is also associated with various health-related issues such as cardiovascular diseases, anxiety, depression, etc. Stress affects men and women differently. Beyond these differences, there are individual differences too. Some people are better at handling stress than others and move on quite quickly. For those who are slow to cope with such situations, there is good news. Resilience can be learned and developed with time.
How to Manage Stress and Develop Resilience?
Managing stress and developing resilience is important for a healthy life. Here are some of the tips to develop resilience.
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Communicate With the Body: When stressed, the body alerts the individual. It sends signals like difficulty concentrating, a nervous stomach, headache, cold hands, feeling on edge, irritable behavior, etc. Knowing how the body communicates can help an individual a lot in dealing with stress. Recognize these feelings, talk about them to close ones, try deep breathing and relaxing exercises, take a walk, and pen down feelings.
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Self-Care: Make time for oneself. It is not selfishness, it is self-care. Do not hesitate to say no. Start with small changes in the routine. Exercise daily, eat healthy food, sleep adequately, meditate, listen to music, and dance. Do things that lead to happiness. It will help shift the attention to positive things.
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Follow a New Routine: Make a good bath to a bedtime schedule. Plan the day by including me-time in it.
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Make New Connections: Stay in contact with family and friends. Call them, plan a meeting, organize a dinner. Talking wholeheartedly with friends about feelings helps to calm down. Make new friends and communicate with them. This will all add up in managing stress.
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See-Through a Different Perspective: Try changing the thought process about something. Keeping the situation in perspective is another important way to boost resilience. Try to calm stress and anger by understanding others’ states of mind. Be positive, practice reframing; and it will definitely help. Resilient people tend to view life challenges and respond to them with appropriate measures.
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Remain Hopeful: No one can go into the past and change it. But an individual can build a better future. Accept the fact that the past cannot be changed. It leads to less anxiousness.
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Be Proactive: Do not ignore the body signals. Instead, figure them out. Make plans and take necessary actions. Although it takes time to recover from past traumas, always be hopeful that an individual can recover from it.
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Emotional Awareness: A major part of resilience is emotional awareness. It is very important to understand what an individual feels and why that feeling is arising. Knowing what makes an individual upset can provide valuable insight into what needs to be done in life.
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Be Optimistic: Try to look on the bright side. It maximizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses. Developing a more optimistic view can help become more resilient.
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Keep Up With Sense of Humor: Those who have an active sense of humor tend to experience less stress and experience numerous other benefits of laughter. It thereby helps in building more resilience.
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Strengthen Oneself by Indulging in the Spiritual Side: Studies show that those who are more spiritual tend to be more resilient. Connecting to the spiritual side provides strength. This can be yoga or meditation and connecting to the inner self, going out for a wall and connecting with nature, or dedicating oneself to other rituals of life.
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Never Give Up: The most successful people are those who maintain their efforts. It takes time for things to change, do not give up in between. Keep trying and trust the process.
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Take the Help of a Healthcare Professional: If constant stress is affecting the overall health, an individual should definitely see a doctor.
Conclusion
Stress resilience is time-taking but is definitely rewarding. This process makes a person stronger with time. One cannot develop resilience overnight. It takes daily effort and practice. Continuous practice surely changes how we approach stress and adversity. Recognize the stressors, learn to respond to them, and build emotional, mental, and physical strength. Remember, resilience can be learned and developed. Practicing resilience can help an individual combat life challenges with greater ease and turn down negative thoughts and events.
