Building Your Resilience (Part 1 of 4)

Build Your Resilience (Part 1 of 4)

As isolation and disruption to normal daily routines continues during this pandemic, you can expect shifting emotions, feelings of irritability, frustration, disconnection and other signs of stress and anxiety. There is no easy way through this, but building coping skills and resilience will help you manage the emotional upheaval triggered by COVID-19.

What is Resilience? Resilience is the process of adapting in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, or other significant sources of stress. Becoming resilient helps you work through difficult events, but it also helps you grow and improve your life even in the absence of adversity. Some people refer to resilience as “bouncing back,” but it’s more than that. Being resilient includes learning from past experiences and developing new coping strategies moving forward.

When faced with a tragedy, natural disaster, health concern, relationship, work, or school problem, resilience is how well a person can adapt to the impact of that major event on their life. A person with strong resilience has the ability to bounce back more quickly and with less stress than someone whose resilience is less developed.

Everyone has resilience. It’s just a question of how much and how well you put it to good use in your life. Resilience doesn’t mean the person doesn’t feel the intensity of the event or problem. Instead, it just means that they’ve found ways of dealing with it more quickly and effectively than others.

Everyone can learn to increase their resilience abilities. Learning greater resilience is a skill that you can develop at any age, no matter your education or background.

Like building a muscle, increasing your resilience requires time and dedication. People tend to think of resilience as a personality trait (either you have it or you don’t), but this isn’t the case. With intention and practice, you can become more resilient.

There isn’t one specific strategy for building resilience. It’s a process that includes fostering physical wellness, coping with stress and adjusting your thought process.

Part 2 of this 4 Part blog series begins to identify specific steps to help you build resilience.