6 Tiny Things Emotionally Resilient People Do Differently Than Everyone Else
It's not about the fall; it's about the comeback.
ASphotofamily from ASphotostudio Emotional resilience is a wonderful skill to have and develop — even strengthen. But are we doing it right? Are we lacking in one aspect of it or another?
What We Tend to Get Wrong about Emotional Resilience
We tend to think of emotional resilience as how we respond to challenges at the moment, whether we cry, lose hope, become paralyzed or numb.
But emotional resilience has many factors (12 according to a recent study), and by far the most important of them is how successfully we bounce back.
Many of us might shed a tear at the moment or feel initially demoralized or overwhelmed but then pick ourselves up and keep going, while others might be stoic in the moment but never continue on the path thereafter. So, the initial snapshot of our reactions does not convey the full or the more meaningful part of the story.
Why do we get it wrong?
Our understanding of emotional resilience is fundamentally distorted, with one of the main culprits being popular culture. Action heroes (who we consider super resilient) are always portrayed as stoic under extreme pressure, while protagonists in rom-coms or dramas ('regular' people) are more likely to cry, crumple, or give up under pressure (only to recover later during an inspirational belted-ballad montage).
These visible cues of 'strength' and 'weakness' are not only simplistic, they tell us nothing of the inner psychological-emotional processes that actually determine resilience, and they bias our perception of resilience toward immediate reactions and away from how well we bounce back over time.
This leads to us making three incorrect assumptions.
Misunderstanding about resilience #1
We believe that crying indicates a lack of emotional resilience. Crying is complicated and it's determined by factors such as the context and subjective meaning of the situation, gender (men are socialized to avoid crying and therefore tend to cry less), empathy (higher empathy can make you cry more easily), general stress levels, personality traits such as extraversion, and more.
But crying has also been found to be a highly effective mechanism for restoring emotional and psychological balance — and that's what resilience is all about.
Misunderstanding about resilience #2
We assume the resilience a person displays in one scenario implies how resilient they would be in another. It doesn't.
A trained marine might be amazingly resilient in combat situations but become extremely dysregulated (e.g., anxious and overwhelmed) when having a stressful 'relationship talk' or confrontation with their spouse, and struggle to manage and express their feelings.
Misunderstanding about resilience #3
We think our emotional resilience is set and stable but it's neither.
The research demonstrates that resilience can be built by both positive and negative experiences. But — and here's the key part — it's how we process such experiences that determine whether they end up making us (resilient) or breaking us.
How to Improve Emotional Resilience
There are many established evidence-based approaches to improving resilience such as gaining emotional support, deepening connection to others, having purpose, optimism, mindfulness, enhancing our emotional vocabulary, and others.
Since it would take an entire book to cover them, I'm going to focus on a single factor that is both critical and typically neglected in resilience research and that is the story we tell ourselves about the hardship we went through and what we tell ourselves about how we got through it.
Boost your resilience by editing your story.
To build resilience, you have to be able to acknowledge your strengths (and be specific about them) so you can draw on those same attributes or coping mechanisms during future hardships. It's hard to draw on your coping mechanisms when your story is that you don't have any. Resilience is built by getting through hardships and recognizing the resources within us and around us that helped us do so.
Complete the following sentences (in writing preferably) with the details of an emotional difficult experience you had.
1. For me, the hardest moments were ...
Name several things.
2. List the things you did that helped you cope or contributed to moments of better coping.
This may be support from friends/family, sticking to a schedule, tackling a project, connecting with people you hadn't been in touch with for a while, exercise, nature walks, meditation, self-compassion, asking for help, helping others, distraction, promising yourself a reward if you get through a task or a hard day, etc.
3. Choose one of the 'coping' items you just listed and write a short paragraph about how you felt at the time.
Why was the strategy helpful? How you could use it when facing future hardships (of any kind)?
4. Do the exercise every day.
Start with one short essay a day until you finish your list, while adding items to the list as you go (because writing about the experience will remind you of other coping mechanisms you used).
5. When you next face hardship, go through your list.
Select the coping strategies you could adapt to the new situation.
6. Now change your story.
Look at your (growing) list of coping mechanisms and remind yourself that when challenges come, you'll be upset and distressed and even shut down for a while, but you have a whole list of tools and resources that helped you bounce back when the entire world shut down and life, as we know, stopped.
If you can recover from that — you can recover from anything.
Guy Winch is a distinguished psychologist and acclaimed author. His work has been featured in The New York Times and Psychology Today.