The Art Of Inner Strength: 6 Simple Ways To Build Emotional Resilience In Hard Times
Life will always test you — but your response is what defines you.
getty People squander so much time resisting adversity, wishing it would change, or dwelling on its presence. The way that I see it, handling adversity is the master key to life. If you can do that, you become at peace and in touch with yourself, where nothing can bother you. This whole ride feels so much smoother, and you drastically raise the upper limits of your success.
What is emotional resilience? It is your ability to adapt to and move through hard times. It is the durability of an optimistic, accepting, productive state of mind. It means you are able to remain clear and resourceful in any situation, and flip negatives into positives.
Emotional resilience is what enables you to take (almost) anything in stride, not freak out, and keep moving forward. I snuck the “almost” there because there’s no such thing as being bulletproof. We all have our moments, which is why other people are crucial in this as well. But the work of developing that support network is still in our hands as well.
There are simple things that you can do on a regular basis to build more emotional resilience. So, when those challenging days occur, you will be able to handle them. To give your direction a little more definition, let’s break down some of the key characteristics you’re aiming to develop. With these tools, you can come out on the other side of anything with more strength, wisdom, and confidence.
Here are 6 ways that you can build emotional resilience during hard times:
1. Regularly try challenging things
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Low self-esteem will run from challenges, whereas high self-esteem faces them. Some people engineer their entire lives to insulate themselves against discomfort. All this does is set you up to be utterly crippled when reality violently intrudes and bursts the bubble of your illusory safety.
So, how does challenging yourself help? It boosts your self-esteem. It makes your spirit, or will, stronger and rugged. Intentionally stepping into moments and scenarios that activate your sympathetic nervous system creates a familiarity and comfort with tackling adversity head-on. Then, when you see that you’re perfectly fine in the moment, you walk away feeling expanded and exhilarated.
This is how you start to form the belief “I can handle anything.” Successfully navigating stressful moments is what builds self-confidence. Challenging yourself doesn’t have to mean getting dropped into the jungle with only a pocket knife. You can find challenge in taking a cold shower at home, or smiling and saying hello to people you pass on the street, or leaving the house without makeup on, or doing a 5-minute set at an amateur comedy open mic.
Whatever that thing is for you that stirs up a bit of fear. If you pay attention, you will find opportunities every single day to challenge yourself. Watch your mind and body as you move through the world.
When do you shrink and move away from people, situations, or take certain actions? When do you avoid eye contact with others? Where do you become overly concerned with how you look to other people? Where do you negotiate and bargain with yourself to break your word, or procrastinate and put things off until next week?
Everyone has different set points for their own emotional resilience, as well as things they consider “challenging.” But no matter where yours are, you can start paying attention to those feelings of avoidance and discomfort. Once you have sharpened this awareness, you will discover an endless supply of customized challenges waiting to be tackled.
(Key point: it isn’t just that self-esteem and resilience come from trying difficult things and winning/coming out victorious. Merely the act of attempting difficult things builds self-esteem, because it trains your identity to believe that you are someone who is capable of tackling hard things. Winning is secondary. Attempting/leaning into the hard things is its own reward.)
2. Invest in your relationships and support systems
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The more community you have and are genuinely, deeply connected to, the better you will perform when times of struggle come your way. When you’re overwhelmed and going through a hard time, your external support system effectively lends you their collective emotional resilience.
They fill your cup when it’s empty. They help you think in healthier ways and brainstorm solutions. They remind you of your strength and capacity. They believe in you when you can’t believe in yourself. They listen and hold space when you need it. They have your back and help you keep yourself together.
No matter how wickedly strong and self-sufficient you become, at some point, we will all need other people to get by. While you work on building your internal resources, be sure to build up your outer resources as well.
Investing in these relationships looks like actively prioritizing quality time with people and setting dates for group get-togethers. When you’re in each other’s presence, you’re taking the conversation to more intimate and emotionally vulnerable places. You share your full truths, or ask for and offer support where it’s needed.
It’s fine to mess around and laugh sometimes. But sadly, that’s the extent of many people’s friendships. When it hits the fan, they feel like they have no one to turn to, even though they have a network of people they hang out with regularly.
What makes it easy for you and other people to reach out during hard times is already knowing that it’s safe to do so. How you interact now is setting a precedent. Strong social support systems empower individuals to use more adaptive coping strategies to deal with stress, a recent study argued.
These relationships can provide a sense of solidarity and shared purpose, and can also guide individuals toward healthier behaviors like exercise, rather than harmful ones like smoking. Through demonstration, let those around you know that radically honest, dark, and ugly conversations are welcome, honored, and appreciated. Having friends who expect each other to lean on them, and get lovingly frustrated when they don’t, is more precious than gold.
3. Be the dominant creator of positive change in your life
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Alongside facing challenging moments, this point is another huge contributor to strengthening beliefs like “I can. I am capable, valuable, and I can get through anything.” The heart of it can be summed up into three words: Start taking charge.
Life doesn’t just throw success and positive change at you. Yes, sometimes great things, people, or opportunities will come your way. But very few things will stick or take root if you’re not already off your butt and actively engaged in living.
If you’re unsatisfied with something, no one is going to come along and save you, or clean up your mess, or put in the work. Get up, make it better, or get rid of it. That might mean literally cleaning up your home. Do you want to feel healthier and get stronger? Then go to the gym, throw the garbage in your cupboards in the trash, and try new ways of eating to see what makes your body sing.
If you are chronically broke or feeling tight on money, see what excess stuff you can sell, or learn how to create alternative revenue streams. If you have any existing skill sets you can improve upon and develop, put in practice, and find a higher-level mentor to show you the way to more greatness.
This is about seeing real-time impacts in your own life, and knowing that you created them; your internal will was the sole agent of change. The results you get will feed back into your beliefs of what’s possible and what you can produce, which fuels more action and awesomeness.
4. Build your stress management tool kit
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The baseline level of stress in your body and mind massively dictates how you will (or won’t) respond to adversity. Imagine brake pads on a car that are full, fresh, and thick, versus another set that are completely worn down to metal grinding on metal. That is the equivalent of your nervous system with and without stress management.
Besides your belief in your capabilities, emotional resilience is largely dependent on a regulated, balanced nervous system. I’m sure you’ve experienced the downside of this before. When you’re fully taxed and strung out, you can barely even handle the mental task of making a grocery list, let alone handling real issues. You get irritable, clouded by brain fog, and depressed.
There are hundreds of ways to alleviate all that stress and thicken up those neurological brake pads. Common ways include:
- Sweating it out with infrared saunas
- Taking an extended, relaxing bath
- Journaling out thoughts and feelings on paper
- Meditation, yoga, and floatation therapy
- Talking it out with friends or therapists
- Self-massage and foam rolling
- Going for a long walk in a forest and/or near a body of water
- Supplementation with natural herbs and minerals
- Creating art or playing instruments
Experiment with what feels right for you. Whatever your tools are, once you identify them, you can have them in your back pocket at all times.
Assembling and using a toolkit empowers you to take an active role in managing your stress, which fosters a sense of agency and control over your life. Research indicates that using positive coping strategies can reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, while maladaptive strategies are linked to increased distress.
This way, you know what’s going to work for you when times get tough. You also know what routines to get back into when you suddenly realize you’re feeling overwhelmed and stretched too thin.
5. Add movement to your day
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Regular workouts combine challenging yourself with taking charge of life and managing your stress. Both your mind and your body will be stronger and more resilient. That is, if you are really showing up for it.
While I acknowledge the consistency, doing the same casual exercise routine for years on end doesn’t build anything. It just barely maintains the level of strength and fitness you’re currently at. The approach to physical activity I’m talking about involves grit and determination.
In each session, keep pushing yourself to increase the distance, time, reps, or weight. It doesn’t need to be by much. Just as long as you keep pushing the envelope.
If you know you’ve proven to yourself that you’re not the best at doing this on your own, then hire a trainer for a few months. They will not only keep you safe and injury-free, but they will pull a level of performance out of you that you’ve never seen before. Then you can use all those lessons on your own going forward.
Get yourself out to the gym even when you don’t want to. Battling the little voice in your head that says, “Nah, what about tomorrow?” and getting out the door is already a huge win. When that voice comes back mid-workout and tells you to quit, or call it a day and hit the shower, tell it to go away and do one more set of anything, just to prove to yourself that you can take the reins whenever you want to.
On the biochemical level, moving your body will also greatly help regulate your moods and keep you feeling happy, energized, and optimistic. Science backs this up tenfold.
6. Find the humor
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If you can’t laugh at life, then forget about it. A sense of humor is essential if you want to easily deploy emotional resilience. What this means is not taking everything so seriously. You have a looser grip on life. Short of the apocalypse, you know that nothing is the end of the world. The opposite of this attitude would be living in complete fear and anxiety, afraid of misfortune, failure, and death.
You will always struggle through life unless you can learn to laugh at your own faults and limitations, and even at death itself. This is a huge reason why stand-up comedy exists. And it’s also why some of the funniest jokes are about the darkest and most messed-up things in life. Comedians make room for us to feel understood, to forget our troubles, and at the same time to remember that they’re not so bad.
Laughter acts as a powerful coping tool, helping individuals navigate difficult situations with greater grace and positivity. Studies show that humor enables cognitive reappraisal, the process of reinterpreting an event in a less negative way to alter its emotional impact.
If you’re feeling disconnected from laughter and humour, I highly recommend getting out to live comedy clubs (and spending more time with your funniest friends) as a way to rekindle that energy.
All of these points can become daily habits and reflexes. Once you have begun to apply effort in all areas, what happens is that you start creating shifts in your character, how you think, and see the world. You beef up your psychological and emotional musculature and prepare your mind for anything.
You can move more swiftly through any hardship with ease and grace, and become a support system for those around you. Once you get to that level, you’ll experience rewards and fulfillment beyond what you ever thought was possible.
Jordan Gray is a five-time #1 Amazon best-selling author, public speaker, and relationship coach with more than a decade of practice behind him. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and more.
