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This piece will be tackling the topic of RESILIENCE. This is the fourth part of the article, which will deal with THE MARKERS OF RESILIENCE.
Last Updated on November 4, 2020 by ELLEASH
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She stood in the storm and when the wind did not blow her way, she adjusted her sails.
In my last post, I opened up an intimate part of my story, to give you an example of how resilience can be learned and how some tools can help you become more resilient.
Today, we are going to be looking at the MARKERS OF RESILIENCE that some people may possess, or that they can learn. Shall we get into it?
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What are markers of resilience?
The American Psychology Association provides these factors that contribute to and act as markers of resilience:
- The capacity to make realistic plans and take steps to carry them out.
- A positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities.
- Skills in communication and problem-solving.
- The capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses
Glenn Schiraldi, author and resilience expert, provides even more examples and characteristics of resilient people.
Here is a listing of strengths, traits, and coping mechanisms that are highly correlated with resilience:
- Adaptability (having persistence, confidence, and flexibility; accepting what can’t be controlled; using creative problem-solving skills and active coping strategies)
- Altruism (learned helpfulness), love, and compassion
- Balance (engagement in a wide range of activities, such as hobbies, educational pursuits, jobs, social and cultural pastimes)
- Calm under pressure (equanimity, the ability to regulate stress levels)
- Character (integrity, moral strength)
- Curiosity (which is related to focus and interested engagement)
- Good health habits (getting sufficient sleep, nutrition, and exercise; not using alcohol or other substances immoderately; not using tobacco at all; maintaining good personal appearance and hygiene)
- Happiness and emotional intelligence
- Humor
- Intrinsic religious faith
- Meaning and purpose (believing your life matters)
- Optimism
- Rational thought process
- Self–esteem
- Sense of autonomy (having appropriate separation or independence from family dysfunction; being self-sufficient; being determined to be different—perhaps leaving an abusive home; being self- protecting; having goals to build a better life)
- Sociability and social competence (getting along, using bonding skills, being willing to seek out and commit to relationships, enjoying interdependence)
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As you can see, the list is quite exhaustive and I am sure that you will find some of these fit you too.
Let me sum up, if you are aware of both your micro and macro worlds, then you are able to manage your feelings effectively, process your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and you understand that life has its inevitable ups and downs.
Let’s have a look at a point that I find highly interesting: good health habits.
Why is having good health habits important and how can this actually have positive repercussions on your psychological strength (and vice versa!)?
Joshua Miles (2015), is a counselor and therapist, and he believes that resilience is such a great trait to have for the following reasons:
- Greater resilience leads to improved learning and academic achievement
- Higher resilience is related to a lower rate of mortality and increased physical health
- It contributes to reduced risk-taking behaviors including excessive drinking, smoking, and use of drugs
- Resilience is related to lower absences from work or school due to sickness
- Those with greater resilience tend to be more involved in the community and/or family activities
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Although these are all highly satisfying traits to have, one of them definitely stands out for me and that is the point about our health.
Y’all know how I am with my self-care and how being healthy, both physically and mentally, is so important to me and I prone it ALL the time! Lol!
I may slip up sometimes and find myself having unhealthy thoughts, and more often than not, it’s because I am not taking care of myself the way I should be.
Which is exactly what happened to me at the beginning of the month.
I wasn’t practising what I keep preaching and my body shut down! I know better, but I’m only human …
Sometimes we just forget or we don’t take the time to self-care!
But, we all know what happens when we just don’t take care of ourselves and do simple, yet effective actions, that can totally take our day to a whole new level, right?
Unhealthy behaviors tend to come back or appear, with such a force, that all that great work we put in previously, fades out.
Therefore, our overall health has a positive outcome on our resilience, but the same can be said about resilience being positive on our overall health!
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It’s a little like, who came first? The chicken or the egg?
From Meetu Khosla‘s research paper (2017), we can review that resilience leads, or contributes, to many different positive health outcomes, including:
- Better coping with stress, through enhanced problem-solving, a positive orientation, and re-evaluation of stressors
- Better management of PTSD symptoms
- Better recovery after a spinal cord injury
- Greater resistance to stress
- Less depressive symptoms
- Successful ageing and improved sense of well-being despite age-related challenges
- The experience of more positive emotions and better regulation of negative emotions
So all of this sounds pretty cool when you’re reading it right?
It is.
But these are just a handful of tools that can be drawn upon to develop resilience.
These tools can be given to us and we can learn how to use them.
But how can we develop resilience if we don’t know if we even have it or not?
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How can I grow as a person and grow mentally strong?
Like I wrote in my anterior posts, resilience isn’t something that is inherent. You’re not born with it. It’s not like dimples or green eyes! Lol!
There may be a genetic factor to a person’s base level of resilience, but you are always able to improve upon the resilience you have.
When I opened up to you about my traumatic experience of losing my high school boyfriend to suicide, I mentioned that I was able to overcome this because of the coping mechanisms my Mom had slowly handed to me as a child (and beyond!), through my life experiences, and that I was able to tune into them when I needed to.
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So, what do you do when you haven’t been given these tools?
Can they be learned? Of course they can! Can they be improved on or developed if I have some, and how do I do it? Yes, they can be improved upon and it’s what is commonly referred to as “self-learned resilience.”
What is self-learned resilience?
The term is quite self-explanatory right?
Self-learned resilience, is what you can add to your own bits and pieces of resilience and is the result of being aware of the opportunities for self-development and the courage to take advantage of them.
Here are some ways that you can go about it and they have been taken from 3 different sources.
After reading them, I would like you to tell me what they all remind you of …
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The first is from VeryWell Mind author Kendra Cherry (2018). Her ways to improve on the resilience you already have, are:
- Be optimistic—you don’t need to ignore your problems, just understand that it’s all temporary and that you have what it takes to make it through.
- Build positive beliefs in your abilities to help you increase your self-esteem.
- Develop a strong social network of people who support you and who you can confide in.
- Develop your problem-solving skills through strategies like making a list of potential ways to solve your current problem.
- Embrace change as the inevitability that it is, and be ready for it.
- Establish reasonable goals by brainstorming solutions and breaking them down into manageable steps.
- Find a sense of purpose in your life, which will help boost you up on difficult days.
- Nurture yourself with healthy, positive self-care—get enough sleep, eat well, and exercise.
- Take action to solve problems rather than waiting for the problem to solve itself.
She also encourages us to keep working on our skills and not get discouraged if it takes a while to get to the level of resilience you desire. (2018)
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The second source is from Kira M. Newman at the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, whose examples are:
- Change the narrative by free writing about the issue or deciding to focus on the positives.
- Cultivate forgiveness by letting go of grudges and letting yourself off the hook
- Face your fears and challenge yourself; expose yourself to things that scare you in increasingly larger doses.
- Meditate and practice mindfulness; the Body Scan is a good way to work on your meditation and mindfulness skills.
- Practice self-compassion; try to be mindful, remind yourself that you’re not alone, and be kind to yourself (2016).
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And lastly, from Dr. Carine Nzodom (2017) on using a loss or stressful event to grow:
- Allow yourself to feel a wide range of emotions.
- Identify your support system and let them be there for you.
- Process your emotions with the help of a therapist.
- Be mindful of your wellness and self-care.
- Get some rest or try to get an adequate amount of sleep.
- Try your best to maintain a routine.
- Write about your experience and share it with others
These are very varied ways that you can improve on what resilience tools you already have.
And what did you notice when reading them??
YES?!
These are all components that refer to self-care.
These are things that not only will help you become more resilient, but they all have the common baseline of self-care.
So these are definitely things that you can practice doing everyday, in your own time.
This was a lot right? That’s why I am going to let you digest all of this and in my next post I will write about building RESILIENCE IN CHILDREN.
What tools can we, as parents (and if you are not a parent, these are for sure things that you can do for yourself!), provide our children with, to help them face adversity with more of a chance to come out the other side less scathed, than if they were left to fend life’s ruthlessness with no armour!
Click here to go to PART 5.
Elle Ash xo
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