Resilience: definition and 10 habits to enhance it
Life goes on ... Life always goes on, but often without appealing to us, it takes us a long time to get hooked to the values that keep us with the future when it suddenly breaks down.
We want to predict what will happen and we dedicate a lot of energy to establish a stability that gives us the tranquility of the calm sea, but sometimes the weather changes, sometimes waves come and other times tsunamis appear that destroy us not only the built but what we had cemented , even the imagined thing that kept us with hope and motivated us to get up every day in the morning. That's when we need resilience.
- Recommended article: "The 10 typical habits of resilient people"
Resilience: a virtue to face the bad spells
What to do when we go through a bad time? The alternative is so simple that it is cruel, the alternative is to continue living , because living is also suffering, is moving forward without desire, is bewilderment, fear, anger ...
We have to give permission for this stage, after all it is a logical phase of mourning.
Society fills us with the plan of life of a lot of premises that we must meet to be happy and that also seems that if we do not, we are blamed for choosing to be dissatisfied, as if the emotional state could be programmed and kept active in joy until you decide to modify it. Unfortunately, this is not the case .
How do we face a process of loss or a sad stage?
As for how we face these moments of low spirits, many different things happen. Some people who believe in it and luckily their sea is calm, can afford to look at other gaps , to consider that they can come tidal waves or some unexpected storm or that now that the sea is calm is a pity not to enjoy it having someone else to be with, a better job, a smaller nose ...
Others are elite athletes in this discipline , continually raffle wave after wave, without time to enjoy the calm, they are simply dealing with everything that arrives without paying attention to anything and at least while that busy stage lasts they do not feel too much the discomfort, which however they later notice as a physical and emotional hangover, proportional to the vortex in which she has been immersed.
Other people get used to living with discomfort , but with the permanent feeling of being responsible, this reassures them gives them at least a sense of control, but the sea can not be controlled as if it were the pool of my house, so unexpectedly, without deserving it, without predicting it, We destroy life a storm and ... what do I do next?
Learning to live differently
This is the most complicated of situations, in which the pain is so intense that everything around you goes into the background, in which any comment complaining about something that you find a banality offends you, and immerses you in the silence of incomprehension and sadness.
It is often said that the most bitter pains are intimate , they hurt so much that we do not want to expose ourselves to the double victimization of incomprehension and shut up, hearing as an annoying noise the great difficulties that others find in their day to day and that you would give too much to exchange.
In that moment in which you come to the conclusion that a single sentence of yours, a holder of your misfortunes, would completely minimize your problems, you will be angry and you would shout it, to decide to opt again for silence, it does not compensate, in the end It does not compensate ... And that's when we need tools to get out of the quagmire. The key tool is resilience , an aptitude that can be improved and that impels us to be able to get well out of the most adverse situations
So, how to strengthen our capacity for resilience?
The most effective way to develop resilience is to adopt a series of habits and attitudes , in addition to establishing certain patterns of self-discovery, such as the following:
- Identify what you are experiencing on an emotional level.
- identify the somatizations that reflect what you feel in your body.
- Questioning what you would do at that moment if you did not feel like it and try to carry it out.
- Load sense every action you carry out.
- Act to improve your long-term life and not to eliminate the discomfort you feel.
- Observe your automatic response pattern.
- Create an alternative list of different strategies to deal with the malaise.
- Decide which of them serve to eliminate discomfort and which are to build a life that compensates.
- Begin to choose in a conscious way every decision that is usually made impulsively.
- Allowing oneself to be wrong, accepting discomfort is the greatest learning and increases tolerance by becoming freer people.
Learning to relativize
One of the most important aspects of resilience is to be clear that, whether we want to or not, we will never be able to make totally objective assessments about reality . This fact, that philosophy has been exploring for hundreds of years through one of its branches (epistemology), makes us ask ourselves this question: since we will always have to interpret what happens to us, what is the best way to do what?
The key to resilience is knowing that we must avoid pessimism, as it is also based on a series of constant inventions about what happens to us. The fact that pessimism and sadness keep us mired in discomfort does not make this reading of reality more reliable.
Therefore, since we do what we do, we will not be able to know reality in a direct way, let's choose build an interpretation of our life that has a meaning important for us. It is a matter of choosing, under equal conditions, a vital story that allows us to continue advancing.
From this skill, which requires time and practice, resilience will be born, which will help us to empower ourselves and to be a little closer to that happiness for which we have fought so much.
Bibliographic references:
- Forés, A. and Grané, J. (2008). The resilience. Grow from adversity Barcelona Editorial Platform.
- Triglia, Adrián; Regader, Bertrand; García-Allen, Jonathan. (2016). Psychologically speaking. Paidós.
