Resilience- How to Cope
In our ever-changing world, each person encounters a variety of difficult and challenging life events. This could be a job change, family stress, financial problems, or any adverse event. Despite these life events, one should be resilient.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the process of how people adapt well when faced with difficult and challenging times such as trauma, tragedy, or threats. It gives people strength to cope. It is the ability to survive and thrive following adversity.
Why have resilience?
Resilient people are better able to handle misfortune or difficult situations and persevere to rebuild their lives. There are many situations that are unavoidable such as loss, heartbreak, and death. When one is better able to not dwell on difficult situations, they can acknowledge what happened, think of what they are going to do differently next time, if it applies, and move forward. No one can control everything that happens in their life on a day to day basis, but having the ability to take control of a situation and move forward is important.
Ways to become more resilient
Being in a world where a variety of crises can come up at any moment, it is important to have ways to cope. Here are ways that can help you become more resilient:
Be active and engaged
During difficult times, it is easy to only have negative or tough thoughts and be hyper focused on what is bad. With having a very specific focus, we lose our focal point on what is important to us. It is important to learn from what is going on and to set goals on how we want to grow. It gets people engaged and active in the future.
Develop strong relationships
People who have a strong support system and have built up their relationships provides a level of comfort to fall back on. Having a strong network of people also causes less stress on people since they know that someone will be there for them if tragedy happens.
Be open
People who have resilience understand that plans may change and roll with it. Being open means to take a challenging situation, acknowledge that it may be difficult and then move forward. Having different thoughts and experiences are what make people human.
Have self confidence
Even during difficult times, having the confidence that it will get better helps build resilience. Being confident will enable you to take risks and build the strength to keep moving ahead.
You are not alone in dealing with resilience. If it becomes too much, maybe it is time to contact Tabono. We are here to help you.
References:
Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M. (2013). “Psychological Resilience.” European Psychologist, 18(1), 12-23.
Ong, A., Zautra, A, & Reid, M. (2010). “Psychological resilience predicts decreases in pain catastrophizing through positive emotions.” Psychol Aging, 25(3), 516-523.
Tugade, M., Fredrickson, B., & Barrett, L. (2004). “Psychological resilience and positive emotional granularity: Examining the benefits of positive on coping and health.” Journal of Personality, 72(6), 1161-1184.
