Cultivating Emotional Resilience: Strategies for Thriving in a Changing World

People who are emotionally resilient have deliberate responses to painful experiences. These responses include allowing themselves to grieve, focusing on the things they can control, and reminding themselves about the things they are thankful for. Anyone can cultivate their own emotional resilience to make it stronger and more durable, and in fact, in the world we live in today, is a significant key to living a life without chronic stress. The information below can help you do that for yourself.?

Exploring the Concept of Emotional Resilience and Its Benefits

Resilient people find it easier to adapt to stressful situations and can recognize the positive aspects of changes. In addition, these are the people we often turn to when a crisis arises because we know that they can handle difficult situations.

By becoming more resilient, you can bounce back from adversity, more effectively navigate challenges, and protect yourself from illnesses that develop due to stress. Resilience may also help you create meaningful relationships.

Recognizing the Causes of Stress

Identifying reasons we become stressed?can help us manage it more effectively, which is one aspect of resilience.

Short-term stressors (i.e., acute stress) are those that cause us to feel anxious. Some of these include dealing with a lot of traffic or our children acting up. This type of stress does not require much resilience because once the situation resolves, it is relieved.

Chronic stress is more severe because it involves issues that are more difficult to resolve and can negatively affect our physical and mental well-being.

Chronic stressors can include:

• Debt.
• Grief.
• Relationship problems (e.g., a separation or divorce).
• Loss of employment.
• Chronic illness.
• Traumatic experiences.
• Significant life changes.
• Limiting beliefs.
• Continuously living to please other people.
• Not acknowledging and/or expressing our feelings or emotions.

By developing and strengthening our resilience, we can effectively manage these stressors, which helps us safeguard our well-being.

How To Create a Traffic-Less Highway for Our Emotions

We need to normalize our feelings. Normalizing our feelings doesn’t mean that we should minimize or dismiss them. Instead, we should express them in healthy ways. We need to realize that our emotions don’t cast a negative light on us. Many times, sharing our feelings with someone we trust can help us feel more hopeful and less alone.?

Bottling up our emotions could cause us to feel even more stress and anxiety, which may lead to the onset of depression. It may also negatively affect our ability to deal with short-term stressors, cause physical symptoms to develop, and negatively affect our relationships.

Reasons we may bottle up our feelings include:

• How we were raised.
• How we were conditioned by society.
• Being in survival mode all the time.
• Experiencing trauma.
• Fears such as a fear of being vulnerable or getting judged.
• A lack of emotional validation or support during specific developmental stages of childhood.
• Having negative experiences when we express our emotions.
• Persistently neglecting our emotional health.

Finding a controlled and safe way to explore and then express these bottled-up emotions in healthy ways is a vital aspect of becoming emotionally resilient.

Coping With Repressed Feelings and Challenging Situations

Emotions can be subconscious, which means that we are not aware that these emotions exist, even when they are affecting our daily lives. If we do not find a healthy way to release these emotions, they can cause us to experience physical symptoms, including muscle tension and pain. The good news is that we can release these repressed emotions and cope with challenging situations in many different ways such as artistic expression, journaling, mindful practices, yoga, meditation, and participating in physical activities we enjoy. The list goes on.

Enhancing Our Emotional Well-Being by Practicing Self-Care

Building emotional resilience requires that we stay proactive, positive, and hopeful. The 10 factors below can help us as we work towards becoming more resilient.

10 Factors That Can Help Us Practice Self-Care and Build Our Resilience

1. Self-awareness -Requires recognizing whether our thoughts, actions, and beliefs align with our values.
2. Positive self-talk?-How we speak to ourselves matters. Therefore, our internal dialogue needs to be supportive and uplifting.
3. Emotional expression: Realize that we should express our emotions in healthy ways.
4. Mindfulness?-?Looking at situations as they truly are, instead of how we want or expect them to be.
5. Having a sense of humor?-?Laughing about the plot twists we experience in our lives can help us feel more prepared while we deal with them.
6. Coping skills?-?Develop self-serving methods that can help us deal with the challenges we face.
7. Support?-?Surrounding ourselves with supportive people who want what is best for us can increase our confidence when we need to deal with stressors.
8. Practicing gratitude?-?Focusing on positive aspects of our lives helps us decrease our negative emotions, which may improve our overall health.
9. Stay active?-?participating in activities that we love?helps relieve our anxiety and stress.?
10. Read?-?We can understand ourselves better if we find stories about people who are experiencing the same issues.?

Strengthening Emotional Resilience Through Mindfulness and Self-Reflection

Self-reflection can help us understand some of the reasons we lack resilience.

Factors that can impact our ability to be emotionally resilient include:

• Exposure to trauma.
• Early life experiences.
• Physical health.
• Our environment.
• Genetics.
• Mental health.
• Personality traits.

Nonetheless, despite our experiences, we can always work towards improving our resilience by:

• Acknowledging and validating the way you feel?-?For example, a couple that has been trying to conceive for some time may feel angry when a family member with three children conceives again. This is a natural feeling that other couples in the same situation experience.
• Practicing self-care?-?Find activities that can promote inner peace and help you connect with yourself (e.g., spending time outside and exploring your creativity).
• Questioning negative thoughts?-?Replace negative thoughts with declarations celebrating your identity.
• Finding support?-?consider making an appointment with a life coach?like Andrew O’Brien, NBC-HWC, MBA, SHRM-SCP, BCC.

Stress and anxiety can significantly impact our physical health and mental well-being, especially when our emotional resilience level is low.