How to Be Resilient in the Face of Massive Adversity

You’re not blessed with resilience; you build it.

Every one of us at some point in our lives is going to be faced with a massive adversity. I’ve had many including a near-miss with cancer, losing my job and battling mental illness.

The antidote to adversity is resilience. Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

You’re not blessed with resilience; you build it. Resilience is the ability to find strength in a tough situation. The key to resilience is to take the negative events and learn ways of processing them differently, so they support us rather than hinder us.

When you’ve faced a massive adversity, and overcome it, you not only appreciate it but you end up with a different perspective on life and have skills that you can use next time you face it. That perspective, in my case, can be something as simple as “Yay I’m still alive and didn’t die.”

This perspective is obviously far more useful than being succumbed by the adversity and swallowed up into its dark hole.

Here’s how to be resilient when you face adversity:

The adversity could have been worse

Whatever your adversity is, it could have been worse. Think about the magnitude of your adversity and then try to imagine something that is ten times worse.

Seeing how lucky you are despite the adversity will give you further perspective and another story you can tell yourself that will help you keep going.

It’s bad, but it’s not that bad.

Day by day

Chunking down your recovery process can be very useful. If you try and climb Mt Everest in three hours, you’re probably going to become overwhelmed just by the thought of it and that’s not going to be helpful.

When you chunk down your adversity, it becomes easier to manage. Take each day as it comes and don’t try and foresee how the rest of your life will pan out when you’re going through adversity.

It’s not permanent

Nothing last forever — not even adversity. Our fight or flight response in our brain lies to us and tells us that the adversity will last longer than it really will to protect us. Our flight or flight response is like a mother that cares way too much and is only trying to help.

The way you battle thoughts that something is permanent is by removing words such as ‘forever’ and changing them to words that suggest that the adversity is temporary. I find words like ‘right now’ and ‘recently’ to be much better than telling myself “I’m always going to be like this and it will last forever.”

There’s no empowering meaning behind thinking you’ll be down on one leg begging for your life to change forever. Change how you frame your adversity into something that is temporary or short-term.

Remember confidence and compassion

Being sympathetic to yourself and your situation and not punishing yourself for the adversity is key. If someone had gone through a death in the family or lost their job, you’d be compassionate to them so why wouldn’t you do the same when it happens to yourself?

When you face adversity, it’s easy to focus on everything that is going wrong. The way to build confidence when attempting to overcome adversity is to focus on the small wins. There must be one or two things you did well today, right?

Even if it’s only holding it together for an hour or making dinner for your family, something went right. If you remind yourself of these small wins enough, you’ll build confidence.

By fusing confidence and compassion together, you can stop beating yourself up and instead use that same energy to beat adversity.

Take breaks

There are going to be days when the adversity feels like too much. That’s okay. Taking breaks from overcoming your adversity and doing nothing or reading a book will give your mind space to breathe.

If all you do is fight the adversity head-on, 24/7, you’ll burn yourself out.

One way to supercharge these breaks is to try and not do them alone. Taking breaks with the support of friends and family gives you extra strength.

Feeling alone during adversity is one of the worst feelings in the world and this is how you can prevent that from happening next time you face adversity.

Discovering meaning in it all

When you face adversity there are three potential outcomes:

1. You’re broken forever
2. You get back to where you were before the adversity
3. You thrive because of the adversity and end up further ahead than where you were before the adversity

Option three is obviously the best and it’s available to all of us. Finding meaning from our adversity is about using it to help others.

By helping others, we give our adversity meaning and put some good back into the world at the same time.

Losing a loved one sucks but if you could help 30 other people overcome the same challenge, wouldn’t that feel good? Would it make the pain of your adversity decrease just a little?

Helping others gives your adversity meaning.

Triumphing again

Adversity can make us feel guilty and prevent us from doing the things that make us happy. The simple way to triumph again is to do something that will make you happy.

You may have lost your job, but why can’t you eat at your favorite restaurant?

You may have lost a parent, but why can’t you take a holiday to your favorite place?

You need many positive experiences to help you fight adversity and you hold the keys to that kingdom. Until you’re reminded how good life feels again, you’ll be stuck in the unhappiness and pain of your adversity. Allow yourself to triumph again. It’s your choice.

Find resilience in others

Whatever adversity you are facing, your not the first. The way to find more resilience is to find it in others.

Watch a few movies of people who have overcome crippling adversity, read a few books of people that have dealt with adversity, and meet people in person from your network who have dealt with something similar.

When you do this, you’ll see that all of our problems as humans are the same and this idea will set you free from the trap that can be adversity.

Amplifying your resilience

The best way I’ve found to amplify my own resilience is a gratitude practice I learned from the Tim Ferriss Podcast.

All you need to do is every day, at exactly the same time (ideally morning), write down three things you are grateful for in the notepad of your phone. When that inevitable adversity comes for you, having things to be grateful for will help you see that everything is going to be okay and life is good despite the adversity.

There’s never a point where you have nothing; you always have something and that’s the greatest lesson you can learn from adversity to build your resilience.

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