Emotional Resilience
This is the ability to handle a stressful event or experience without destroying one’s resolve, sense of purpose, or sanity.
An emotionally resilient person can channelize and metabolize negative feelings instead of being overwhelmed or paralyzed by them. One does not have to wait for dire circumstances to practise emotional resilience, and a few daily rituals are sufficient to build our sense of balance and help us achieve more in life while boosting our mental health and immunity.
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Reflective journaling as a daily practice helps us improve our emotional stamina.
Writing down our experiences leads to new insights and a deeper understanding of our behaviour and actions. Writing down your failures and successes also helps us self-analyze our life in an objective, detached way. One can choose a pen and paper or digital format to write and make it a point to write when one experiences highs and lows in life.
We have to take care not to damage our self-esteem and our sense of self-worth by being judgemental about ourselves.
Embracing one’s imperfect moments with kindness and grace, makes us see the positive aspects of the situation and helps us learn from our mistakes. Meditation and certain thought exercises that steer our mind towards positivity, help us in being compassionate towards ourselves.
- Resilience and gratitude have a connection at the neurotransmitter level our of brains.
- Happiness chemicals like serotonin and dopamine are released as we express gratitude, lighting up the two areas of our brain called the amygdala and hippocampus, which regulate our emotions and memory.
- A daily gratitude practise helps us feel content and even meditative, living life in a deeper dimension, filling our days with balance and perspective.
Though it is not a practice, hope helps us cope with our day-to-day stresses, letting us find joy in the things that are going right, or shifting our focus to something bigger than ourselves.
Being close to nature, and spending time doing something one loves, or with someone special, help us find our joy and hope, taking the sting out of the (inevitable) sufferings of life.
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You can work proactively to build a support ecosystem to help you get through difficult times.
- Call your close friend(s) and talk to them about how you’re feeling.
- Join a community / group of like-minded people who’ve been through what you’re going through right now.
- Communicate with your partner.
- Be open, direct and transparent with your manager, at work.
Build your village and every struggle will be more manageable than it is today.
Spend 5 to 10 minutes at the end of each day writing in detail about three things that went well that day, large or small, and also describing why you think they happened.
This simple practice is effective because it not only helps you remember and appreciate good things that happened in the past; it can also teach you to notice and savor positive events as they happen.
Our diminishing resilience and decreasing psychological threshold of handling pain and struggle is, in turn, making everything look like a crisis.
We are making a catastrophe out of everything, getting offended at the drop of a hat, mostly for no legitimate reason other than our own ego-filled state of being.