Being human can be hard. Developing greater resilience can buffer and bolster our mental health…but why do our brains get in the way sometimes? Shouldn’t our minds help us, instead of making it more difficult?? In the video and article below I discuss two internal obstacles to psychological well-being, and what we can do about them.
In the physical world, resilience is a property of objects or substances that makes them flexible. Think of the times you’ve had a strong rain and wind storm come through your area. If trees were rigid and brittle, they’d all snap from the force of that wind, but instead they bend just enough to stay intact. (Hopefully.) This is one way to think about psychological resilience as well.
Resilience in the psychological sense is the skill that enables people to successfully navigate the hard stuff that comes with life. It’s not imperviousness to difficulty, it’s not a magical force field; but it’s the capacity to flexibly interact with that hard stuff. It allows us to recover more quickly, or to adapt and change where needed.
Related: (VIDEO) Explaining Psychological Flexibility: Surfing Metaphor
There are lots of good ways to work on building resilience, and plenty of things that can make it challenging at times. One of these challenges in particular might come as a surprise–it’s our own human mind and the way it automatically works. Negotiating a more flexible interaction with some of the wired-in features of our brains is one key aspect of developing greater psychological resilience. I provide more depth and some suggestions for how to do this in the above video.
This resilience and flexibility is particularly helpful for people with very loud, thinky, and active minds–such as is often the case with anxiety and related issues. If you’d like more help with developing resilience, and addressing some of the internal challenges we face due to the capacity of our minds, reach out to us today.
Photo by Casey Thiebeau on Unsplash
