Resilience and the Power of Change

The global explosion of Covid-19 has put unanticipated stress on all of us—and how every single person reacts can conceivably affect everyone else. As a nation, we’ve had to pivot in many facets of our lives during these trying times whether it be finding a new job or learning how to homeschool children or figuring out a way to have personal space when everyone is home 24/7. What we thought was to be true is no longer the case and our comfort zone has completely gone out the window. This pandemic has forced us to take pause and look within.

Dr. Divya Kannan, lead psychologist at Cure.fit a prominent health and fitness app, discusses the importance of resilience, emotional awareness, and gratitude.

Resilience and the power of change

Resilience, a now popular term that you have no doubt heard about. What does it really mean? The psychological literature defines resilience as the ability to ‘bounce back’ from a crisis or difficult time in your life. Some describe it as the ability to respond to setbacks or an attitude of “mental toughness.”

What resilience is really asking of us is, how do we work through our fears? How do we face life challenges that come our way and what can help us be more prepared to navigate these challenges?

Developing resilience is a process which involves acknowledging the inevitability of change and the emotional struggle that can come with it. The process of recovery, adaptation, and developing resilience can feel like an obstacle course, but let’s look at a couple of essential practices that can help us develop these tools and transform how we respond to a crisis.

Do we respond to hardship or react?

Being resilient often involves making difficult life choices that are in front of us, or adapting to sometimes extreme stressors and circumstances, and this can naturally cause us a great deal of stress. When we are under stress, our body and mind naturally try to restore us to a sense of balance or homeostasis. This is one of the reasons we may look to unhealthy coping strategies such as emotional eating or binging, alcohol use, gaming so that we feel instantly but temporarily better and are rewarded quickly by an almost false sense of balance at that moment.

However, this reward can be deceiving, keeping us in a never-ending loop of reacting to stress followed by self-gratification, often to avoid emotional pain or continue to feel a sense of pleasure. If we are able to pause and ask ourselves how this strategy will serve us in the long run, allow for “thinking time” between stressor and response, then we can start to consider how best to respond to all the choices in front of us, and get ourselves onto an effective path of coping. Responding mindfully to stress involves confronting our emotional pain and with guidance and support, we can learn the tools through mindfulness to ease into this.

How emotional awareness guides us

Being aware of your emotions, and knowing why you feel what you feel, is an important tool that can guide us in our choices and helps us to regulate our emotions. One of the key reasons for this is that low self-awareness leads one to be aware of the problem only once emotions have peaked or is close to reaching a heightened state, where it is then tougher to intervene or self-regulate. While emotions can feel overwhelming, suppressing our emotions can paralyze us, and prevent us from knowing how to act. This can make us feel as though we are not in control of our feelings and more like our emotions are controlling us. Developing good emotional intelligence is central to developing resilience.

Can we harness the power of gratitude?

We are in a constant state of chasing rainbows. Do you remember spending a lot of time thinking about how it would be to buy your first bike or get your first salary or first promotion? These experiences were pleasurable, likely took a lot of effort, but once we attain them, we go back to a mindset of not having enough, and in fact, wanting more. A shift in mindset, one of gratitude, which is essentially a feeling of what one has in the moment is enough, can help you take stock of what you do have in your life.

Transforming ourselves while facing life challenges can be a slow and painful process, but resilience is at the heart of this change. Change can be a naturally disorienting process, that requires a series of active steps to build new ways of being and adapting to the novelty that change brings. By harnessing our capacity to change, we will be able to see growth and wisdom even from our most difficult experiences

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