Emotional resilience is the ability to recover from or adjust easily when something has gone wrong, or we think something has gone wrong, or it feels challenging. It’s the energy we have to deal with things when they come up—the bandwidth to overcome challenges, to feel confident and competent.
Think of a stretchy band. If it’s stretched, you can bounce something on it and it comes back, but if we over-pull it, it might break or just stay there. We’re not able to bounce back from small or big things, there’s no flexibility to launch us back up.
Studies show that stress is not inherently bad for us. It’s actually our reaction to the stress (over-pulling) and what we think about it (resisting and judging it) that may be harmful or not.
If stress is not inherently bad for us, then it’s our story about the stress or our reaction to it that may be harmful—likely creating more stress.
Our lower brain is always on the lookout for danger: real or perceived from our thinking—past, present or the future—it’s all the same to it.
We can create stress subconsciously, without even realizing it. This is the way our lower brain operates and as it was designed. Some of the time it’s helpful (a car coming down the street at us), but a lot of the time it’s not (someone laughed at what we said in middle school).
The most impactful thing you can do is to practice observing your own experience without reacting to it. Most of us don’t just observe, we react and we judge and start to feel a stress response such as being irritable, anxious or overwhelmed.
Observing the stress response first and not reacting to it will help you to not deplete your emotional resilience tank. It will prevent you from overstretching, to keep a little slack in your bandwidth.
When your ready to build your emotional resilience, I can help.