Enhancing Resilience is possible because we are always able to learn new ways of coping and dealing with situations life presents us with.

Enhancing Resilience for a Happier Life

Enhancing resilience helps us overcome difficulties and move forward. Our lives are full of change and challenges.   Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from hardship or setback. It, therefore, helps propel us to move forward from a misfortune.  We react to things in personal ways shaped by our upbringing, experience, culture and so forth. However, we can enhance or build resilience by bolstering innate attributes like optimism, levelheadedness and an ability to change course.

Cultivating Greater Resilience

Some folks “roll with the punches”, and bounce back from a hardship more easily than others. Some folks become frozen or panicked.  Resilience allows us to use our inner strength to overcome things such as loss, illness, or a disaster. It isn’t prevention but rather a skill to overcome adverse situations. Although a degree of resilience is innate, some strategies can be learned. Therefore, enhancing resiience is worthwhile as it can help neutralize depression and anxiety, thereby improving one’s ability to cope with stressful situations.

Enhancing Resilience tips include:

Connecting with others – build and nurture relationships with family, friends and everyday people in your life. Being alone in times of difficulty makes things worse, so reach out.

Take care of yourself – eat, be active, rest and stay on top of medical checkups or conditions

Learn from experience – once a situation has been resolved, review it and look at it in terms of what was helpful and what was not.

Be Proactive and find meaning – decisive action is much better than becoming detached. Ignored problems tend to inflate rather than go away. Avoiding issues yields poor results while looking at the issue and problem-solving can make a big difference on smaller things. Major life setbacks or traumas require much more time. Resilience takes time.

Break tasks down into more manageable steps and ask for help when needed.

Nurture yourself and be kind to yourself – especially when hurting. You can journal and/or seek therapy either individual or group. It is important to begin building your confidence and trust in your own instincts and feelings.

Work towards Acceptance that change is a constant in our lives and try to gain more perspective about the situation and your reaction to it.

Explore your spirituality – seek out comfort in religion or philosophical teachings or even poetry.

Trust your Gut and believe it when you see the writing on the wall – whether in relationships or with work. Recognize a threat – denial is quite brittle.

Big losses or traumas set up the stages of grief – experience them which helps you move from denial to acceptance more quickly.

Manage your emotions to best stay in control to think more clearly.

Believe in yourself – this may take a lot of practice but it works – see things as they are but believe that you are EXCEPTIONAL

Plan ahead when there isn’t danger present.

Help someone else – a very good tonic for changing your focus and feeling better.