What is Resilience?
Resilience is a way to describe the quality of something that goes back to its original form after it has been bent or stretched. It is also a popular term used to describe a psychological quality in people. Resilience has been described as “the capacity to cope with change and challenge and bounce back during difficult times.
How Young People Describe Resilience
Dealing with hardships and still holding your head up
Giving things a go or trying your best
Being strong on the inside
Being able to cope with what life throws at you and shrug it off
Standing up for yourself
As you can see, the idea of resilience focuses on how we deal with stressful situations and adversity – the more resilient we are, the more able we are to manage adversity.
Experiencing the Tough Times
Ups and downs are a normal part of life and there are many times when people feel stretched or under pressure.
Challenges in life can range from easy to manage and causing a small amount of stress, to very stressful, such as a trauma or crisis.
What might seem like a mild pressure to one person may very difficult for another. (Likewise, what seems unbearable to one person may be managed fairly easily by another.)
Have you ever heard someone’s story and thought to yourself:
“If that was me I don’t know how I would have coped!”
Or you might have thought “What’s the big deal, what are they so worried about?”.
What Influences Resilience
Factors that influence how people experiences a challenge situation or trauma include:
Personal capacities and coping skills.
The degree of the trauma or stress.
Support and resources available to an individual.
Timing and the context of the events.
Presence of other circumstances or additional stress present. at the time of the event.
Given that everyone has different life experiences and different resources, it’s important not to judge people on how they cope or how long it takes them to bounce back from a stressful event. (It is TOTALLY personal how long people take to recover from an event.)
It is also equally important not to judge yourself about how you are reacting to a stressful situation.
It can be helpful to examine how you cope.
Acknowledge your needs.
Develop new strategies to get through the tough times.
Kinesiology & Counseling are great at helping with this.
Developing Resilience
Research suggests that there are certain factors and circumstances in life that promote resilience. Some of these factors include:
Supportive and stable family relationships
Having positive expectations or being optimistic
Sense of self worth
Participating and contributing to social and or community activities
Having a sense of belonging and good friendships
Personal attributes such as problem solving abilities and communication skills
Because we all come from different backgrounds and have different life experiences, not everyone has had the ideal circumstances to develop resilience. So it’s good to know that it’s possible for anyone to learn from adversity and to develop positive ways of dealing with things.
Through dealing with adversity, people have learned to build resilience and have discovered courage they didn’t previously know they had. While people can’t be resilient all the time, it is important to remember that resilience is something that can be learned and improved on, and support is available to do this.
Here at De-Stress and be HAPPY we are here to help you develop your resilience and transform your life.
BOOK YOUR 1ST appointment today and see how you can De-Stress and be HAPPY.