💪How are your resilience levels?
It seems that no matter where I’ve been lately, people are sharing that all of the challenges we've faced and continue to face are wreaking havoc with their resilience – not a surprise, especially considering for how long we’ve been managing those challenges and the associated stress.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity - physically, mentally and emotionally - and to adapt to change and grow while doing so – no mean feat!
Thanks to Beth Cabrera for sharing this piece from Thrive on LinkedIn recently which caught my eye.
In it, Pantea Vahidi, RN sets out, wonderfully clearly, 7️⃣ traits that the most resilient amongst us enjoy:
🌿 Being accepting of your own 'baseline' (and working to improve it)
🌿 Demonstrating flexibility
🌿 Being willing to learn
🌿 Consciously seeking solutions
🌿 Being resourceful (with the tools available to you)
🌿 Solving problems creatively
🌿 Having realistic expectations
These traits are very much in keeping with the principles of Physical Intelligence (Simon & Schuster 2019).
How we interpret events affects our mindset.
Taking time to analyze, process, and learn from negative events increases resilience and optimism by boosting serotonin (happiness and status), oxytocin (social bonding and trust) and dopamine (pleasure and reward) levels.
Realistic optimism helps us create and maintain optimal mental and emotional health – essential for resilience.
In addition, it is important to incorporate exercise into our routine. Our bodies and brains are inextricably linked. Physical exercise rebalances cortisol (stress), which boosts serotonin and releases endorphins (that enhance our mood) – in turn, improving our performance and supporting our mental and emotional health – ultimately building resilience.
The same system – our parasympathetic nervous system – enables us to recover from physical exertion as well as mental and emotional pressure. Maintaining a robust parasympathetic nervous system helps us bounce back better and faster.
If you don’t possess these traits right now, consider how you can adapt your lifestyle to include one or more of them.
If you've already made a conscious decision to improve your resilience, let me know what changes you made and how it went below? 👇
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