Get back up when you get knocked down
How to improve your resilience
How many articles, stories and news segments have you seen dedicated to COVID stressors? Millions, right?! COVID has brought up challenges for everyone but so does life outside of a global pandemic. It is at times like these during unusual circumstances that life’s general hurdles impact us more because we simply have more on our plate. So how do you improve your resilience?
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from hurdles that happen in your life. If you think about your life as a rubber band each time you have a challenge that band becomes stretched, when you learn how to deal with it, feel your emotions, act and move forward the rubber band (your life) goes back to normal. When life hands you 3, 5, 10, 20 more challenges the rubber band becomes seriously stretched especially if you haven’t been able to process and act on the things that have already rocked you. Become quicker at bouncing back to bolster your mental health and wellbeing.
You require energy to be resilient so the quicker you bounce back the greater capacity you will have to meet your next challenge with vibrancy, calmness, and a can-do attitude. To increase your energy, you need to generate energy daily. This could be through singing, dancing, running, swimming, hitting the gym. You also need to dedicate time to reviving yourself. This means giving your soul time to rest. For many people the only time they allow their soul rest is when they sleep. In this time, they are (hopefully) deeply sleeping and giving themselves more energy for the day tomorrow but not restoring the vibrancy and calmness, hence why people can sleep 8hours and still wake up tired. To revive your soul, you need conscious down time meditating, being in nature, journaling about how you feel, doing things you love, spending time with quality people who care about you.
It is easy to simply disconnect from everyone and everything, but it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be better for it if you do nothing to work on what frustrated or stressed you out in the first place. You may appear calm but underneath the surface you know ‘if one more thing happens, I simply won’t be able to take it’. This feeling is a signal to go and create energy and do something good for your soul. In that process do something else that will make yourself feel good- acknowledge your growth and successes, acknowledge what struggles you have already faced and successfully coped with. This will remind yourself that you can get through your current challenges.
What are some strategies you use to help you build resilience? Share in the comments.
You’ve seen it before…life having a way of breaking through the toughest situations. You can too! You got this!