A Survivors Guide to Resilience
According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the stress of a pandemic like COVID can trigger deteriorating physical and mental health, even increases in substance use and abuse. And for many, the pandemic is just the frosting on the cake of traumas in connection with bias and discrimination, chronic stress of living in or on the brink of, and anxiety over tomorrow’s election. Indeed, over 50% of adults in America feel that their mental health has deteriorated (Kaiser Family Foundation), and the prevalence of anxiety disorders and depression have tripled and quadrupled, respectively, over the summer months. Hitting close to home, demand for the services of Rock Recovery, a mental health nonprofit that I started in 2007, have risen 400%.
In times like this, it’s wise to wonder, “How can I outsmart the statistics?,” and “How do I plant my feet firmly in the 50% who find ways to thrive when the world becomes rigid, tense, and unforgiving?” As someone who has experienced rock bottom and grown immensely from years of mental health struggles, I’d like to offer my own Survivor’s Guide to Resilience.
My Story in One Paragraph
It’s not our experiences, but what we make of them, that determine our present and our future.
Many – if not most – of my clients know that a severe eating disorder (actually several variations of them) consumed 7 years of my adult life. In retrospect, the reason that I went through nearly a decade of turmoil boils down to resilience — in this case, lack thereof. It was my lack of resilience that led me to overinvest in otherwise healthy coping strategies – exercising and eating – when the pain became overwhelming.
My story isn’t uncommon — many people rely more on coping strategies than resilience. But as Brené Brown reminds us, coping strategies just numb us — ALL of us, the good and the bad. As Lucy Hone puts it, we lose the good with the bad. Resilience, on the other hand, allows us to relish in the good and put the bad in its place.
Step 1: Envision Resilience
It’s hard to know what resilience looks like until you can spot it in yourself and others. For me, until I experienced a severe lack thereof, I defined resilience as joy, happiness, and a “don’t worry, be happy” attitude toward life. Have you ever met someone who avoided or distracted themself from challenges instead of working through them? That was me. Whenever things weren’t going the way I wanted them to go, I would focus on what was going well. If nothing was going well, I created a new opportunity in which I could be fulfilled. This “avoid and distract” approach got me through everyday bumps and bruises of life, but proved insufficient for more significant challenges.
On my journey out of the hole I dug for myself, I came to a much deeper understanding of resilience, which includes:
Acknowledging that life is full of challenges
Perceiving the present as temporary
Refusing to define yourself as your struggles (e.g., I may be addicted, but I am not an addict)
Realizing that you can influence your experience of these challenges in significant ways
Creating a vision for “good,” “better,” and “best yet”
Moving toward a goal
Thinking calmly and rationally
Bringing awareness to your mental, emotional, and physical states
Sitting with and moving through pain vs. numbing or moving around it
Asking for help and surrounding yourself with support
Invitation: Ask yourself, “What does resilience look like for me?”
Step 2: Tell Your Story
After I got out of residential treatment, I did a lot of public speaking, mostly on college campuses. Each time I spoke about my experience, I got stronger. The same is likely true for you. The more you share your struggles, whether those struggles seem big or small, the more you define them, and the less they define you. As summarized by Dr. Lissa Rankin,
“Every time you tell your story and someone else who cares bears witness to it, you turn off the body’s stress responses, flipping off toxic stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine and flipping on relaxation responses that release healing hormones like oxytocin, dopamine, nitric oxide, and endorphins. Not only does this turn on the body’s innate self-repair mechanisms and function as preventative medicine…it also relaxes your nervous system and helps heal your mind of depression, anxiety, fear, anger, and feelings of disconnection.”
Furthermore, as demonstrated by Jordan Peterson and replicated in contexts around the world, telling your story (aka, self-authoring) gives you authorship of your story: telling your story puts you in the position to both own your past and write your future.
Invitation: Start with a timeline of your life, from your earliest standout memories to present day. Label major successes and challenges along the way. For each major success and each significant challenge, identify the strengths that you leveraged in those times, along with the mental, emotional, and even physical muscles that these experiences helped you grow. You might even create a “title” for each major chapter of your life. Then look across all of these experiences and create an empowering overall headline that speaks to how you have evolved across your lifespan.
Step 3: Write Your Future
As powerful as it is to own your life’s story up until today, it’s even more powerful to begin writing your story from this day forward. Consider a few data points.
We are far more likely to accomplish goals we set for ourselves than those that we don’t (obviously).
Visioning yourself successfully navigating a challenge helps you navigate that challenge in the moment.[1]
Believing that you will succeed at something focuses your brain on factors that contribute to your success, whereas believing you will fail focuses your brain on factors that contribute to failure – a classic self-fulfilling prophecy.[2]
Writing your future story activates these and other psychological mechanisms that can have real and tangible impacts on your actual, experienced future.
Invitation: Before you begin writing, put yourself in the mindset of your very best self, including all the strengths and attributes that you have acquired through your life experiences. Give this fully empowered version of yourself permission to decide what you will do today, tomorrow, and next week. Begin to tell your hero’s story of living the life that you deeply want for yourself, in big and small ways. Start with tomorrow: How will you, your very best self, respond to whatever the day brings?
References
[1] Lohr, J. (2015). Can Visualizing Your Body Doing Something Help You Learn to Do It Better? Scientific American, Online at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can- visualizing-your-body-doing-something-help-you-learn-to- do-it-better/
[2] Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure. Glencoe, IL.
