How To Build Resilience

The Bottom Line

To build resilience, practice positive coping strategies while eliminating negative coping strategies.

Summary

Resilience is the ability to withstand, recover, return, and thrive in the face of adversity or a traumatic event.  Resilience is an ongoing process that develops over time. Furthermore, our perceptions, culture, family, experiences, and training all influence our resilience.

While we all have our strategies for dealing with life’s challenges, the use of positive coping strategies, and the avoidance of dysfunctional coping strategies can predict your resilience.  Positive reframing, humor, and less use of self-blame are top strategies on how to build resilience.  Furthermore, these strategies can work regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or marital status (Rice and Liu 2016).

While positive coping strategies can be learned and trained, we learn dysfunctional coping strategies as well. We often develop these through repetition (Med 2008).  As a result, it is just as important to learn positive coping strategies as it is to learn not to use dysfunctional coping strategies.

How To Implement

Coping refers to taking action to deal with life’s problems.  There is evidence that coping strategies improve with experience.  Most important, the more you use these skills, the better they get.

There are two types of coping strategies, emotion focused coping and problem focused coping.  Each brings powerful tools to help build resilience.

Emotion Focused Coping

If you cannot change the situation, change your mind.  These strategies are most effective when faced with a situation you cannot alter.  Emotion focused coping strategies aim to reduce emotional distress caused by the stressor or situation.

Acceptance

Start by accepting the reality of the situation while recognizing and accepting your inability to change it.  Furthermore, acceptance is an active process.  It can require effort at times.  Every time you practice acceptance, new neural pathways are created in your brain, making acceptance easier in the future.  Once you accept a situation for what it is, you can begin working on unique and creative solutions to make it better.

Positive Reframing

Positive reframing allows you to take control of your response to a situation by reframing it into a possible growth experience. It can introduce gratitude in a stressful situation enabling you to focus on what is going well in your life. Furthermore, practicing gratitude can decrease symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Together, acceptance and positive reframing are a powerful combination.  Accept the reality of a situation, define it positively, and use it as an opportunity to grow.

Humor

Humor can boost one’s mood, alleviate emotional distress, and even buffer against depression.  Laughter and humor improve immune response, enhance perceptual flexibility, and can offset the effects of stress (Wooten 1996).  Load up YouTube and watch a funny video.

Problem Focused Coping

Problem focused coping strategies involve direct action to alter the situation or source of the stress.  They enforce the belief that constructive change is possible.

Planning

Planning involves thinking of methods to alter the stressor or situation. The first step in developing a good plan is to define how success looks . Once you know what success looks like, set clear, measurable goals that will bring you to success. Furthermore, write the goals down and make a to-do list from the goals.

Active Coping

Active coping takes action toward dealing with the stressor or activating the plan.  Once you have your plan in place with clearly defined goals, start tackling that to-do list.

In addition to using positive coping strategies, eliminate the use of dysfunctional coping strategies. These include self-blame, denial, substance abuse, and behavioral disengagement. Furthermore, replacing harmful coping strategies with positive ones will give you the tools to build resilience and deal with anything life throws your way.

Most noteworthy, this study looking at resilience among military service members and veterans showed that the use of acceptance, positive reframing, and humor while avoiding dysfunctional coping strategies were the best predictors of resilience.

Want a quick fix for dealing with stress? Watch this 3 Minute Video To Change Your Response To Stress Forever.