“Stress is not so bad”: how to cultivate resilience in yourself

Why do different people experience difficulties and adversity differently? What is resilience and how can it be developed? How can empathy help develop resilience? We will try to find answers to these questions in the article.

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Many problems in a person's attitude to a difficult situation begin with the perception of what is happening to you. There is a huge difference between what is happening to YOU and what is just happening. It is the belief that problems or difficulties are happening to “you” in most cases that are the main cause of catastrophic consequences: increased anxiety, causeless worry, anxiety or the development of feelings of guilt. Your freedom always depends on the path you choose, helping you realize your level of personal responsibility.

“Stress is not so bad”: how to cultivate resilience in yourself

A few years ago, the unimaginable happened in my life. I wanted to help one person who was sick and hid his illness. I went to his house, intending to perform a life-saving operation that I thought would end with a trip to the emergency room. Instead, it ended with a trip to the morgue. When I arrived, I found my ex-husband lying dead on the bathroom floor. What illness was he hiding? He was a drug addict.

Without a doubt, it was the most traumatic event in my life, but not only in mine. At that time, I had two teenage children who unwittingly found themselves in the front row of this tragedy - the gradual suicide of their father. It took me two years to deal with my ex-husband's property, which we inherited and continued to put me in a state of constant anxiety.

Then I thought that we would never recover, and our whole life would be darkened by this terrible sadness. But now, almost five years later, we're doing well—good, really. Or it was so until recently, when, together with the rest of the world, we began to experience the onset of crises.

It turns out that that terrible time in my life was good preparation for a pandemic, political and social upheaval, and economic and financial uncertainty. The main lesson I learned from it: I never know what will happen next. I plan as well as I can, but I'm much better at changing my thinking now. I can handle life's unexpected twists and turns, accept the challenges I face, and keep going even when it's hard.

How we cope with a crisis or traumatic event (and the coronavirus situation has many of the characteristics of trauma because it is unpredictable and uncontrollable) depends largely on how resilient we are. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficult experiences and setbacks, adapt, move forward, and sometimes even grow.

A person's resilience is determined by a combination of genetics, personal history, environment, and situational context. One study found that genetics accounted for a relatively small part.

“The way I think about it is that there are characteristics of temperament or personality that are influenced by genetics, such as risk taking or whether you're an introvert or an extrovert,” says Karestan Koenen, a professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Harvard University's Chan School of Public Health.

Professor Koenen studies how genes influence the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder. “We've all met people who have a very short temper,” she says. “Part of this has to do with the way we are physiologically designed.” However, it is not true that some people are born more resilient than others. “Almost any trait can be positive or negative depending on the situation,” she explains.

The most significant determinant of resilience, identified in almost every survey or study over the past 50 years, is the quality of close personal relationships, especially with parents and caregivers. Children's attachment to parents plays a vital role in human adaptation.

“How loved you felt as a child says a lot about how you will cope with difficult situations later in life,” says Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, who has studied post-traumatic stress since the 1970s. He is the founder of the Trauma Research Foundation in Boston.

According to long-term studies, the first 20 years of life are especially important. “Different traumas at different ages have particular effects on our perceptions, interpretations and expectations. These early experiences shape the brain,” says van der Kolk.

You can think of resilience as a set of skills that can be learned, and often it is. Part of the development of skills comes from exposure to very difficult—but manageable—experiences like those I and my children have had.

“Stress is not a bad thing,” says Stephen M. Southwick, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and co-author of Resilience: The Science of Overcoming Life's Biggest Challenges. According to him, if you can cope with everything that is happening in the world around you today, then “when you find yourself on the other side, you will become stronger.”

How we cope depends on a set of tools for resilience. For some people, like my ex-husband, this set consists of drugs. For others, it may be drinking, overeating, gambling, or shopping. But all this does not contribute to resilience.

In fact, the tools for developing resilience are optimism (realistic only), moral compass, religious or spiritual beliefs, cognitive and emotional flexibility, and social connections. The most resilient people are those who usually don't dwell on the negative, look for opportunities, and can persist even in the darkest of times. For example, during quarantine, a stressed-out person may decide that now is the time to take up meditation, take an online course, or learn to play the guitar.

Research has shown that commitment to a worthy cause or belief in something greater than ourselves - religiously or spiritually - increases resilience as well as flexibility in thinking.

“Many resilient people learn to carefully accept what they can't change about their current situation, and then ask themselves what they can change,” says Dr. Southwick. Conversely, the tendency to bang your head against the wall and worry endlessly about how you can't change something has the opposite effect of reducing your ability to cope.

Dr. Southwick conducted many studies with former prisoners of war and found that although they suffered greatly, many ultimately found new areas of growth and meaning in their lives. The same thing happened to me. After my own tragic experience, I returned to school and received a Master's degree in social work.

But then, five years ago, being in the thick of things, I felt depressed and hopeless. I tried to cope with this by narrowing my thinking. I didn't worry about how I would live next week, next month or next year. Instead, I thought: how long does it take to enter into an inheritance? Will my daughter be able to go back to college? If I had gone to my ex-husband's house a day earlier, could I have saved him? I worked hard to focus on the present moment and not ruminate about the past or future, which I could not change or control.

I am currently conducting research in social work and in my fieldwork I support people with cancer - also a traumatic experience. I often tell them to stay in the moment and focus on their strengths because imagining the worst-case scenario is pointless and only increases anxiety.

“Each of us must identify what our specific problems are and then how to overcome them at this moment in time,” advises George Bonanno, professor of clinical psychology and director of the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Laboratory at Teachers College, Columbia University. The good news, he says, is that most of us will. Professor Bonanno's laboratory analyzed 67 studies of people who had experienced all types of traumatic events. “I'm talking about mass shootings, hurricanes, spinal cord injuries, things like that,” he says. “And two thirds of the participants turned out to be resilient. Two-thirds were able to function well in a short period of time.”

How to learn resilience

Interviews with a large number of very resilient people—those who have experienced a lot of adversity and dealt with it successfully—show that they have common characteristics.

They have a positive, realistic outlook. They don't dwell on negative information and instead look for opportunities in bleak situations and strive to find the positive in the negative.
They have moral compass. People with a high degree of resilience have a clear sense of what they believe is right and wrong, and make decisions based on this.
They believe in something greater than themselves. This is often found in religious or spiritual practices. Community support as part of religion also increases resilience.
They are altruistic, selfless, and tend to care about others. They often dedicate themselves to causes that they find meaningful and that give them a sense of purpose.
They accept what they cannot change and focus their energy on what they can change. Dr Southwick says resilient people re-evaluate a difficult situation and look for meaningful opportunities in it.
They have a mission, meaning, purpose. They are committed to a meaningful mission in life, and this gives them courage and strength.
They have a social support system and support others. “Very few resilient people are lonely,” Southwick says.

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Resilience and mental health article on the topic

Resilience and children's mental health

Difficulties invariably occur in the life of any person. Their occurrence is natural. Children encounter difficult situations no less often than adults! A difficult situation is characterized by a discrepancy between what a person wants and what he can. The child faces this all the time. What is natural for an adult can be difficult and difficult for a child.

Any difficult situation leads to disruption of activity, gives rise to negative emotions and experiences, and causes discomfort. All this can have adverse consequences for personal development. But is it only the unfavorable ones? After all, obstacles and hindrances are normal phenomena of life; they provoke activity aimed at overcoming them.

Methods of behavior in difficult situations are individual in nature and become stable in adults (self-control, self-regulation). They begin to develop already in childhood, but this development does not occur automatically as they grow older. The child’s temperament, his personality traits, and individual experience are of great importance. Constructive ways of behavior can be formed (active, conscious overcoming of difficulties; activation of development): the ability to apologize, be the first to approach for reconciliation, and non-constructive (do not lead to a solution to the problem, can cause deviations and deformations in development): the emergence of various bad habits, such as biting nails, masturbation; withdrawal; refusal to communicate; aggressiveness.

Difficult situations can be temporary, fleeting (fell, not accepted into the game); short-term, but very acute and significant (loss of a loved one, separation from mother, moving to a new place); long-term, chronic (parental divorce, conflicting upbringing, school failure). The most traumatic ones are short-term, but acute and long-lasting.

For preschoolers, the most traumatic situations are those associated with the loss (real or imaginary) of a sense of security:

hostile, abusive family;
emotionally rejecting family;
family not providing care and supervision;
a disintegrating or broken family;
excessive demands of parents (overprotection);
the appearance of a new family member (stepfather, stepmother, brother, sister);
contradictory upbringing or a sharp change in the type of upbringing (before everything was possible, now nothing is possible);
alien environment outside the family (language, culture);
separation from the family (hospitalization, referral to kindergarten)

For school-age children, in addition to those listed above, situations associated with a decrease in the value of the self are traumatic:

inability to meet family expectations (to be an excellent student, to be able to read well);
detachment from other family members;
non-acceptance by the children's team, teacher;
inability to cope with the academic load.

Gradually overcoming minor difficulties, the child prepares for adult life. It is necessary that he develops the need to find solutions and the ability to withstand adverse influences.

The influence of parents on the child’s development of behavior in difficult situations is great:

Family parenting style: authoritative parents - proactive, sociable, kind children; authoritarian parents - irritable, conflict-prone children; indulgent parents (permissive type of parenting) - impulsive, aggressive children.
The behavior of parents in difficult situations, which the child (often unconsciously) accepts as an example to follow.
Targeted teaching of children ways to overcome difficult situations.

What can parents do?

Observe your child’s behavior in difficult situations.
Analyze with your child possible ways to overcome difficulties in everyday life that may arise. You can play out these situations with a preschooler; with a schoolchild, a conversation is enough.
Turn to your own experience of behavior in difficult situations, evaluate the effectiveness of your actions, and discuss this with your child.
Teach your child the elements of auto-training (the ability to relax by counting to ten, for example); see the article “How to help your child and yourself overcome negative emotions.”

These simple actions on the part of parents can be the start for the child to develop independent skills to overcome difficult situations and develop constructive ways of behavior.