The world around us is full of anxieties and stress, so building psychological resilience is a key skill. This is one’s ability to adapt positively in risky and crisis situations. Furthermore, resilience is also the ability to restore a person back to the original state after experiencing stress and strain.
When a person’s resources for support are less than the levels of stress they are experiencing, and the demands of the environment increase, coping with difficulties becomes more complex.
Emotional resilience
A person’s emotional resilience decreases when he/she lacks social support or connection with others. When a person does not have the opportunity to communicate with family or friends, but also does not seek professional help, they become socially isolated. Then both mental and physical health begin to suffer. Burnout causes a person to feel low levels of energy and motivation, while at the same time having feelings of guilt due to high stress levels.
Skill building
Demonstrating empathy is the ability to put oneself in another’s place to understand their feelings and the motivation for their actions. Emotional intelligence combines knowing and managing, respectively, one’s own emotions and those of others.
Awareness of what is under one’s control and what is not, the focus can be placed on the circle of control. For example, one’s own thoughts, feelings, words, and actions are within one’s circle of control, whereas what others think or say, as well as events in the past, cannot be controlled.
Coping techniques
People who have built psychological resilience are able to escape negative tendencies to minimize or exaggerate the magnitude of something they have taken on. When the to-do list is too big and one blocks, seeing the threat of failure and disappointment, mapping out small steps that will lead to solving a big task is key to achieving it.
Another phenomenon to watch out for is the tendency to worsen. This is an unconscious bias that causes one to experience the feeling that the past is infinitely better than what is happening in the present. It is the tendency to view the past in an extremely positive light while the present appears extremely negative. When people see the world only in its bad light, they lose the ability to make rational decisions about their future. Psychologically resilient people are able to focus on optimistic news and trends – both in their own lives and in society at large.
