In my last article, we talked about self- care and how we can overcome the barriers of self-care. Now, let’s dive deeper and understand what’s the overarching goal of self-care? Well, it is to strengthen resilience.
Resilience is our ability to overcome adversity and rise to challenges. It is also a flexible adaptation to the changing demands of stressful experiences. Resilience enables us to manage challenges in the pursuit of our important goals and recover from traumatic or terrible experiences. People with higher resilience often cope more effectively during difficult circumstances and recover faster than those with lower resilience.
Two very important things worth noting for resilience are; one it’s not just for the worst day of our life, and second resilience helps us sail smoothly through the varying experiences of life every single day.
So how can we become skillful at building this resilience muscle?
A strategic way to improve resilience is to create a personal resilience tool kit to foster wellbeing. The components to this tool kit will be the strategies a person uses to enhance and maintain their well-being. These strategies would require intentional practice overtime and eventually combine to create a set of habits that will help to cope with stress and maintain well-being.
While we all are unique individuals, there is a set of components that is universal for all in building resilience. These are:
PHYSICAL STRATEGIES: doing physical exercise, eating nutritional food, having a good sleep routine
SOCIAL CONNECTION: having meaningful friendships, romantic relationships, family support
COGNITION/MENTAL HABITS: overcoming thinking traps, reframing negative thoughts
MINDFULNESS PRACTICES: meditation practice, learning to have self-compassion and compassion for others, spiritual or religious engagements, gratitude practices etc.
When we become aware of the tools necessary to strengthen resilience and design our personal resilience tool kit, we can improve our well-being. What we must acknowledge is that no one can defeat us from learning a little and growing a little every day and that no one can do that work for us.
So, let us take the responsibility of our well-being and design our personal resilience tool kit. In the event you feel that you require any assistance, please reach out to me at nitika@renewmind.net