THE SCIENCE
Stress may be inevitable, but cumulative stress can be avoided. Emotional resilience is your ability to adapt to stressful situations. An emotionally resilient person can deal with major and minor stress. If that is a skill you want to have or a character trait you want to be known for, read on.
Humans are highly adaptable. Emotional resilience is something you can learn and develop, so you are already set up for success as an emotionally resilient person.
If you find yourself at your emotional edge too often, some gaps in your resilience strategies may exist. Let’s do a check:
Three top traits of an emotionally resilient person are listed below. Evaluate, using gentleness and curiosity, which traits you feel you’ve got down and which could use some love, attention, and development. Once you identify two of the characteristics below that you think you’ve got down, it can illuminate the outstanding trait you need to develop to close the gap. Once you close the gap, notice if you find yourself at your emotional edge as a rare occurrence.
#1 – You practice the art of self-care.
You have discovered your personal needs and met them. You have taken the time to discover and incorporate whatever makes you feel cared for. By the way, you can meet this need by taking a break. More on that later.
#2 – You understand that stressful situations don’t define you.
You have relegated stressful circumstances to their rightful place as short-term conditions that do not determine who you are.
#3 – You are grateful.
You have a gratitude practice that you do daily. Examples of this are keeping a gratitude journal, sharing with your family or friends one thing you are grateful for as a daily practice, or finding one thing to be thankful for in stressful moments. Gratitude broadens perceptions about life and helps to increase feelings of hope and openness toward new possibilities.
Which one do you feel you need to embrace more?
1. The art of self-care
2. Understanding you are not the situation
3. Having a gratitude practice
Write down which one you want to develop. This is not a test—just a reflection for yourself. Writing things down helps you because it engages your critical thinking. You have to slow down and cement the learning in your brain, which accelerates learning.
RESISTING SELF CARE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Do you have any resistance to self-care? When you think about self-care, what is the first thought that comes to your mind? Do you say, “Great! Me-time”? Or do you think, I’ll get to that later, I can use that time instead to [insert any other task other than self-care here].
I know I did when I first put self-care on my calendar as a real thing. After a few times choosing to do something else instead, I had to stop and ask myself, “Why?” Why would I do something else when self-care has been proven to reduce anxiety and stress and all the benefits that come with that: happier feelings, better decisions, better quality relationships, a better quality of work and life, and on and on?
There are quite a few biases that are drivers in our subconscious. One of them is negativity bias. Negativity bias is when things of a negative nature have a more significant effect on one’s psychological state and processes than positive things. Basically bad is stronger than good. For example, we make decisions based on negative information more frequently than positive data. And our brains are hardwired for this. It’s called NATs-negative automatic thoughts. It‘s part of our evolutionary thinking and was critical to our survival. Negative automatic thoughts (NATs) are a stream of thoughts that are negatively framed interpretations of what we think is happening to us. “Think” is the operative word here, as this may not be a reality but a result of our cognitive filters.
To overcome our biases and negative thinking, we must become aware of them and then create new patterns.
So when that thought of ” Oh I’ll just complete this task before I do my self-care practice or have a moment of gratitude because it affects my survival and that is way more important than self-care” streams across your thinking, you can pause, take a breath, bring yourself to presence and restate the truth. And the truth is that by taking a moment of self-care, whatever was seemingly more critical was just evolutionary, old wiring. And when you practice self-care, whatever other task you do will be of a higher quality and exponentially more impactful.
THE ART
Art is a form of communication. It is an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations.
Self-care is an individual expression of deliberate, self-initiated health and well-being.
Self-care is an answer to dealing with stress. Those who can deal with stress become resilient. Resilient people can weather and lead others through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that have become our new norm.
To create new patterns of thought, we need small, consistent steps. Brain plasticity, or neuroplasticity, occurs in 252 days. It is the brain’s ability to change, to modify its connections, to rewire itself.
You have this ability within your grasp.
Once you have chosen one of the three resilience traits from the list above, the next thing you have to do is commit to it every day. Here’s how to make that easy.
- Be aware that the brain deems anything unfamiliar as unsafe.
- Understand that you are habituated to your current behavior and approaches.
Getting support is very helpful to set yourself up for success.
This is less about accountability and more about love—self-love. Knowing we are wired for the familiar and practiced in our current ways means that putting support in place sets us up for success in growing in new ways, especially when we are stressed out.
Taking on self-care as an art form creates the context that this is a conversation you are having with yourself. It is time to connect and check in with yourself, to become aware of your thoughts, and to introduce new ones. It’s a way to recognize how you feel so you know what you need and can determine how to meet those needs. I was recently in one of our VistaKind Experiences, and a feeling of deep sadness came up. I needed to cry, and I needed a hug. So I had a big cry, went to get a hug, and felt my balance return. I didn’t need to attach any story to it. I just needed to listen to my body and give it what it needed, also known as the art of self-care.
When we deepen our connection to what is happening inside ourselves, we can transform our experience of what is happening around us. We can never control our environment. What has happened in the last year and a half has made that abundantly clear. But we can adapt. Not to stress but to have a new way of being in and with ourselves. It’s an art form. And when we master it, we can stand in any moment with presence and grace and lead others to do the same.
Looking for a way to develop the art and science of resiliency and self-care? We created The VistaKind Experience to provide the structure and support.