Today I am going to talk about a word we have been listing about a lot lately in news, daily conversations, on internet and TV. Most of the people don’t really know the meaning of this word and wonder that what is so important about the word; Resilience. Resilience typically means being strong face of adversity, optimistic, courageous, brave, and creative. In this article I am going to explain resilience.
Buzzword of the Moment
Resilience is being a buzzword nowadays and there are different reasons behind it. The first reason may be because researchers have been working on resilience. They try to find out its role and importance in human life for almost two decades. The findings of different researcher bring more attention to resilience. The new findings about resilience bring more things to talk and get under focused in the field of human psychology. The second thing that brings so much attention to resilience is situational factors. Our lifestyle is so much different and has a lot of difficulties then before. We are dealing with so many obstacles in our life such as economy issues, health issues, tough competition in jobs and education. We also deal with stress that comes from all these above mentioned things.
People start realizing the importance of resilience as they become aware of reality that they can’t control their life. People start thinking that they are not able to make their life perfect but they can be the person who is strong enough to strive back and face the difficulties with strength and courage. As due to Covid-19 pandemic, the whole world face a mental breakdown. And specially these type of situations demand resilience to strive and work properly to go by your daily life. So, it is essential for us to focus on things that will help us to build resilience.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is defined as a person’s psychological strength that helps them to cope up with the hardship and stressful situations of life. We can also say that it is a person’s mental reservoir of strength that he/she can call upon in the time of crises and it can help them to face the situation without falling apart. In short, the thing that makes a person to remain calm and stable in the time of disaster is what psychologist called as resilience. According to psychologist, individuals with resilience can more easily handle diversity in better way and can manage to rebuild their lives after disaster. A resilient Individual can recover from life challenges and cope up with problems through utilizing his/her strength and skills.
Change and loss are parts of our daily life and we deal with them and at some point of our life every one of us feel setbacks and crisis. Some experience minor problems such as unable to take your favorite subject class and other experiences large scale of setbacks such as pandemic and natural disasters. The thing is our ways of dealing with difficult situations in our lives make a great deal not only on the outcomes of situation but also build long term psychological effects on us. These psychological effects are may be negative or positive and if these are positive that means the person is more resilience. When a person can’t deal with difficult situation properly, its psychological effects are negative which means a person is less resilient.
However, the good news is there are different things that help you to become more resilient and you will be ready when any difficult situation hit you in the future and can easily cope up with that.
Resilient Individual’s Characteristics
Few people have resilient abilities by nature as personality traits other develop them by experiences. Resilience is not any kind of inborn trait. But is come from different series of a person’s external and internal characteristics that include his/her mental health, physical heath, environment and genetics. Moreover social support is also an essential contributor to make a person resilient. Resilience individual tend to have enormous amount of support from friends and family. Following are the characteristics of people having resilience abilities.
- A resilient individual have optimistic view about his/herself. They have a strong believe in their abilities and themselves to handle any situation in a better way.
- Resilient person have a strong social circle and can rely on their loved ones for social support at the time of adversity.
- Resilient person possesses great problem solving skills. They have sense to identify the main core of problem, generate realistic plans according to the problem and stick by them.
- A resilient individual view their role as a fighter not as a victim.
- Resilient individual have great coping skills to manage their anxiety and stress at the time of distress.
- They make their physical, mental and emotional health as their top priority. Because when you are strong emotionally, physically and mentally you can easily turn the diversity into a great opportunity to grow.
- They have great sense of self-awareness. Resilient individual know their strengths as well as weaknesses that help them to put a right step forward.
- Internal locus of control is also a main characteristic of resilient individual.
Different types of Resilience
Although resilience is mostly use as one word to represents a person’s adaptability skills and coping skills. But for the better understanding of this term it can be divided into four categories as followed:
Psychological Resilience
It is also known as mantel fortitude. It is define as a person’s mental strength and ability to better adapt difficult situations, uncertainty, diversity and challenges. Psychologically resilient person have better coping strategies and have abilities that help the person to stay focused, calm and build better strategy in the time of crises. They also have less negative consequences due to their mental resilience power. Psychological resilience includes a person’s creative problem solving skills, step by step approach to the achieve goals; focus on alternative options, and flexible thinking skills.
Physical Resilience
A person’s physical resilience works at the time of physical crisis such as any chronic illness, injury, physical trauma and accident. Physical resilience helps an individual to recover faster and efficiently and it also shows a person’s physical strength and stamina to cope up with physical related disaster. It is our body’s ability that help us with better adaptation the difficult situations such as physical stressors or any medical related issues. We can build physical resilience through deep breathing exercises, healthy life style, having enjoyable activities ones a while, and through making healthy choices about your lifestyle. Taking proper time to rest and recover from physical stressors also plays important role to boots up physical resilience.
Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience refers as a person’s emotional ability to cope up with diversity and stressful situation. The level of sensitivity toward stressors differs from person to person. Some people are more sensitive to change and other is less naturally. Any difficult situation can easily triggers emotions into a person. However, a resilient person can easily understand their emotions, feelings and reason behind them. Emotionally resilient person have proactive abilities to use external as well as internal resources in the time of crises. They also able to stay realistic optimists. That is why they can positively manage their emotions and stressors.
Community Resilience
Community resilience is a broad term. It refers to capability of groups of people to recover and turn the adverse situation happened at community level such as violence attacks, natural disasters, and economic problems. The best examples of community resilience are 2014’s APS Peshawar terror attach and Covid-19 pandemic. During this pandemic situation we work through community resilience to overcome the consequences. In short it defines as a person’s ability to come out to help others at the time of crisis.
Five Pillars of Resilience
A person’s resilience is made up of five things. The strength of these five things determined that how resilient a person is. These five things work together at the time of diversity. We can say that these are the pillars on which our resilience stands on.
Self-Awareness:
Knowledge about your strengths as well as weaknesses is most important in term of taking actions and making plans in time of difficulties. The more you aware about yourself the more you feel under control during adverse situations.
Mindfulness:
It includes positive, active energy in yourself that help you to focus on your present. Through mindfulness you pay more attention to live in the moment and experience new things rather than fixed with your past. Mindfulness helps you to observe your feelings and thoughts without any judgment. As a result you can make bold decisions without any hesitation.
Self-care:
Your physical and mental health should be your main priority. Give yourself proper time and care. It will help you to always be confident and energetic even when you face diversity.
Positive Relationships:
As I mentioned above social support can be mentioned as a vital component in resilience. Our connection with others is the most important experience in our life. When we have strong social circle we feel supportive, fulfilled and connected that help us to cope up with difficulties in a better way.
Purpose:
Always focus on the purpose and reason behind different events and experiences you have in your life. It will give you a mindset that everything is happing due to some reason and things will get better with time. Finding purpose in your surroundings will give you the meanings behind things, hope for future, and wisdom. You started to think beyond yourself and feel like you are serving something bigger in your life.
The Role of Games
To become more resilient you should play games. You think it sounds ridiculous but let me finish first. All the games are same as there are different levels and hurdles that you should pass to achieve the goals. Moreover, every game has some goals to achieve that make you excited and you try hard to achieve that goal. All the games are designed in way that it feels difficult to play and achieve the goal at first go and you always accept the challenge. People fail to achieve the goal approximately 80%. If this happened in real life people give up more likely. But in games you keep trying because you don’t focus on consequences. There is no one to makes fun of you and you don’t feel embarrassed about trying again and again.
In this way games give us great opportunity to learn from our failures, be creative, find new strategies to overcome difficult situation, boost our confidence to try again and again. These things help us a lot in our real life crises and difficult situations. We learn new strategies, coping skills, never give up on failure but try harder. Moreover, build connection with friends and use this connection in better way at the time of difficulty.
