How can we improve our resilience?
Src: Neuroscience News
When I think of resilience, I think of my grandmother Lila. She lived in a small town in Northern Wisconsin with her four sisters and grade-school educated parents. Lila moved south to Milwaukee for nursing school and once she started working she sent money back home. One by one her sisters followed.
Lila met my grandfather across an operating table back in the 1920s. My grandparents paid off mortgages for their home and a small working farm before the depression hit. Helpful, because after the depression people paid with bags of potatoes or helping my grandmother with their kids.
Decades later, enduring a spouse’s sickness was measured in minutes. Lila gave her doctor husband syringes filled with sugar water to draw out the time between opioid shots after his heart surgery. Lila’s effort to wean my grandfather off his meds because they both knew what becoming addicted would mean.
When I moved cross country, I thought of Lila relocating to an unknown city as the eldest daughter in her 20s too.
What is resilience? Why are some people more resilient than others? How can we improve our resilience?
what is resilience?
According to the Mayo Clinic, “Resilience means being able to adapt to life's misfortunes and setbacks.” Resilience doesn’t make problems (perceived or otherwise) go away, but it allows us to see past them and better handle the stress. We all find ourselves in less than optimal situations, big ones and little ones. And if you live long enough, you’re faced with ample opportunities to learn to bounce back.
This week, my primary doctor retired, almost seventeen years after meeting him as the hospitalist during the weeks I was in/out of the ER.
As I drove to the appointment, I searched for a way to describe my relationship with Dr. K and speculated what his absence as my doctor would feel like. It wasn’t as if I checked in with him every day, but an image of a safety net persisted. Dr. K had history with me in the hospital when the neurologists didn’t know what was going on. He was there for days at a time overseeing my care and interacting with my husband, daughters, and sister. I remember Dr. K gave my husband his pager number which brought great comfort since we never knew when I’d have another event.
When I think of a safety net, I conjure a picture of a trapeze artist and maybe in someway I was up on the high-wire feeling invincible in my late 40s. Well, the stress weakened the wire while I went back-and-forth and back-and-forth until one day, I fell off.
It took the neurologists two weeks to figure out what was happening in my brain. Once they did, they diagnosed my strokes and perscribed boatloads of meds and told me to take it easy while my brain and body healed. I was grateful the episodes stopped and I wasn’t going to fall off the trapeze again. But in reality the high-wire was lowered and my safety net was raised.
My previous goal to stop my brain freeze (and not the ice cream kind) morphed into a new goal: get off all meds, become healthy again without the meds.
I often wondered why I wanted to get off all of my meds — now I think of my grandmother Lila, giving my grandfather placebo shots to gain a few more minutes to help wean him off the opioids. She had a single focused determination that worked. Maybe our resilience is inherited.
why are some people more resilient than others?
In this month’s thought echoes podcast, I interviewed Maggie Jackson, author and journalist. Against the backdrop of her latest book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, I learned that uncertainty has a lot to do with resilience. Maggie says, “That was a surprise to me … there are many different ways I talk about uncertainty as good stress … that kind of wakefulness you get when stressed is part and parcel with the flexibility that goes into resilience.”
And Desiree Delgadillo encourages in a new UCLA Health study, “Highly resilient individuals were less likely to catastrophize, and they keep a level head.”
Maggie shared how curious people are typically highly tolerant of stress, and enjoy exploring the unknown. They approach life differently. “Curious people argue to learn, they’re more open to other’s opinions.” That line struck me — how many times have I impatiently waited for someone to finish speaking, not fully listening, holding back to make my point …
My biggest takeaway from Maggie’s research involved a relatively new personality trait: tolerance for uncertainty. She explained, “We all land somewhere on the spectrum ... Scientists are treating anxiety and other mental disorders simply by targeting tolerance of uncertainty, because that's how important our approach to uncertainty is to mental well-being.”
how can we improve our resilience?
In a recent Big Think article, ”Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience,” Wendy Suzuki talks about cognitive flexibility. The idea of approaching situations from different perspectives. How sometimes we look at the same situation in the same way we approached it when we were six-years-old. Cognitive flexibility says if we consider there are different ways to approach something, the ability to adopt a different perspective becomes possible.
In her Psychology Today article “Resilience, What it is and Why We Need it” Dr. Monica Vermani encourages, “We can build resiliency by reframing negative events, having faith in ourselves over our fear, and controlling the messages we tell ourselves.”
Resilience for me is about reframing. Something happens, an obstacle is put in your path, and you try to figure out how to get past it. I knew in my bones I’d be okay after my strokes, but I didn’t really know what okay would look like or how I would get there.
I was hyper-vigilant in my movements and speech. My words were slippery. It took lots of effort to camp-counselor them to behave. I wasn’t tending to sales projection spreadsheets for awhile, so I used my disability paperwork as my personal Sudoku. Then I worked up to tracking my meds and exercise with color-coded spreadsheets before I tiptoed back into creating formulas and graphs.
Along the way I remembered a time when I'd done something hard in the past (climbing Mt. Hood) with my mantra during training and coming down the mountain with a sprained ankle: one foot in front of the other. Mt. Hood became my bottomless reservoir of resilience, along with the support of my family and friends.
After 3 1/2 years my favorite spreadsheet line ever: Row 265 “Dr. K agreeds, official stop of meds.” Little did I know my first granddaughter would be born exactly ten years later.
WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR COMMENTS. WHAT’S IN YOUR RESILIENCE RESERVOIR?
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