Resilience: definition and 10 habits to enhance it

Life goes on... Life always goes on, but many times without wanting anything, it takes time to re-engage with the values ​​that keep us with a future when it is suddenly truncated.

We want to predict what will happen and we dedicate a lot of energy to establish a stability that gives us the tranquility of the calm sea, but sometimes the weather changes, sometimes waves come and other times tsunamis appear that destroy not only what we built but what we had builtEven the imagination that kept us excited and motivated us to get up every day in the morning. That's when we need the resilience.

• Recommended article: "The 10 typical habits of resilient people"

Resilience: a virtue to face the bad times

What to do when we go through a bad time? The alternative is so simple that it is cruel, the alternative is to continue living, because living is also suffering, it is moving forward without desire, it is bewilderment, fear, anger ...

We have to give ourselves permission for this stage, after all it is a logical phase of duel.

Society fills our life plan with a lot of premises that we must fulfill in order to be happy and that it also seems that if we do not do it, we blame themselves for choosing to be dissatisfied, as if the emotional state could be programmed and kept active in joy mode until you decide modify it. Unfortunately this is not so.

How do we face a process of loss or a sad stage?

When it comes to how we deal with these low spirits, a lot of different things happen. Some people who believe in it and luckily their sea is calm, can afford to look at other lagoons, consider that swells or an unexpected storm may come or that now that the sea is calm it's a shame not to enjoy it having someone else to be with, a better job, one more nose little...

Others are elite athletes in this discipline, continuously dodge wave after wave, without time to enjoy the calm, they simply take care of solving everything that comes without paying attention to anything and at least while During this busy stage, they do not feel the discomfort too much, which however they later notice as a physical and emotional hangover, proportional to the maelstrom in which they have been immersed.

Other people get used to living with discomfort, but with the permanent feeling of being responsible, this reassures them gives them at least a sense of control, but the sea cannot control as if it were the swimming pool of my house, so unexpectedly, without deserving it, without predicting it, it destroys our lives a temporary and... What do i do next

Learning to live differently

This is the most complicated of situations, in which the pain is so intense that everything around you fades into the background, in the that any complaining comment about something that is trivial to you offends you, and immerses you in the silence of misunderstanding and the sadness.

It is often said that the bitterest pains are intimate, they hurt so much that we do not want to expose ourselves to the double victimization of misunderstanding and we shut up, hearing like a annoying noise the great difficulties that others encounter in their day to day and that you would give too much for to exchange.

At that moment when you come to the conclusion that a single phrase of yours, a headline of your misfortunes, would completely minimize their problems, you get angry and you would scream it, to decide to opt for silence again, it does not compensate, in the end it does not compensates... And that's when we need tools to get out of the quagmire. The key tool is resilience, an ability that can be improved and that encourages us to be able to get out of the most adverse situations well

So how do we strengthen our resilience capacity?

The most effective way to build resilience is to adopt a series of habits and attitudes, in addition to establishing certain self-discovery guidelines, such as the following:

• Identify what you are experiencing on an emotional level.
• identify the somatizations that reflect what you feel in your body.
• Question what you would do at that moment if you did not feel that way and try to carry it out.
• Charge every action you carry out with meaning.
• Act to improve your life in the long term and not to eliminate the discomfort you feel.
• Observe your automatic response pattern.
• Create an alternative list of different coping strategies.
• Decide which of them serve to eliminate discomfort and which are to build a life that compensates.
• Begin to consciously choose each decision that is usually made impulsively.
• Allowing yourself to be wrong, accepting discomfort is the greatest learning and tolerance increases, becoming freer people.

Learning to relativize

One of the most important aspects of resilience is to be clear that, whether we want to or not, we will never be able to make totally objective assessments about reality. This fact, which philosophy has been exploring for hundreds of years through one of its branches (the epistemology), raises this question to us: since we will always have to interpret what happens to us, what is the best way to do it?

The key to resilience is knowing that we must avoid being dragged down by pessimism, since it is also based on a series of constant inventions about what happens to us. The fact that pessimism and sadness keep us mired in discomfort does not make this reading of reality any more reliable.

Therefore, since we do what we do we will not get to know reality in a direct way, let us choose build an interpretation of our life that has meaning important for us. It is a matter of choosing, under equal conditions, a vital story that allows us to continue moving forward.

From this skill, which requires time and practice, resilience will be born, which will help us to empower ourselves and to be a little closer to that happiness for which we have fought so hard.

Bibliographic references:

• Forés, A. and Grané, J. (2008). The resilience. Grow from adversity. Barcelona Editorial Platform.
• Triglia, Adrián; Regader, Bertrand; Garcia-Allen, Jonathan. (2016). Psychologically speaking. Paidos.