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Building your resiliency to stress is a way of dealing with stressful situations in such a way that it also helps you take the next step in your own growth as a person. Building your resiliency raises your tolerance so that as you grow, things that stressed you out in the past no longer have the same hold on you that they once did.
So, what exactly is resiliency?
| Resiliency |
n.1. The ability to recover rapidly from illness, change, or misfortune.
2. The ability of something to regain its shape after being bent, stretched or compressed. |
Already, you can probably see the connection of this concept with stress management. Life does the bending, stretching and compressing of us in our daily experiences, testing our resiliency. How well we weather the storm depends on how resilient we are.
Statements about resiliency:
- Resiliency is about who you are while stress management is about what you do.
- Resiliency occurs on a continuum (it's not an either/or proposition).
- Resiliency is related to a person's overall growth and development.
- Our level of resiliency (at that moment) is evident in how we respond to a stressor.
- Resiliency grows through healthy resonses to stressors.
So, how we handle the storm not only reveals our current level of resiliency, it also can build it up.
Building Resiliency
Generally, building resiliency involves doing two difficult things simultaneously in a stressful situation: self-soothing and self-confronting.
Self-Soothing
Self-soothing is taking deliberate steps to calm oneself while facing a stressful situation. Often this can involve traditional stress management techniques such as relaxation, deep breathing or healthy self-talk.
Besides just the goal of outwardly handling a situation appropriately, self-soothing has a deeper purpose that can be different from traditional stress management: to calm oneself enough in the anxious situation in order to do the self-confronting.
Self-Confronting
The idea here is to ask yourself why you are upset and learn what this tells you about yourself. Specifically, what is your growth issue in this situation? One example of this can be, "Am I depending on someone else to validate my sense of self-worth?", "Do I have my sense of myself too heavily invested in this situation, so that when it changes I may lose myself?".
Once you've identified where you need to grow, the next step is to figure out what the "hard thing" is that you need to do to grow, and make yourself do it. Make yourself respond to the situation in accordance with your core values and beliefs and depend on those for your self validation.
Example 1
Example 2
Things to Remember
Focusing on building your resiliency does NOT mean that whatever is going on around you is okay or that you should accept it, because maybe your growth issue involves saying no or setting a boundary where you've been afraid to in the past.
Self-soothing without the self-confronting leads to avoidance. Typical examples of avoidant behavior include withdrawing, being demanding, emotionally-driven eating, substance abuse, etc.
Conversely, self-confronting without self-soothing can lead to you beating yourself up (not good). Everybody walks a different road. For you, growing may involve backing off and letting go of control of a situation. For someone else, it may mean that they need to take more charge of the situation. Don't judge yourself by comparing yourself to others.
Give yourself time to grow. You're not where you used to be, and you may not be where you want to be yet, so be content with where you are as long as you feel that you're moving in the right direction.
Check out this link to
Al Siebert's Resiliency Center web page. Dr. Siebert is the author of The Survivor Personality.
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