Bouncing Back from Setbacks: Strategies for Resilience
Resilience, often termed as emotional fitness or psychological strength, is at the heart of personal growth and stress management. It refers to the capacity to bounce back from life’s difficulties, adversity or setbacks, and to continue marching forth towards our goals. Cultivating resilience can empower individuals to cope effectively with stress, neutralize negative emotions, and foster personal growth.
There's no one-size-fits-all strategy for building resilience, as our responses to stress and adversity may vary. However, a handful of approaches may be helpful:
1. Maintain a Positive Mindset: Cultivating and retaining a positive outlook on life can significantly elevate resilience. Positive thinking does not mean avoiding or ignoring adversity; rather, it encourages recognizing, confronting, and working through problems by focusing on potential solutions.
2. Embrace Change: Understand that setbacks are temporary, and disappointments are just detours, not final destinations. This change in perception can make bouncing back from problems much more manageable.
3. Create Strong Social Connections: Having a support circle can be a vital tool for resilience-building. Surrounding yourself with people who are positive, supportive, empathetic, and understanding can foster a sense of belonging and serve as a buffer during stressful times. We hope this stress-savvy challenge has helped! The community at 7 Cups stands by you.
4. Mindful Activities: Engaging in mindfulness practices such as meditation, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or yoga can enhance psychological resilience by promoting relaxation and mental clarity.
5. Self-Care: Prioritizing personal wellbeing and setting time aside for regeneration is essential for both physical and mental resilience. Regular exercise and a balanced diet, coupled with adequate rest and relaxation, can have profound impacts on your ability to cope with stress and setbacks.
6. Embrace Learning: Life’s setbacks are often filled with valuable lessons. Embracing a growth mindset that views challenges as opportunities for learning and personal development can foster resilience.
Group Discussion/Exercise
One effective therapeutic exercise to draw on these strategies for resilience is known as the 'Stress-Resilience Reflective Exercise':
1) Identify a recent stressor or setback in your life. What are the feelings and thoughts that this setback has generated?
2) Then, employ a problem-solving approach: What can be done to overcome this issue? What positive outcome or learning can be derived from this situation?
Share reflections in our group chat, if needed. Repeat this exercise anytime you face adversity.
Resilience and stress management are intrinsically tied. By learning and implementing resilience-boosting strategies, you not only better equip yourself against future setbacks but also cultivate a healthier, more balanced perspective on stress management. Being resilient doesn’t mean you won’t experience difficulty or distress. But it does mean you will be better equipped to manage stressors and navigate your way through adversity towards a successful and rewarding life.
Tagging our Stress Explorers:
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@SoulfullyAButterfly
The first snow fall was subtle, falling in the tiniest shards of glass reflecting back distant deja vu against my front door. I slid the key in the lock and looked around, reminding myself not to appear nervous so as not attract negative attention. It felt warm in my home at first but it quickly settled on me how cold it was even with the extra heater I had to purchase with my food money.
Too depressed to have a hot shower, I bundled up like a dirty burrito in four layers of sweaters and hoodies, a jacket, tights, sweatpants, multiple socks and a beanie. Anger began seeping in. My helplessness. My futility. Then an almost fully encompassing rage slammed a tsunami into my being as I thought about how my heater had been turned off since the end of last winter due to code, insurance and other issues.
Rage turns darker as I think about how I hadn't had a day of quiet enjoyment in my rental homes for the past eight years. I had been basically abused and assaulted or ignored by every single person, place or thing my whole life. Poison floods my mind with the violence of purged and vomited lava guts of the earth exploding into the crashing ocean water on the most jagged and steep and unholy of rocks.
But why can't my landlord be nice? Follow the rules? Have found the time to fix the heater in the last year? Or at least lower my rent a bit or not hired drug using degenerates? Where are the rules and laws actually governing and protecting others? Can't cops do more? Back, forth, black, fourth.
Oh, that's why; all of it is my fault. I'm a bad person. I have no empathy. I'm stupid. The manager and landlord and other staff and people in the building assaulting me, threatening me, slandering me, ignoring my requests for things needing fixing, physically pushing me and blaming...all that is no less than what I deserve. My sister was right. IS right. We get what we deserve. I should never have been born.
Plus my sister...she's always right. Straight-A student, MVP on the basketball team, thrower of parties and winner of talent contests, brandisher of my dad's credit card at her fancy university and executor of his will, achiever of all things proper such as registry as a medical professional and becoming a wife, a mother, a businesswoman and caretaker...
Meanwhile I shamefully and barely scrape up merit role, am cut from the soccer team, can't even be in a relationship with someone I like or who likes me and just end up going from *** job to *** job while always in some semi-state of homelessness, poverty and illness with a few half-functional friends or relationships here and there, all who have gone away.
Feeling chronic and hopeless and helpless and desperate I grabbed at my phone, grab at food, grab at a pillow to distract myself. What does it matter that I'm destroying myself, ignoring myself? It's for the best. I'm nothing. Nothing at all.
Growing up my baba used to read me a book called 'Something from Nothing'.
'So often we speak of the glories of the butterfly. But rarely do we speak of what it must go through to become so.'
@SoulfullyAButterfly
1. Thoughts: obsessive, intrusive thoughts about the challenges, including planning and reviewing all the time the tasks involved. Rehearsing and criticizing talks with people, what should I say what I must have said? Emotions: high anxiety, exhaustion.
2. Coping tools: embracing change, mindful activities, and embracing learning. These are established habits, thankfully. They might mitigate but not eliminate a peak of stress. Positive outcome: "What doesn't kiII me makes me stronger".
1. stressor/setback - I would say the breakup i went through and still am trying to heal from.
feelings - depression/anxiety/hypervigilant/unworthiness etc
2. attending therapy for an extended period while using the things i learn, outside of session. practice self-care, spend time around those who love and appreciate me. i also find joining *** support groups who have been through similar situations to be helpful 😀
@heathermarie95 face book* oops
❤️ A recent stressor is that I've fallen behind on some tasks and objectives because of my mental health struggles. It worsens my anxiety and depression and it makes me feel stressed, sad and overwhelmed. It also makes me think that I'm unworthy, a disappointment, a mess and a failure. ❤️
❤️ To overcome this, I can practice self-care, take a break, pace myself, practice self-compassion, remind myself that it's not my fault and that I'm trying my best, reward myself for my progress, be patient with myself, seek support, challenge my unhelpful thoughts and be kinder to myself. ❤️
❤️ The lessons I can learn are that being hard on myself is not only pointless but also counterproductive, that my health must come first, that I'm human (and I shouldn't be too demanding with myself), that I deserve support and self-care too, that my thoughts aren't the reality, that I'm not the one to blame for my symptoms, that my productivity doesn't determine my worth, that all progress is valuable and that it's okay to not be at your 100%. ❤️
This one is definitely challenging me to really consider my current situation and break down the things that I'm so desperately trying to pile together in hopes of "keeping it together." There is so much going on in my life right now that some times, identifying any one component threatens my ability to be resilient and preserve. It's like Jenga, I have the goal of completing this task and once I start pulling pieces out, the structure is compromised and begins to collapse.
Now, usually this may be an avoidance tatic, some maladaptive coping mechanism. But for the time being, the way I've been addressing my mental health has been working out very well, I've been more on control of how my treatments are going rather than the usual allowing others to influence and dictate or manipulate what I do or need.
So without risking my sanity, 😅, I'm going to say a stressor that recently challenged my resiliency is the influence of my spouse. I've noticed how he responds to me or vis versa can tremendously impact the outcome of anything I do. It's been something I've commented on during times of anger or wtvr but not something I've spent time carefully considering....until this week's therapy session. I tend to feel broken by the fact that we've not been on the same page in so long and fearful of the seemingly impossibility of ever being on the same page again. I'm hurt by the situations that have taken place over the years and I'm disappointed mainly in my choices, hearing myself constantly question "what if" as if thats gonna change anything. I tend to catastrophy every outcome and even allow these things to distort who I believe my husband is as a person. It's been hidden in some harsh resentment and bitterness, it's been causing a cataclysmic break in our relationship. Now, I am only responsible for what I do, do not do, etc so there are parts of this stressor that are inevitable but how I continue to allow my husband to influence my abilities to life a healthier life are my responsibility so there's a shift, a transformative component that brings forth hope and excitement in the challenge to detach and determination to overcome this major area of dysfunction. There's a lot to work out here which in itself can be stressful but with the tools and support I have in place, I feel more at peace with this stress than I previously have.
I kinda included solutions above but to be more specific and SMART about it here are some of my preliminary ideas:
Detach detach detach, I must learn to have healthy means of separating as to be less influenced by others so I can be in control of what I am responsible for regardless of what is going on. I am still working out what this looks like and means so for now, the goal is to learn, learn, learn 🤗 and take note on ways i can begin to implement changes.
Recognize and identify 3 ways I allow myself to be influenced and the circumstances and outcomes of those situations. What am I trying to accomplish? How am I influenced? What is this influence telling me? What was the outcome? What's the connection? How do I want to address this? How can I improve my residency? What did I learn?
I know this is a long one but it's honestly the simplest thing and way I could attack this discussion lol thanks for hanging in there. Hopefully it helps.